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Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.

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Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew. Glory to you, O Lord. The Pharisees went off and plotted how they might entrap Jesus in speech. They sent their disciples to him with the Herodians, saying, teacher, we know that you are a truthful man and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. And you are not concerned with anyone's opinion, for you do not regard a person's status. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not knowing their malice? Jesus said, why are you testing me, you hypocrites? Show me the coin that pays the census tax. Then they handed him the Roman coin. He said to them, whose image is this and whose inscription? They replied, caesar's. At that, he said to them, then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God. The Gospel of the Lord. I think everybody has heard the cliche, nothing ever changes. And at the heart of that cliche is an understanding that human behavior tends to always be familiar, despite centuries declared decades, millennia. And here is a prime example of that. And there's no lost irony in the fact that we are coming up on an election to hear a gospel like this, because even back in the days of Jesus public ministry, there was a tendency to intertwine politics with faith. And what happened among the elites of Judaism was that because Rome was so overwhelmingly in control of things, the people began to integrate the way they practiced their Judaism with trying to appease and become almost one with the Roman authorities. And what tends to happen when religion and politics get integrated is that neither of them tend to live out their best roles. Politics becomes almost blind to certain things that the political world needs to see, and the religious world stops following God's will and starts following political whims. And as we're reminded here, even opinion, that word should not be lost on you. What is your opinion? Because that's what tends to happen, becomes much more based on opinion than on truth. Well, Jesus here is trying to give them an instruction that hopefully can guide the way they do both of those things, the way they interrelate with the Roman Empire, but also, and I would argue much more importantly, the way they could live out their faith, their Judaism. And here's where we can translate that to the 21st century. Our faith, what we believe, should always be a part of what informs our politics, because at its heart, we are people of faith. Before we're part of any political party or even part of any nation. In the promise and hope of eternal life, our faith is the only thing that matters. But the opposite is also true. Our politics should never inform our faith. And Jesus was trying to lay that out for the people to say, look at what God has called you to look at the type of person God has tried to make you and allow that to inform everything in your life. And then, and only then, will you be living out the will of God for you. Will you truly be an active and living disciple in the world? And as long as they were worried about appeasing Rome, they could never possibly come close to living out what their faith called upon them to be. Things never change, and that can still very much be our reality. And as people that proclaims to be people of faith, as people that hopes to be the disciples we're called upon to be, we can't ever forget that.