The Things That Are God’s

Most of us run our lives like a household budget. We set aside so much for the mortgage, so much for the car, so much for the government in April, and a portion for God on Sunday morning. We give him his hour and his envelope. We consider our account with God settled. It feels fair. It even feels devout. Underneath the budget, though, sits an assumption we rarely say out loud: that God is one more creditor with a claim on part of us, and that whatever is left over is ours to spend as we please. Sorting life into compartments, one for faith and the rest for “real life,” quietly makes us the owners of our life and God is simply a tenant.

Today’s Gospel drops a coin into that ledger. The Pharisees send their disciples, with the Herodians, to trap Jesus with a question about the tax to Caesar. In a response we are all familiar with, Jesus asks for the coin, holds it up, and asks whose likeness it bears. “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” We usually hear that as a fair division of territory. Look again at what he’s holding. The coin carries Caesar’s face. You carry God’s.

Isaiah sets the stage centuries earlier. God names a pagan emperor, Cyrus of Persia, “his anointed,” takes him by the right hand, sends him to set the exiles free, and tells him plainly, “I gird you, though you do not know me.” The most powerful man in the world is an instrument in someone else’s hand. He is the instrument of a God he does not know.

Today is the Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, and the Lord’s Day takes the place this year of the Feast of Saint Luke, the evangelist, a Gentile physician whom God also called from outside Israel. As we remember Saint Luke, let us consider the question these readings put to you and me. What are we rendering to God, the change in our pocket or the person who bears his image?

The Readings

First Reading: Isaiah 45:1, 4-6

Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him and ungird the loins of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed:

For the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen, I call you by your name, I surname you, though you do not know me. I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God; I gird you, though you do not know me, that men may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me; I am the Lord, and there is no other.

Gospel: Matthew 22:15-21

Then the Pharisees went and took counsel how to entangle him in his talk. And they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians, saying, “Teacher, we know that you are true, and teach the way of God truthfully, and care for no man; for you do not regard the position of men. Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the money for the tax.” And they brought him a coin. And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Scriptural Analysis

Isaiah’s oracle comes from the years of the Babylonian exile, when Judah had lost its king, its Temple and its land. The Navarre commentators note that Cyrus “was a foreign king who did not know the God of the chosen people, and yet, surprisingly, has been given the title of ‘anointed’, a title reserved to the kings of Israel.” The Hebrew word is meshiach (meh-SHEE-akh), the word that gives us “Messiah.” The commentators add, with some understatement, “This message must have truly amazed those who heard the oracle.” Just before today’s passage, God calls Cyrus “my shepherd” (Isaiah 44:28), and the Navarre commentary says God “has chosen to save his people by means of this ‘outsider’ shepherd.” Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on Isaiah, explains the title: Cyrus is “my anointed, that is, my king, not because of his anointing, but because of his royal dignity.”¹

Then the oracle describes what God will do for him. Navarre explains that “ungird the loins of kings” means disarming them, “for the sword was slung from the belt.” And all of it, God says, is “for the sake of my servant Jacob, and Israel my chosen.” Cyrus thinks he is building an empire. God is bringing his people home. History bears it out: in the first year of his reign, Cyrus issued the decree that sent the exiles back to rebuild the Temple (Ezra 1:1-4).²

Twice God tells him, “though you do not know me.” Aquinas reads that line soberly. The gift of power was meant to bear fruit in Cyrus himself, namely the knowledge of God, and on that score it was “partly frustrated on the part of Cyrus himself,” because “thou hast not known me, to be the only true God, as you remain in idolatry.” God doesn’t need Cyrus’s faith to use Cyrus’s armies. However, Thomas finds fruit elsewhere, in the purpose clause of verse 6: “that men may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me.” Thomas says this was fulfilled when “in his epistles, Cyrus wrote the praise of God everywhere,” and that is just what we find in the decree that opens the Book of Ezra: “The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth” (Ezra 1:2).³ Cyrus is praising the God of Israel in this decree.

Navarre calls God a mystery “who ordinarily acts through persons and events in history, without letting himself be seen,” and the election of Cyrus is a case in point. Then the commentators add a line the Gospel will make concrete: “The Fathers saw in Cyrus a figure of Christ.”⁴ The Persian king who frees captives without knowing the Lord points ahead to the true Anointed, who knows the Father perfectly and frees captives from something far worse than Babylon. The refrain, “I am the Lord, and there is no other,” runs straight through every throne on earth. No emperor is God. Every emperor, and indeed every ruler, answers to him.

Let us not consider the Gospel. Jesus is teaching in the Temple courts, and he has just told three parables aimed at the chief priests and Pharisees; the last of them was about the wedding feast we heard last Sunday. They respond to his parables with a plot to entrap Jesus. Daniel Harrington notes that the verb Matthew uses for entrapping him, pagideuō (pah-gee-DYOO-oh), “set a snare or trap,” appears only here in the New Testament. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri point out how odd the partnership is. The Pharisees were religious patriots opposed to Roman rule, the Herodians were content to work with Rome, and “the present alliance is made solely for the purpose of bringing down the Messiah.” Aquinas finds the whole scheme absurd: “they did something stupid,” because “he was the Word of God, and the Word of God cannot be grasped.”⁵

We have heard this exchange so many times that it becomes easy to overlook the fact that this question was indeed a real trap. The tax was the kēnsos (KANE-sos), Harrington explains, a poll tax laid on men, women, and slaves in Judea once direct Roman rule began in AD 6, paid in Roman coinage; it represented about a day’s wage for a laborer. Mitch and Sri lay out the dilemma. If Jesus approves the tax, he loses the crowds who hated Roman rule. If he forbids it, the Herodians report him to Rome for inciting revolt, and the last Galilean who led a tax revolt had been put down with brutal force. Jesus answers their hearts before he answers their question: “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites?” Aquinas sees two replies in the scene, one to their minds and one to their words, because “to respond to words is of man, but to respond to the mind is of God,” and Christ, being both, does both.⁶

“Show me the money for the tax.” They produce a coin on the spot, in the Temple, and Mitch and Sri note that the act exposes them: whatever they think of Roman taxation in principle, they are plainly in the habit of paying it. They are carrying around Roman currency. Then Jesus asks, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” Harrington describes the most widely circulated denarius of the day. It bore the head of the emperor Tiberius and a Latin inscription that read “Tiberius Caesar, august son of the divine Augustus, high priest.” Mitch and Sri put it bluntly: “These overtly religious claims could not have been more offensive to Jewish sensibilities.” It’s a small piece of silver that calls a man the son of a god.⁷

Listen to the word Jesus chooses. Matthew’s word for “likeness” is eikōn (ay-KOHN), the word the Greek Old Testament uses when God says, “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26). Every Jew in that courtyard knew whose image he himself bore.

“Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” The verb, apodote (ah-PO-doh-teh), means to give back, and Harrington translates it that way: “Give back Caesar’s things to Caesar.” Since the coin came from Caesar and carried his face, paying the tax was “simply a matter of giving back to the emperor what was his already.” Then Jesus adds the second half, and Harrington says that addition “turns the incident into a challenge to be as careful about one’s obligations to God as one is about one’s obligations to Caesar.” He also warns against pressing the verse into a full political philosophy; Matthew cares most about the challenge. Mitch and Sri say Jesus exposes a false dilemma. “Paying taxes is not a compromise of one’s duties toward God, nor does serving God exempt one from supporting the civil government.” Then they go further: “Jesus implicitly subordinates the claims of Caesar to the claims of God.” And they ask the question the coin raises: “But what is it that ‘belongs to God’? It is the human person, who bears the image of the living God.”⁸

Aquinas says it in a sentence: “We have a soul which is made to the image of God, and therefore we should render it to God.” Saint Hilary of Poitiers, in the Catena Aurea (kah-TAY-nah OW-ray-ah) of Saint Thomas, names what God is owed: “body, soul, and will.” And Saint John Chrysostom marks the edge of Caesar’s share. We render to Caesar only the things “which in nothing are opposed to religion; if such there be, it is no longer Caesar’s but the Devil’s tribute.”⁹ The Catechism teaches the same in our own day. The citizen is obliged in conscience to refuse the directives of civil authorities “when they are contrary to the demands of the moral order, to the fundamental rights of persons or the teachings of the Gospel,” and the Catechism grounds that refusal in this very verse.¹⁰

Saint Luke tells this story too (Luke 20:20-26), and he adds a bitter postscript. When the chief priests bring Jesus to Pilate, their first charge is that he was “forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar” (Luke 23:2). He had said the opposite. The men who handed him a coin went to Caesar’s governor with a lie about the incident.

Put the two readings side by side, and they tell one story about power. Cyrus held the greatest empire of his age, and God called him by name and used him, “though you do not know me.” Tiberius’s coin calls him the son of a god, and Jesus hands it back to him like a receipt. The Catechism has a name for what that coin claims: “Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God,” and among the things we divinize it lists “power,” “the state” and “money.”¹¹ Both readings answer that idolatry with one sentence: “I am the Lord, and there is no other.” Caesar is handed back his coin. The Lord is handed back the one who bears his image.

Daily Application

The interior movement these readings ask for is to give ourselves back to God. Most of us are careful with Caesar, because the consequences of neglect arrive in the mail. God’s claim arrives more quietly, so it’s the one we negotiate or even neglect. Harrington’s line makes a good examination of conscience: am I as careful about my obligations to God as I am about my obligations to Caesar?

Start by finding your coin. The Catechism’s list is uncomfortable because it’s so ordinary: power, pleasure, the state, money. Ask what in your life carries a face other than God’s and still gets your loyalty first. For some of us it’s the paycheck. For others it’s a political party, a career, or a reputation. Caesar is owed his coin. All of these things have a rightful place in our lives. The trouble starts when they ask for what belongs to God: your conscience, your Sunday, your children’s faith, the poor man you’ve decided to ignore.

We must render to Caesar honestly. The Catechism says that submission to authority and co-responsibility for the common good “make it morally obligatory to pay taxes, to exercise the right to vote, and to defend one’s country.”¹² A Christian who cheats on his taxes, or sits out every election, has misread this Gospel as badly as one who hands his complete conscience and allegiance to the state. Of course, we must all keep Chrysostom’s limit close. When Caesar demands what belongs to God, the demand has stopped being Caesar’s tribute, something he is rightfully owed, and has become something we must refuse and resist.

Finally, give to God what bears his image, which is you. Today is Sunday, and the Mass is where the Church does this most plainly. When the gifts are carried up at the offertory, place yourself on the paten with the bread: your body, your soul and your will. Ask which of the three you’ve been holding back, and hand it over all the more freely and urgently.

Saint Luke is a good companion for this. Franciscan Media remembers him as “the only Gentile Christian among the Gospel writers,” the man Paul calls “our beloved physician,” who stayed near Paul through his imprisonment at Caesarea and the dangerous voyage to Rome. Like Cyrus, Luke came to God’s people from outside. Unlike Cyrus, he came to know the Lord who called him, and he spent his life making that Lord known to other Gentiles. Franciscan Media’s reflection on him closes with a line worth carrying into Mass: “The treasure of the Scriptures is a true gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church.”¹³

Give Caesar his coin today. Then give God the one thing that carries his face.

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Notes

1. ↑ The Navarre Bible, Old Testament, commentary on Isaiah, by members of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Navarre (Dublin: Four Courts Press; New York: Scepter Publishers, 2005), 200; Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, trans. Louis St. Hilaire (Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute; Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2021), chap. 45, no. 858.
2. ↑ Navarre Bible, commentary on Isaiah, 201.
3. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, chap. 45, nos. 859-860.
4. ↑ Navarre Bible, commentary on Isaiah, 204.
5. ↑ Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991), 309; Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 285; Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2013), C. 22, L. 2, no. 1777.
6. ↑ Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 310; Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 285; Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, C. 22, L. 2, no. 1786.
7. ↑ Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 285; Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 310.
8. ↑ Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 309-311; Mitch and Sri, Gospel of Matthew, 286.
9. ↑ Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, C. 22, L. 2, no. 1788; Saint Hilary of Poitiers and Saint John Chrysostom, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, vol. 1, St. Matthew (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841), on Matt 22:15-22.
10. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 2242.
11. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2113.
12. ↑ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2240.
13. ↑ “Saint Luke,” Saint of the Day, Franciscan Media, accessed October 13, 2026, franciscanmedia.org.

Books Cited

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• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets (Four Courts Press, 2005)
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Isaiah, trans. Louis St. Hilaire (Aquinas Institute / Emmaus Academic, 2021)
• Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew, Sacra Pagina 1 (Liturgical Press, 1991)
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 13-28, trans. Jeremy Holmes (Aquinas Institute, 2013)
• Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, 4 vols. (Baronius Press)
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image)