What belongs to God

The Pharisees bring a coin to trap him, and Jesus asks them to look at it. Whose image is this? Caesar’s, so it goes back to Caesar. The question underneath is one a household can ask at its own table: whose image is on us? The week has rightful claims — the job, the bills, the children’s schedules — and they deserve to be paid honestly. But the body was stamped with another image first, and it belongs to the One who made it. Friday, October 23, is a small coin returned to him. Latin-rite Catholics fourteen and older abstain from meat; in the U.S. a bishop-approved penance may take its place outside Lent. Those who are ill, pregnant, or nursing, and anyone for whom eating is already hard, are not asked to add anything. No one needs a stricter fast to prove the debt is serious.

Isaiah calls Cyrus the Lord’s anointed — a Persian king who did not know him, used anyway to bring the exiles home. That is consolation for a tired house. God does not wait for the family to become impressive before he works through it. Psalm 96 tells the nations to give the Lord glory and honor, and most weeks that glory is paid in small change: the dishes done, a child’s fever watched through the night, grace said over a plain supper.

Paul thanks God for the Thessalonians’ work of faith, labor of love, and endurance in hope. On World Mission Sunday the Church prays for those who carry the Gospel far from home, and a household can join them from where it stands. Say one Our Father for the missions before the week begins, and let Friday be the rest of the offering. Give Caesar his coin. Give God the one who bears his image.

From the cellar: The Catholic Company takes ten dollars off a first order of seventy dollars or more — Bibles and prayer books worth opening, never a substitute for the prayer itself.