ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL
Isaiah 45: 1, 4-6; 1 Thessalonians 1: 1-5B; Matthew 22: 15-21
As I’m sure you know, prayer is conversation with God. We talk, but we also listen to what God has to say to us. And that’s often the difficult part of prayer . . . the listening. Because how exactly does God speak to us? For me, I’ve found that God often speaks to me through my memories. And last week, as I prayed for inspiration for today’s homily, all of a sudden I had a memory from my boyhood. I have a lot of beautiful, wonderful memories of growing up on Long Island in the 60’s and 70’s, and this one was especially so. It was of the late Saturday afternoons and evenings that I would accompany my parents across the street to the house of our neighbors, my parent’s best friends, Fran and Joe Kless. Down the steps we would go into their basement, finished with highly varnished knotty pine walls and square green and black tiled flooring, with vinyl upholstered furniture that made embarrassing sounds as you shifted on it. And there, in addition to listening to their conversation and laughter for hours on end, I received a brilliant musical education as the recordings of Big Bands the likes of Glenn Miller & Tommy Dorsey and singers like Frank Sinatra & Nat King Cole played in the background. And in the midst of this memory, one song played over and over in my mind, the recording of All or Nothing at All by Frank Sinatra and Harry James.
All or nothing at all
Half love never appealed to me
If your heart never could yield to me
Then I'd rather have nothing at all
All or nothing at all
If it's love there is no in between
Why begin, then cry for something that might have been
No, I rather have nothing at all.
What does this song have to do with today’s Gospel? Everything! But before I get to that, let me give you a bit of the backstory of the Gospel.
That day in the temple, the religious leaders of the Jews thought they were clever. They had sent their emissaries to Jesus with a loaded question, a question that they thought would paint him into a corner that he wouldn’t be able to escape. They thought they had him trapped in a question where his patriotic loyalty would be revealed, and they hoped they could get proof that he was an enemy of the nation so the civil authorities would take him away. They wanted him out of their hair. He was getting too much attention with his message of God's love for all people. The religious leaders were losing control of their followers who were more attracted to his law of love than to their letter of the law.
"Teacher," they maliciously addressed him, "Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar?" Should we support the government or not?" Of course, Jesus knows their intent. He asks them to show him a coin. Being law-abiding followers, faithful to their temple leadership, these supposedly righteous Jews should have had in their pockets only temple currency. Anything else would have defiled them and made them unworthy to be in that place - at least according to the rules and regulations their religious leaders had instilled in them. Yet the coin retrieved from their pocket had the emperor's face stamped on it, his head surrounded with the words, "Emperor Tiberius, Son of God." Loyal subjects in occupied Palestine were expected to worship the emperor as their God.
So, one of the emissaries of the Pharisees gives Jesus the coin, the blasphemous coin, and waits to see what Jesus will say about it. It seems to them that Jesus has two choices. He can support the political government and blaspheme against the Creator God. Or, he can support the Creator God and blaspheme against the political leadership. But, Jesus - of course - outsmarts them. He doesn't fall into the trap. “Give to the emperor what is the emperor's and give to God the things that are God's.” With these simple words, he confounds them. They realize their attempt to trap him has been unsuccessful. And they go away.
“Give to Caesar, what is Caesar's, but give to God, what is God's.” A clever response on Jesus’ part that silenced his critics. But the second part of his response is perhaps more directed at us then it was at them, and the implication of it is more than many of us want to hear. Because what is God's? What do I, what do we, owe God? “All or Nothing at All.”
All or nothing at all? That’s too much! Some, yes. Maybe half. Maybe even more. But all? No that’s too much to ask for. If I hand it all over, I’ll have nothing. If I hand it all over, what is left to satisfy my own desires? What’s left to fulfill the expectations that others place on me? All or nothing at all? We consider it a risk rather than a sure bet.
But one of the Psalms says, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it” [Psalm 24:1]. And at the other end of the Bible, when St. Paul writes his First Letter to the Corinthians, he reminds them, “You are not your own. You have been bought and paid for. And at what a great price!” And so what is God’s—we are, every single one of us. We are, every single part of us: our heart, our soul, our mind, our strength.
But this isn't just a matter of semantics:
To give to God our HEART means making Him our greatest treasure - valuing our relationship with Him, with Jesus, more than anything else in our life. It’s surrendering to him anything that that becomes an obstacle to your love affair with him: crammed schedules, toxic relationships, distracting ambition. It’s making truth, and charity, and mercy, and service the hallmarks of our lives.
Your SOUL is who you are. It’s the part of us that lives forever. And so, giving God our soul means loving Him with all we are. This includes:
- Our DESIRES - conforming our desires to those which will please and honor God.
- Our AFFECTIONS - that we love those things that God loves.
- Our PURPOSES - that we pursue those things that God would have us pursue.
- Our WILL - that we choose that which is good in our lives.
- Our FEELINGS - that we subject our feelings to the truth of God’s Word.
Having faith doesn’t mean giving up knowledge and understanding. And so rendering to God our MIND includes study and thought that will grow my faith and bless my relationship with Him. But it also means that we be less dependent on facts and more dependent on faith, less held by reason and more open to mystery.
And STRENGTH is love in action. We give our strength over to God by what you and I do and say. It’s to honor him with the strength of our words and the strength of our abilities, the strength of our actions, and the strength of our character. And most importantly, that we find our strength in that which is holy, godly, and pure.
Not such easy stuff. The rendering to Caesar might be unwanted, but it is ever so much easier. To give to God costs a lot more than what the government and what society, what our employers, what are family, what our friends, and even what our church expect of us or demand from us. But God wants it all - all of us; all that we have; all that we are. He wants our heart, our soul, our mind, our strength. But you know what? All of that was never ours to begin with. It’s been given to us on loan. And he who has given it to us wants it back – all of it. Anything less is shortchanging God.
