Friends, welcome to Word on Fire, Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an

apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization, using media both old and

new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate and encounter with

Christ and His Church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring

the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today we invite

you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the

warmth and light of Christ with each one of us. Peace be with you. Friends, our

gospel for today contains one of Jesus' greatest one-liners. Then give to

Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. Now this little rejoinder has

inspired, as you know, an enormous amount of controversy over the centuries. And

I'll come back in the second half of the homily today to explore what that

might mean. But first I want to get at another spiritual issue that this story

suggests. And to do this we have to look at the context of Jesus' famous

saying. It should be clear by now in the gospel of Matthew, the section we've

been moving through the last several weeks, the Pharisees don't care much for

Jesus. And they've been sort of coming after him and he's been coming back at

them. They were advocates of religious rectitude of an uncompromised living

out of the Old Testament laws, especially those dealing with ritual purity.

Now Jesus without repudiating any of that represented, however, something

different, namely a making plane of the heart of the law, which is living in

friendship with God. This relationship that he characterized as the kingdom of

God. So we're meant to see in these chapters a sort of a contrast between two

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