So I understood the template hierarchy and thought the non-static template for the home page should be index.php (the one within the theme).
However, I could not figure out why my changes to the content.php file (called by the index.php file) were not appearing in my site. Consequently, I thought that there must be another template file for the homepage that was overriding content.php. Turns out I was making the changes to the if statement of a conditional, when the else statement was the one displaying on my site, causing those changes to not appear.
My resolution was to pay closer attention to the conditionals and add the php calls I wanted multiple times — within the correct if and else parts of the template to the content.php file.