Christ Insight

Based on: Matthew 22:34-40

When you make a table or you crochet a blanket you expect those things to be the thing you made them to be.  You don't expect them to start doing something you did not create them to do.  If we created it, then we decide what that thing is used for.  It doesn't decide on its own.  For example, what if the scrambled eggs you fixed this morning walked off your plate and told you, “I decided  not to be your breakfast.  Instead, I am going to deliver newspapers.” Once you got past the fact that scrambled eggs talked, you would start to realize that the whole world could suddenly become chaos as objects decided not to do the very thing they were designed to do.  The pew as you are sitting in and could decide not to hold you up and you would find yourself painfully sitting on the floor.  Cars, houses, books, streetlights, may all decide to do something other than they were created do and then and nothing in this world would be dependable.  It would be impossible to live.

Based on: Matthew 22:15-22

Do you remember the Peanuts cartoons where Charlie Brown would try to kick the football that Lucy was holding? Over and over again Charlie Brown would run to the football to kick it, and Lucy would pull it away at the last moment.  No matter how many times Charlie Brown tried to kick that football he would always end up flat on his back.  Do you think the Pharisees were beginning to feel like Charlie Brown? Over and over again they came to Jesus with questions, trying to trick him or to find something he said which they could use against him.  In today's gospel reading we heard them ask a question about taxes, and after Jesus responds, we see the Pharisees walk away with their heads hung low.  Again, the football was pulled away at the last moment and they ended up flat on their backs.  We can just hear them say "Drats" as they leave Jesus.  But as we hear Jesus respond "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's," let us not ignore what he says as the Pharisees did, but let us take it to heart and ask ourselves, "What do we have that belongs to our government, and what do we have that belongs to God?"