This is Cardinal Francis George.

I invite you to join me for the next few minutes to reflect with Father Robert Barron on the Word of God, which is the Word on Fire.

Word on Fire Catholic Ministries is a non-profit ministry at the forefront of Catholic evangelization,

using new media to spread the faith on every continent.

Father Barron challenges us to open our hearts to the Word on Fire, which is God's

Word of Love for each of us.

If our hearts are open, the Lord can change and transform us so that we might speak with love

about the one who is love.

The global benefactors of Word on Fire, with the support of the Archdiocese of

Chicago now present Word on Fire. 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 gods.

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,

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