Br. Bernard Delcourt
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, October 18, 2026
“Show me the coin.”
That's all Jesus asks for, and it's enough to unravel the whole trap they've set for him. The Pharisees and the Herodians make for one of the strangest alliances in the Gospels; two groups that agree on almost nothing except that Jesus is a problem they'd like solved.
The Pharisees despise Roman occupation and everything it represents. The Herodians have made their peace with Rome and profit from it. Put them in a room together on any other day, and they'd have nothing to say to each other. But a common enemy has a way of making for uncomfortable friends.
So, they come to Jesus with flattery dripping from every word: "Teacher, we know you are sincere, you teach the way of God in accordance with truth, you show deference to no one" and then they spring the trap: "Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?"
It's a perfect question, in the way that only a truly malicious question can be perfect. If Jesus says yes, pay the tax, he alienates every Jew who resents bankrolling the army that occupies their homeland, people who remember that this same tax had sparked open revolt a generation earlier. If he says no, don't pay it, the
Herodians can report him to the Roman authorities as an agitator preaching sedition, and sedition against Rome had a way of ending on a cross. There is no safe answer. That's the whole design. They think they've boxed him in completely.
And notice what they're not asking. This isn't really a question about fiscal policy or the ethics of taxation in the abstract. It's a question meant to force Jesus to plant a flag, to declare, once and for all, which side he's on, God's or Caesar's, so that whichever side he offends can be turned against him. It is a question built entirely on the assumption that loyalty has to be either-or.
Jesus, of course, doesn't fall for it. But he also doesn't dodge it. He asks for a denarius, and right there, something quietly damning has already happened. Someone in that pious, Torah-quoting crowd produces a coin stamped with the image of Tiberius Caesar and an inscription proclaiming him the son of a god.
Devout Jews weren't supposed to carry graven images at all, let alone one that claimed divinity for a Roman emperor. The very fact that someone can pull one out of a pocket in the Temple courts tells you these men have already made their compromises with Caesar's world. They've been carrying his currency the whole time.
"Whose head is this," Jesus asks, "and whose title?" "The emperor's," they answer, and there's where their trap fails. "Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperors, and to God the things that are God's."
It sounds, at first, like the ultimate diplomatic non-answer, the kind of thing a clever man says to get out of a tight spot. But it isn't a dodge. It's a much harder answer than either yes or no, because it doesn't let anyone off the hook. It hands the question back to us,
and it will keep handing the question back to every generation that reads it: what, exactly, belongs to Caesar, and what belongs to God?
Here's where the coin itself becomes the real sermon. A coin stamped with Caesar's image belongs to Caesar; fair enough, give it back, it was always his. But what is stamped with God's image? Scripture already answered that question long before Matthew wrote a word of it: in the beginning, God made humankind in God's own image.
It isn't Caesar's face that is pressed into flesh and bone. God's face is. So, when Jesus says, "give to God the things that are God's," the deepest and most searching implication of that sentence is: give God yourself. Give God your whole life, because that's whose image you were minted with in the first place.
That reframes the entire question, doesn't it? This was never really a story about tax policy. It's a story about identity, about whose mark you carry and whose claim on you runs the deepest. Caesar can have his coins back; they were never anything but metal with his face on them. But we are not metal.
We are not currency to be spent according to somebody else's economy. We belong, first and finally, to the God whose image we bear from the moment of our making, sealed again at the font, where water and oil mark us as Christ's own forever.
And yet, and this is where the passage refuses to let us get too comfortable, Jesus doesn't say Caesar gets nothing. He doesn't tell his followers to renounce the world, stop paying taxes, withdraw from public life, and wait for the Kingdom to arrive on its own. He says: give to Caesar what is Caesar's.
There is a legitimate claim that government makes on us; for taxes, for civic responsibility, for the ordinary business of living together in a society. Jesus doesn't erase that claim. What he does is put a boundary around it. Caesar's claim is real, but it is not ultimate. Caesar's claim answers to a higher claim, and it can never be allowed to swallow that higher claim whole.
That's the tension every one of us lives inside, all the time, whether we notice it or not. We are citizens of countries and citizens of the Kingdom of God simultaneously, and those two citizenships don't always pull in the same direction. Most days the tension is quiet, we pay our taxes, we vote, we obey reasonable laws, and none of it seems to cost us much of anything spiritually.
But every so often, the two claims come into open conflict, and we're forced to ask, in a very concrete way, which allegiance actually governs the other. History is not short on examples of what happens when people decide that obedience to the state is simply obedience to God by another name, no questions asked. We rightly remember, with real admiration, those who found the courage to say no to that equation when it mattered most, who understood that legal is not the same thing as right, and that "my country, right or wrong" is not a creed available to people who belong first to God.
None of us gets to opt out of that discernment by declaring the question too political for church. Jesus certainly didn't. He stood in the middle of the most charged political question of his day and refused both the easy yes and the easy no, because the real question underneath it was never really about Rome at all. It was about us, about what we're willing to render, and to whom, and why.
So here is the question this Gospel leaves sitting in our laps, right where the Pharisees' trap used to be: whose image do you bear, and what does that image cost you to honor? What have you been carrying around in your pocket, what compromises, what quiet allegiances that you didn't even notice had Caesar's face stamped on them?
And what would it look like, this week, to give back to Caesar exactly what belongs to him, no more and no less, and to give to God the one thing Caesar was never entitled to ask for: yourself, made in the image of the living God, and claimed by him before any empire ever had the chance.
Amen.
That's all Jesus asks for, and it's enough to unravel the whole trap they've set for him. The Pharisees and the Herodians make for one of the strangest alliances in the Gospels; two groups that agree on almost nothing except that Jesus is a problem they'd like solved.
The Pharisees despise Roman occupation and everything it represents. The Herodians have made their peace with Rome and profit from it. Put them in a room together on any other day, and they'd have nothing to say to each other. But a common enemy has a way of making for uncomfortable friends.
So, they come to Jesus with flattery dripping from every word: "Teacher, we know you are sincere, you teach the way of God in accordance with truth, you show deference to no one" and then they spring the trap: "Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?"
It's a perfect question, in the way that only a truly malicious question can be perfect. If Jesus says yes, pay the tax, he alienates every Jew who resents bankrolling the army that occupies their homeland, people who remember that this same tax had sparked open revolt a generation earlier. If he says no, don't pay it, the
Herodians can report him to the Roman authorities as an agitator preaching sedition, and sedition against Rome had a way of ending on a cross. There is no safe answer. That's the whole design. They think they've boxed him in completely.
And notice what they're not asking. This isn't really a question about fiscal policy or the ethics of taxation in the abstract. It's a question meant to force Jesus to plant a flag, to declare, once and for all, which side he's on, God's or Caesar's, so that whichever side he offends can be turned against him. It is a question built entirely on the assumption that loyalty has to be either-or.
Jesus, of course, doesn't fall for it. But he also doesn't dodge it. He asks for a denarius, and right there, something quietly damning has already happened. Someone in that pious, Torah-quoting crowd produces a coin stamped with the image of Tiberius Caesar and an inscription proclaiming him the son of a god.
Devout Jews weren't supposed to carry graven images at all, let alone one that claimed divinity for a Roman emperor. The very fact that someone can pull one out of a pocket in the Temple courts tells you these men have already made their compromises with Caesar's world. They've been carrying his currency the whole time.
"Whose head is this," Jesus asks, "and whose title?" "The emperor's," they answer, and there's where their trap fails. "Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperors, and to God the things that are God's."
It sounds, at first, like the ultimate diplomatic non-answer, the kind of thing a clever man says to get out of a tight spot. But it isn't a dodge. It's a much harder answer than either yes or no, because it doesn't let anyone off the hook. It hands the question back to us,
and it will keep handing the question back to every generation that reads it: what, exactly, belongs to Caesar, and what belongs to God?
Here's where the coin itself becomes the real sermon. A coin stamped with Caesar's image belongs to Caesar; fair enough, give it back, it was always his. But what is stamped with God's image? Scripture already answered that question long before Matthew wrote a word of it: in the beginning, God made humankind in God's own image.
It isn't Caesar's face that is pressed into flesh and bone. God's face is. So, when Jesus says, "give to God the things that are God's," the deepest and most searching implication of that sentence is: give God yourself. Give God your whole life, because that's whose image you were minted with in the first place.
That reframes the entire question, doesn't it? This was never really a story about tax policy. It's a story about identity, about whose mark you carry and whose claim on you runs the deepest. Caesar can have his coins back; they were never anything but metal with his face on them. But we are not metal.
We are not currency to be spent according to somebody else's economy. We belong, first and finally, to the God whose image we bear from the moment of our making, sealed again at the font, where water and oil mark us as Christ's own forever.
And yet, and this is where the passage refuses to let us get too comfortable, Jesus doesn't say Caesar gets nothing. He doesn't tell his followers to renounce the world, stop paying taxes, withdraw from public life, and wait for the Kingdom to arrive on its own. He says: give to Caesar what is Caesar's.
There is a legitimate claim that government makes on us; for taxes, for civic responsibility, for the ordinary business of living together in a society. Jesus doesn't erase that claim. What he does is put a boundary around it. Caesar's claim is real, but it is not ultimate. Caesar's claim answers to a higher claim, and it can never be allowed to swallow that higher claim whole.
That's the tension every one of us lives inside, all the time, whether we notice it or not. We are citizens of countries and citizens of the Kingdom of God simultaneously, and those two citizenships don't always pull in the same direction. Most days the tension is quiet, we pay our taxes, we vote, we obey reasonable laws, and none of it seems to cost us much of anything spiritually.
But every so often, the two claims come into open conflict, and we're forced to ask, in a very concrete way, which allegiance actually governs the other. History is not short on examples of what happens when people decide that obedience to the state is simply obedience to God by another name, no questions asked. We rightly remember, with real admiration, those who found the courage to say no to that equation when it mattered most, who understood that legal is not the same thing as right, and that "my country, right or wrong" is not a creed available to people who belong first to God.
None of us gets to opt out of that discernment by declaring the question too political for church. Jesus certainly didn't. He stood in the middle of the most charged political question of his day and refused both the easy yes and the easy no, because the real question underneath it was never really about Rome at all. It was about us, about what we're willing to render, and to whom, and why.
So here is the question this Gospel leaves sitting in our laps, right where the Pharisees' trap used to be: whose image do you bear, and what does that image cost you to honor? What have you been carrying around in your pocket, what compromises, what quiet allegiances that you didn't even notice had Caesar's face stamped on them?
And what would it look like, this week, to give back to Caesar exactly what belongs to him, no more and no less, and to give to God the one thing Caesar was never entitled to ask for: yourself, made in the image of the living God, and claimed by him before any empire ever had the chance.
Amen.
