Homilia* do Arcebispo Charles J. Chaput, arcebispo de Filadélfia, na missa de encerramento da Quinzena pela Liberdade. Ver notícia aqui.
My dear faithful people of God and people of Good
will,
Philadelphia is the place where both the Declaration of
Independence and the United States Constitution were written. For more than two
centuries, these documents have inspired people around the globe. So as we begin
our reflection on today’s readings, I have the privilege of greeting everyone
here today -- and every person watching or listening from a distance -- in the
name of the Church of my home, the Church of Philadelphia, the cradle of our
country’s liberty and the city of our nation’s founding, so greetings to all of
you from the people of Philadelphia. May God bless and guide all of us as we
settle our hearts and minds on the Word of
God.
Paul Claudel, the French poet and diplomat of
the last century, once described the Christian as “a man who knows what he is
doing and where he is going in a world [that] no longer [knows] the difference
between good and evil, between yes and no. He is like a god standing out in a
crowd of invalids . . . He alone has liberty in a world of slaves.”
Like
most of the great writers of his time, Claudel was a mix of gold and clay, flaws
and genius. He had a deep and brilliant Catholic faith, and when he wrote that a
man “who no longer believes in God, no longer believes in anything,” he was
simply reporting what he saw all around him. He spoke from a lifetime that
witnessed two world wars and the rise of atheist ideologies that murdered tens
of millions of innocent people using the vocabulary of science. He knew exactly
where forgetting God can lead.
We Americans live in a different country,
on a different continent, in a different century. And yet, in speaking of
liberty, Claudel leads us to the reason we come together in worship this
afternoon.
Most of us know today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew.
What we should, or should not, render unto Caesar shapes much of our daily
discourse as citizens. But I want to focus on the other and more important point
Jesus makes in today’s Gospel: the things we should render unto God.
When
the Pharisees and Herodians try to trap Jesus, he responds by asking for a coin.
Examining it he says, “Whose image is this and whose inscription?” When his
enemies say “Caesar’s,” he tells them to render it to Caesar. In other words,
that which bears the image of Caesar belongs to Caesar.
The key word in
Christ’s answer is “image,” or in the Greek,
eikon. Our modern meaning of “image” is weaker
than the original Greek meaning. We tend to think of an image as something
symbolic, like a painting or sketch. The Greek understanding includes that sense
but goes much further. In the New Testament, the “image” of something shares in
the nature of the thing itself.
This has consequences for our own lives
because we’re made in the image and likeness of God. In the Greek translation of
the Old Testament, the same word,
eikon,
is used in Genesis when describing creation. “Let us make man in our image,
after our likeness” says God (Gen 1:26). The implication is clear. To be made in
the image of God is more than a pious slogan. It’s a statement of fact. Every
one of us shares -- in a limited but real way -- in the nature of God himself.
When we follow Jesus Christ, we grow in conformity to that image.
Once we
understand this, the impact of Christ’s response to his enemies becomes clear.
Jesus isn’t being clever. He’s not offering a political commentary. He’s making
a claim on every human being. He’s saying, “render unto Caesar those things that
bear Caesar’s image,
but more
importantly, render unto God that which bears God’s image” -- in other
words, you and me. All of us.
And that raises some unsettling questions:
What do you and I, and all of us, really render to God in our personal lives? If
we claim to be disciples, then what does that actually mean in the way we speak
and the way we act?
Thinking about the relationship of Caesar and God,
religious faith and secular authority, is important. It helps us sort through
our different duties as Christians and citizens. But on a deeper level, Caesar
is a creature -- a creature of this world -- and Christ’s message is
uncompromising: We should give Caesar
nothing of ourselves. Obviously we’re in the
world. That means we have obligations of charity and justice to the people with
whom we share it. For Christians, patriotism is a virtue. Love of country is an
honorable thing. As Chesterton once said, if we build a wall between ourselves
and the world, it makes little difference whether we describe ourselves as
locked in or locked out.
But God has made us for more than the world. Our
real home isn’t here. The point of today’s Gospel passage is not how we might
calculate a fair division of goods between Caesar and God.
In reality, it all belongs to God and nothing
– at least nothing permanent and important – belongs to Caesar. Why? Because
just as the coin bears the stamp of Caesar’s image, we bear the stamp of God’s
image in baptism. We belong to God, and
only to God.
In today’s second reading,
St. Paul tells us, “Indeed religion” -- the RSV version says “godliness” – “with
contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, just as we
shall not be able to take anything out of it.” My dear friends, true freedom
knows no attachments other than Jesus Christ. It has no love of riches or the
appetites they try to satisfy. True freedom can walk away from anything --
wealth, honor, fame, pleasure. Even power. It fears neither the state, nor death
itself.
Who is the most free person at anything? It’s the person who
masters her art. A pianist is most free who -- having mastered her instrument
according to the rules that govern it and the rules of music, and having
disciplined and honed her skills -- can now play anything she wants.
The
same holds true for our lives. We’re free only to the extent that we unburden
ourselves of our own willfulness and practice the art of living according to
God’s plan. When we do this, when we choose to live according to God’s
intentions for us, then -- and only then -- will we be truly free.
This
is the freedom of the sons and daughters of God. It’s the freedom of Miguel Pro,
of Mother Teresa, Maximillian Kolbe, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and all the other holy
women and men who have gone before us to do the right thing, the heroic thing,
in the face of suffering, adversity and death.
This is the kind of
freedom that can transform the world. And it should animate all of our talk
about liberty – religious or otherwise.
I say this for two reasons.
Here’s the first reason.
Real freedom isn’t
something Caesar can give or take away. He can interfere with it; but
when he does, he steals from his own legitimacy.
Here’s the second
reason.
The purpose of religious liberty is to
create the context for true freedom. Religious liberty is a foundational
right. It’s necessary for the good of society. But it can never be sufficient
for human happiness. It’s not an end in itself. In the end, we defend religious
liberty in order to live the deeper freedom that is discipleship in Jesus
Christ. What good is religious freedom, consecrated in the law, if we don’t then
use that freedom to seek God with our whole mind, our whole strength, our whole
soul and all that we are?
Today, July 4, we celebrate the birth of a
novus ordo seclorum – a “new order of
the ages,” the American Era. God has blessed our nation with resources, power,
beauty and the rule of law. We have so much to be grateful for. But these are
gifts. They can be misused. They can be lost. In coming years, we’ll face more
and more serious challenges to religious liberty in our country. This is why the
Fortnight for Freedom has been so very important.
And yet, the political
and legal effort to defend religious liberty – as vital as it is – belongs to a
much greater struggle to master and convert our own hearts, and to live for God
completely, without alibis or self-delusion. The only question that finally
matters is this one:
Will we live
wholeheartedly for Jesus Christ? If so, then we can be a source of
freedom for the world. If not, nothing else will do.
God’s word in
today’s first reading is a caution we ignore at our own expense. “Son of man,”
God says to Ezekiel and to all of us, “I have appointed you as a sentinel. If I
say to the wicked, ‘you will surely die’ – and you do not warn them or
speak out to dissuade them . . . I will hold
you responsible for their blood.”
Here’s what that means for each of us:
We live in a time that calls for sentinels and public witness. Every Christian
in every era faces the same task. But you and I are responsible for
this moment. Today. Now. We need to “speak
out,” not only for religious liberty and the ideals of the nation we love, but
for the sacredness of life and the dignity of the human person – in other words,
for the truth of what it means to be made in the image and likeness of
God.
We need to be witnesses of that truth not only in words, but also in
deeds. In the end, we’re missionaries of Jesus Christ, or we’re nothing at all.
And we can’t share with others what we don’t live faithfully and joyfully
ourselves.
When we leave this Mass today, we need to render unto Caesar
those things that bear his image. But we need to render ourselves unto God --
generously, zealously, holding nothing back. To the extent we let God transform
us into his own image, we will – by the example of our lives – fulfill our duty
as citizens of the United States, but much more importantly, as disciples of
Jesus Christ.
*É a primeira vez que publico uma homilia na íntegra aqui. Nunca pretendi que este blogue servisse apenas para reproduzir conteúdo de outros e fazer copy+paste de comunicados e sermões. Faço-o com este, pela pertinência do assunto - liberdade religiosa - e a qualidade da análise feita à passagem, tantas vezes citada, sobre "dar a César o que é de César e a Deus o que é de Deus".
