29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Isa 45:1,4-6
Ths 1:1-5
Mt 22:15-21
“Whose head is this? Whose name?”
Most nights, I leave the office around nine. Somewhere on the way home, a message comes in from my wife, E: ‘Don’t make noise, the kids are in bed.’
I know I shouldn’t, but I make just a bit of noise anyway. And from his room, I hear my son, L. That’s my small window. I wash up as fast as I can and get to him before he falls asleep. A few minutes, and I’ll take every one of them. But by then my daughter, M, is usually asleep, and I miss her more often than I care to admit.
One night two weeks ago, with a week of travel coming up and everything to clear before I went, I only left the office at a quarter past midnight. There was no window that night. Everyone was fast asleep. I didn’t look in on the children, nor on E. No one heard me come back, exhausted. I showered, got into bed, and lay awake till two.
I’ve carried that night around for two weeks, and this Sunday’s Gospel won’t let me put it down.
The Pharisees and the Herodians, who agreed on very little, come to Jesus together with a question built to catch him. ‘Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?’ Say yes and he loses the crowd. Say no and he’s guilty of sedition. Having trained in law, I know that kind of question — whichever way you answer, it hangs you.
What I notice now is how they open — flattery first, then the trap. Mine works the same way. Nobody at the office sets out to take my evenings. It begins with something true — you’re the one who can fix this. It’s good to be trusted. It’s also how the hours go.
Jesus asks them for a coin. He doesn’t seem to carry one. They do, right there in the Temple courts. I’m not so different. Caesar’s coin is in my pocket all day, in the form of a phone that never quite goes quiet, and I bring it home with me.
The coin was most likely a denarius of Tiberius, inscribed with ‘son of the divine Augustus’. Caesar’s coin asked for more than money. As a banker, that stays with me. Work rarely says ‘worship me’. It says ‘just this once’, ‘you’re the only one who can’, or ‘the client is waiting’. Each claim is reasonable on its own. Together, they ask for something no employer is owed.
Jesus doesn’t brush Caesar aside, though. The coin goes back to him, and my work is owed real things too: diligence, care for the clients who trust me, loyalty to the team I lead. The long days also provide for my family. They pay for the home which E and the children were asleep in that night.
I see the work as a calling, too. I was entrusted with the Gulf and asked to make a dent in it and by God’s grace, I have. It has meant harnessing the bank’s Shariah licence in KL and building bespoke solutions for clients there, many of them framed as values-based solutions, which is often how Shariah is explained to a non-Muslim. Helping clients hold their wealth in a way that sits with their faith has been some of the most meaningful work I’ve done, and I’m grateful to have been trusted with it. Those clients also cut into my evenings. I wouldn’t give that work up. I just can’t keep giving it everything.
What Jesus leaves unsaid, his listeners would have finished for themselves. The coin carries Caesar’s image. We carry God’s. E, L and M were made in that image, and what they’re owed can’t be paid in coin. It’s paid in time, in simply being there. Giving to God what is God’s isn’t only what I do on Sunday. Some of it happens at bedtime on a Tuesday.
I’ve been faithful with the provision. With the presence, much less. L gets a few minutes because he happens to be awake. M often gets nothing at all. I know they miss me. I don’t know what M makes of a father who mostly comes home after she’s asleep, and I’m not sure I want to find out the hard way.
If I’m honest, not all of those hours are demanded of me. I find it hard to delegate anything important. It’s easier to do it myself, and my team knows it. Sometimes it’s easier for them to bring a problem to me, knowing I’ll take it over. I tell myself it’s quicker. Sometimes it is. More often, I just don’t trust anyone else to get it right.
Which brings me back to that night, awake till two, with the travel ahead and everything still undone. Psalm 127 has been sitting with me: “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives sleep to his beloved.” The psalm doesn’t call work vain. It calls anxious toil vain, the kind that believes everything depends on me. I’d spent the whole day carrying things that weren’t mine to carry, and then I couldn’t put them down.
It costs me too. On a normal night, a bit of noise is enough, and someone calls out. That night, no one knew I was home. I had spent the whole day being needed, and I ended it unseen by the three people I most want to be seen by. I need them as much as they need me.
That long night took me straight back to a course I’d attended only a few weeks earlier. I had been sent on it, and only when I got there did I realise it was a coaching course. I found out later that HR had quietly put my name forward because they felt I might burn out. It stopped me in my tracks. I had thought I was simply being diligent. Someone else had been watching the hours and had seen what I hadn’t. It was a kindness; and it was a mirror. Lying awake at two in the morning, I finally saw what they had seen.
It also sent me back to Exodus, to Moses judging every dispute in Israel himself from morning till evening, and Jethro telling him: “What you are doing is not good… The task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.” Moses wasn’t lazy; he was conscientious to a fault. Jethro’s answer wasn’t “work less”. It was “trust others with it.” Underneath my refusal to let go, I suspect, is a quiet belief that if I don’t hold it, it won’t be held.
Work isn’t the enemy, and I’ll keep giving it my best. But before I pick up the next file at seven in the evening, I can ask the question Jesus asked of the coin: ‘Whose is this?’ Sometimes it’s mine. More often than I’ve admitted, it belongs to someone on my team, and the hour belongs to E, L and M.
So, I’ll start small — one night a week, home while L and M are both still awake, and no one has to tell me to be quiet. That will mean leaving some work with the person whose name is on it. It feels too small. It’s still more than I’ve been giving.
(Today’s OXYGEN by Gerard Francis)
Prayer: Lord, you made me in your image, and you ask for all of me. Thank you for my work and for what it provides. Help me give it what it is owed, and no more. Give me the trust to let others carry what is theirs. When I am about to spend an hour that belongs to you, or to E, L and M, stop me. Give me the grace to go home, and the gift of sleep.
Thanksgiving: Thank You for the messages that you prompt us with. For sending people and events into our lives to reinforce these messages.
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