Verses 1-47
Chapter 20
20:1-8 One day, while
Jesus was teaching the people in the Temple and telling them the good
news, the chief priests and scribes with the elders came up and said to
him, "Tell us, by what authority do you do these things? Or, who is it
who gives you this authority?" He said to them, "I, too, will ask you
for a statement. Tell me, was the baptism of John from heaven or from
men?" They discussed it with each other. "If," they said to each other,
"we say, 'From heaven,' he will say, 'Why did you not believe in him?'
But, if we say, 'From men,' all the people will stone us, for they are
convinced that John was a prophet." So they answered that they did not
know where it was from. Jesus said to them, "Neither do I tell you by
what authority I do these things."
This chapter describes what is usually called the Day of
Questions. It was a day when the Jewish authorities, in all their
different sections, came to Jesus with question after question designed
to trap him, and when, in his wisdom, he answered them in such a way as
routed them and left them speechless.
The first question was put by the chief priests, the scribes and
the elders. The chief priests were a body of men composed of ex-High
Priests and of members of the families from which the High Priests were
drawn. The phrase describes the religious aristocracy of the Temple. The
three sets of men--chief priests, scribes and elders--were the
component parts of the Sanhedrin, the supreme council and governing body
of the Jews; and we may well take it that this was a question concocted
by the Sanhedrin with a view to formulating a charge against Jesus.
No wonder they asked him by what authority he did these things!
To ride into Jerusalem as he did and then to take the law into his own
hands and cleanse the Temple, required some explanation. To the orthodox
Jews of the day, Jesus' calm assumption of authority was an amazing
thing. No Rabbi ever delivered a judgment or made a statement without
giving his authorities. He would say, "There is a teaching that . . ."
Or he would say, "This was confirmed by Rabbi So and So when he said . .
." But none would have claimed the utterly independent authority with
which Jesus moved among men. What they wanted was that Jesus should say
bluntly and directly that he was the Messiah and the Son of God. Then
they would have a ready-made charge of blasphemy and could arrest him on
the spot. But he would not give that answer, for his hour was not yet
come.
The reply of Jesus is sometimes described as a clever debating
answer, used simply to score a point. But it is far more than that. He
asked them to answer the question, "Was the authority of John the
Baptist human or divine?" The point is that their answer to Jesus'
question would answer their own question. Every one knew how John had
regarded Jesus and how he had considered himself only the fore-runner of
the one who was the Messiah. If they agreed that John's authority was
divine then they had also to agree that Jesus was the Messiah, because
John had said so. If they denied it, the people would rise,, against
them. Jesus' answer in fact asks the question, "Tell me--where do you
yourself think I got my authority?" He did not need to answer their
question if they answered his.
To face the truth may confront a man with a sore and difficult
situation; but to refuse to face it confronts him with a tangle out of
which there is no escape. The emissaries of the Pharisees refused to
face the truth, and they had to withdraw frustrated and discredited with
the crowd.
20:9-18 Jesus began to
speak this parable to the people. "A man planted a vineyard and let it
out to tenants, and went away for a long time. At the proper time he
despatched a servant to the tenants so that they might give him his
share of the fruit of the vineyard. The tenants beat him and sent him
away empty-handed. He went on to send another servant. They beat him,
too, and maltreated him, and sent him away empty-handed. He went on to
send a third. This one they wounded and threw out. The owner of the
vineyard said, 'What am I to do? I will send my beloved son. It may be
they will respect him.' When the tenants saw him they said to each
other, 'This is the heir. Let us kill him so that the inheritance will
be ours.' And they flung him out of the vineyard and killed him. What,
then, will the owner of the vineyard do to them? He will come and he
will destroy these tenants, and will give the vineyard to others." When
they heard this, they said, "God forbid!" He looked at them and said,
"What, then, is this which stands written--'The stone which the builders
rejected, this has become the head of the corner? Everyone who falls
against that stone will be shattered; but if it falls on anyone it will
wipe him out as the wind blows the chaff away.'"
This is a parable whose meaning is crystal clear. The vineyard stands for the nation of Israel (compare Isaiah 5:1-7).
The tenants are the rulers of Israel into whose hands the nation was
entrusted. The messengers are the prophets who were disregarded,
persecuted and killed. The son is Jesus himself. And the doom is that
the place which Israel should have occupied is to be given to others.
The story itself is the kind of thing which could and did
happen. Judaea in the time of Jesus was in the throes of economic
trouble and labour unrest. There was many an absentee landlord who let
out his lands in just such a way. The rent was seldom paid in money. It
was either a fixed amount of produce, irrespective of the success or
failure of the harvest, or it was a percentage of the crop, whatever it
might be.
In its teaching this is one of the richest of the parables. It tells us certain things about man.
(i) It tells us of human privilege. The tenants did not make the
vineyard. They entered into possession of it. The owner did not stand
over them with a whip. He went away and left them to work in their own
way.
(ii) It tells us of human sin. The sin of the tenants was that
they refused to give the owner his due and wished to control what it was
his sole right to control. Sin consists in the failure to give God his
proper place and in usurping the power which should be his.
(iii) It tells of human responsibility. For long enough the
tenants were left to their own devices; but the day of reckoning came.
Soon or late a man is called upon to give account for that which was
committed to his charge.
The parable tells us certain things about God.
(i) It tells us of the patience of God. The owner did not strike
at the first sign of rebellion on the part of the tenants. He gave them
chance after chance to do the right thing. There is nothing so
wonderful as the patience of God. If any man had created the world he
would have taken his hand, and, in exasperated despair, he would have
wiped it out long ago.
(ii) It tells us of the judgment of God. The tenants thought
they could presume on the patience of the master and get away with it.
But God has not abdicated. However much a man may seem to get away with
it, the day of reckoning comes. As the Romans put it, "Justice holds the
scales with an even and a scrupulous balance and in the end she will
prevail."
The parable tells us something about Jesus.
(i) It tells us that he knew what was coming. He did not come to
Jerusalem hugging a dream that even yet he might escape the cross. Open
eyed and unafraid, he went on. When Achilles, the great Greek hero, was
warned by the prophetess Cassandra that, if he went out to battle, he
would surely die, he answered, "Nevertheless I am for going on." For
Jesus there was to be no turning back.
(ii) It tells us that he never doubted Gods ultimate triumph.
Beyond the power of wicked men stood the undefeatable majesty of God.
Wickedness may seem for a time to prevail, but it cannot in the end
escape its punishment.
Careless seems the great Avenger, history's pages but record
One death grapple in the darkness, 'twixt old systems and
the Word;
Truth for ever on the scaffold, Wrong for ever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
(iii) It lays down most unmistakably his claim to be the Son of
God. Deliberately he removes himself from the succession of the
prophets. They were servants; he is the Son. In this parable he made a
claim that none could fail to see to be God's Chosen King.
The quotation about the stone which the builders rejected comes from Psalms 118:22-23. It was a favourite quotation in the early church as a description of the death and resurrection of Jesus. (compare Acts 4:11; 1 Peter 2:7.)
20:19-26 The scribes
and chief priests tried to lay hands on Jesus at that very hour; and
they feared the people, for they realized that he spoke this parable to
them. They watched for an opportunity, and they despatched spies, who
pretended that they were genuinely concerned about the right thing to
do, so that they might fasten on what he said and be able to hand him
over to the power and the authority of the governor. They asked him,
"Teacher, we know that you speak and teach rightly, and you are no
respecter of persons. Is it lawful for us to pay tribute to Caesar? Or
not?" He saw their subtle deception and said to them, "Show me a
denarius. Whose image and inscription is on it?" They said, "Caesar's."
"Well then," he said to them, "give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar,
and give to God what belongs to God." There was nothing in this
statement that they could fasten on to in the presence of the people.
They were amazed at his answer, and had nothing to say.
Here the emissaries of the Sanhedrin returned to the attack.
They suborned men to go to Jesus and ask a question as if it was really
troubling their consciences. The tribute to be paid to Caesar was a
poll-tax of one denarius, about 4 pence, per year. Every man from 14 to
65 and every women from 12 to 65 had to pay that simply for the
privilege of existing. This tribute was a burning question in Palestine
and had been the cause of more than one rebellion. It was not the merely
financial question which was at stake. The tribute was not regarded as a
heavy imposition and was in fact no real burden at all. The issue at
stake was this--the fanatical Jews claimed that they had no king but God
and held that it was wrong to pay tribute to anyone other than him. The
question was a religious question, for which many were willing to die.
So, then, these emissaries of the Sanhedrin attempted to impale
Jesus on the horns of a dilemma. If he said that the tribute should not
be paid, they would at once report him to Pilate and arrest would follow
as surely as the night the day. If he said that it should be paid, he
would alienate many of his supporters, especially the Galilaeans, whose
support was so strong.
Jesus answered them on their own grounds. He asked to be shown a
denarius. Now, in the ancient world the sign of kingship was the issue
of currency. For instance, the Maccabees had immediately issued their
own currency whenever Jerusalem was freed from the Syrians. Further, it
was universally admitted that to have the right to issue currency
carried with it the right to impose taxation. If a man had the right to
put his image and superscription on a coin, ipso facto he had acquired
the right to impose taxation. So Jesus said, "If you accept Caesar's
currency and use it, you are bound to accept Caesar's right to impose
taxes"; "but," he went on, "there is a domain in which Caesar's writ
does not run and which belongs wholly to God."
(i) If a man lives in a state and enjoys all its privileges, he
cannot divorce himself from it. The more honest a man is, the better
citizen he will be. There should be no better and no more conscientious
citizens of any state than its Christians; and one of the tragedies of
modern life is that Christians do not sufficiently take their part in
the government of the state. If they abandon their responsibilities and
leave materialistic politicians to govern, Christians cannot justifiably
complain about what is done or not done.
(ii) Nonetheless, it remains true that in the life of the
Christian God has the last word and not the state. The voice of
conscience is louder than the voice of any man-made laws. The Christian
is at once the servant and the conscience of the state. Just because he
is the best of citizens, he will refuse to do what a Christian citizen
cannot do. He will at one and the same time fear God and honour the
king.
20:27-40 Some of the
Sadducees, who say that there is no resurrection, came to Jesus and
asked him, "Teacher, Moses wrote to us that, if a man's married brother
dies without leaving any children, his brother must take his wife and
raise up descendants for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The
first took a wife and died childless. The second and the third also
took her; and in the same way the whole seven left no children and died.
Later the wife died, too. Whose wife will she be at the resurrection,
for the seven had her to wife?" Jesus said to them, "The sons of this
age marry and are married. But those who are deemed worthy to obtain
that age and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are
married, for they cannot die any more, for they are like angels and they
are sons of God, for they are the sons of the resurrection. That the
dead are raised even Moses indicated in the passage about the bush, when
he called the Lord, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of
Jacob. God is not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live
to him." Some of the scribes said, "Teacher, you have spoken well"; and
they no longer dared to ask him any question.
When the emissaries of the Sanhedrin had been finally silenced,
the Sadducees appeared on the scene. The whole point of their question
depends on two things.
(i) It depends upon the levirate law of marriage (Deuteronomy 25:5).
According to that law if a man died childless, his brother must marry
the widow and beget children to carry on the line. It is far from likely
that it was operative in the time of Jesus, but it was included in the
Mosaic regulations and therefore the Sadducees regarded it as binding.
(ii) It depends upon the beliefs of the Sadducees. Sadducees and
Pharisees are often mentioned together but in beliefs they were poles
apart.
(a) The Pharisees were entirely a religious body. They had no
political ambitions and were content with any government which allowed
them to carry out the ceremonial law. The Sadducees were few but very
wealthy. The priests and the aristocrats were nearly all Sadducees. They
were the governing class; and they were largely collaborationist with
Rome, being unwilling to risk losing their wealth, their comfort and
their place.
(b) The Pharisees accepted the scriptures plus all the thousand
detailed regulations and rules of the oral and ceremonial law, such as
the Sabbath law and the laws about hand washing. The Sadducees accepted
only the written law of the Old Testament; and in the Old Testament they
stressed only the law of Moses and set no store on the prophetic books.
(c) The Pharisees believed in the resurrection from the dead and
in angels and spirits. The Sadducees held that there was no
resurrection from the dead and that there were no angels or spirits.
(d) The Pharisees believed in fate; and that a man's life was
planned and ordered by God. The Sadducees believed in unrestricted
free-will.
(e) The Pharisees believed in and hoped for the coming of the
Messiah; the Sadducees did not. For them the coming of the Messiah would
have been a disturbance of their carefully ordered lives.
The Sadducees, then, came with this question about who would be
the husband in heaven of the woman who was married to seven different
men. They regarded such a question as the kind of thing that made belief
in the resurrection of the body ridiculous. Jesus gave them an answer
which has a permanently valid truth in it. He said that we must not
think of heaven in terms of this earth. Life there will be quite
different, because we will be quite different. It would save a mass of
misdirected ingenuity, and not a little heartbreak, if we ceased to
speculate on what heaven is like and left things to the love of God.
Jesus went further. As we have said, the Sadducees did not
believe in the resurrection of the body. They declared they could not
believe in it because there was no information about it, still less any
proof of it, in the books of the law which Moses was held to have
written. So far no Rabbi had been able to meet them on that ground; but
Jesus did. He pointed out that Moses himself had heard God say, "I am
the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God
of Jacob" (Exodus 3:1-6),
and that it was impossible that God should be the God of the dead.
Therefore Abraham and Isaac and Jacob must be still alive. Therefore
there was such a thing as the resurrection of the body. No wonder the
scribes declared it to be a good answer, for Jesus had met the Sadducees
on their own ground and defeated them.
It may well be that we find this an arid passage. It deals with
burning questions of the time by means of arguments which a Rabbi would
find completely convincing but which are not convincing to the modern
mind. But out of this very aridity there emerges a great truth for
anyone who teaches or who wishes to commend Christianity to his fellows.
Jesus used arguments that the people he was arguing with could
understand. He talked to them in their own language; he met them on
their own ground; and that is precisely why the common people heard him
gladly.
Sometimes, when one reads religious and theological books, one
feels that all this may be true but it would be quite impossible to
present it to the non-theologically minded man who, after all, is in an
overwhelming majority. Jesus used language and arguments which people
could and did understand; he met people with their own vocabulary, on
their own ground, and with their own ideas. We will be far better
teachers of Christianity and far better witnesses for Christ when we
learn to do the same.
20:41-44 Jesus said to
them, "How does David say that the Christ is his son? For David himself
says in the Book of Psalms, 'The Lord says to my Lord, Sit at my right
hand till I make your enemies your footstool.' So David calls him Lord,
and how can he be his son?"
It is worth while taking this little passage by itself for it
is very difficult to understand. The most popular title of the Messiah
was Son of David. That is what the blind man at Jericho called Jesus (Luke 18:38-39), and that is how the crowds addressed him at his entry into Jerusalem (Matthew 21:9). Here Jesus seems to cast doubts on the validity of that title. The quotation is from Psalms 110:1.
In Jesus' time all the Psalms were attributed to David and this one was
taken to refer to the Messiah. In it David says that he heard God speak
to his Anointed One and tell him to sit at his right hand until his
enemies became his footstool; and in it David calls the Messiah My Lord.
How can the Messiah be at once David's son and David's Lord?
Jesus was doing here what he so often tried to do, trying to
correct the popular idea of the Messiah which was that under him the
golden age would come and Israel would become the greatest nation in the
world. It was a dream of political power. How was that to happen? There
were many ideas about it but the popular one was that some great
descendant of David would come to be invincible captain and king. So
then the title Son of David was inextricably mixed up with world
dominion, with military prowess and with material conquest.
Really what Jesus was saying here was, "You think of the coming
Messiah as Son of David; so he is; but he is far more. He is Lord." He
was telling men that they must revise their ideas of what Son of David
meant. They must abandon these fantastic dreams of world power and
visualize the Messiah as Lord of the hearts and lives of men. He was
implicitly blaming them for having too little an idea of God. It is
always man's tendency to make God in his own image, and thereby to miss
his full majesty.
20:45-47 While all the
people were listening, Jesus said to his disciples, "Beware of the
scribes who like to walk about in long robes, and who love greetings in
the market places, and the chief seats in synagogues, and the top place
at banquets. They devour widows' houses and pretend to offer long
prayers. These will receive the greater condemnation."
The honours which the scribes and Rabbis expected to receive
were quite extraordinary. They had rules of precedence all carefully
drawn up. In the college the most learned Rabbi took precedence; at a
banquet, the oldest. It is on record that two Rabbis came in, after
walking on the street, grieved and bewildered because more than one
person had greeted them with, "May your peace be great," without adding,
"My masters!" They claimed to rank even above parents. They said, "Let
your esteem for your friend border on your esteem for your teacher, and
let your respect for your teacher border on your reverence for God."
"Respect for a teacher should exceed respect for a father, for both
father and son owe respect to a teacher." "If a man's father and teacher
have lost anything, the teacher's loss has the precedence, for a man's
father only brought him into this world; his teacher, who taught him
wisdom, brought him into the life of the world to come.... If a man's
father and teacher are carrying burdens, he must first help his teacher,
and afterwards his father. If his father and teacher are in captivity,
he must first ransom his teacher, and afterwards his father." Such
claims are almost incredible; it was not good for a man to make them; it
was still less good for him to have them conceded. But it was claims
like that the scribes and Rabbis made.
Jesus also accused the scribes of devouring widows' houses. A
Rabbi was legally bound to teach for nothing. All Rabbis were supposed
to have trades and to support themselves by the work of their hands,
while their teaching was given free. That sounds very noble but it was
deliberately taught that to support a Rabbi was an act of the greatest
piety. "Whoever," they said, "puts part of his income into the purse of
the wise is counted worthy of a seat in the heavenly academy."
"Whosoever harbours a disciple of the wise in his house is counted as if
he offered a daily sacrifice." "Let thy house be a place of resort to
wise men." It is by no means extraordinary that impressionable women
were the legitimate prey of the less scrupulous and more comfort-loving
rabbis. At their worst, they did devour widows' houses.
The whole unhealthy business shocked and revolted Jesus. It was
all the worse because these men knew so much better and held so
responsible a place within the life of the community. God will always
condemn the man who uses a position of trust to further his own ends and
to pander to his own comfort.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)