Verses 1-46
Chapter 22
22:1-10 Jesus
again answered them in parables: "The Kingdom of Heaven is like the
situation which arose when a man who was a king arranged a wedding for
his son. He sent his servants to summon those who had been invited to
the wedding, and they refused to come. He again sent other servants.
'Tell those who have been invited,' he said, 'look you, I have my meal
all prepared; my oxen and my specially fattened animals have been
killed; and everything is ready. Come to the wedding.' But they
disregarded the invitation and went away, one to his estate, and another
to his business. The rest seized the servants and treated them
shamefully and killed them. The king was angry, and sent his armies, and
destroyed those murderers, and set fire to their city. Then he said to
his servants, 'The wedding is ready. Those who have been invited did not
deserve to come. Go, then, to the highways and invite to the wedding
all you may find.' So the servants went out to the roads, and collected
all whom they found, both bad and good; and the wedding was supplied
with guests."
Matthew 22:1-14 form not one parable, but two; and we will grasp their meaning far more easily and far more fully if we take them separately.
The events of the first of the two were completely in accordance
with normal Jewish customs. When the invitations to a great feast, like
a wedding feast, were sent out, the time was not stated; and when
everything was ready the servants were sent out with a final summons to
tell the guests to come. So, then, the king in this parable had long ago
sent out his invitations; but it was not till everything was prepared
that the final summons was issued--and insultingly refused. This parable
has two meanings.
(i) It has a purely local meaning. Its local meaning was a
driving home of what had already been, said in the Parable of the Wicked
Husbandmen; once again it was an accusation of the Jews. The invited
guests who when the time came refused to come, stand for the Jews. Ages
ago they had been invited by God to be his chosen people; yet when God's
son came into the world, and they were invited to follow him they
contemptuously refused. The result was that the invitation of God went
out direct to the highways and the byways; and the people in the
highways and the byways stand for the sinners and the Gentiles, who
never expected an invitation into the Kingdom.
As the writer of the gospel saw it, the consequences of the
refusal were terrible. There is one verse of the parable which is
strangely out of place; and that because it is not part of the original
parable as Jesus told it, but an interpretation by the writer of the
gospel. That is Matthew 22:7, which tells how the king sent his armies against those who refused the invitation, and burned their city.
This introduction of armies and the burning of the city seems at
first sight completely out of place taken in connexion with invitations
to a wedding feast. But Matthew was composing his gospel some time
between A.D. 80 and 90. What had happened during the period between the
actual life of Jesus and now? The answer is--the destruction of
Jerusalem by the armies of Rome in A.D. 70. The Temple was sacked and
burned and the city destroyed stone from stone, so that a plough was
drawn across it. Complete disaster had come to those who refused to
recognize the Son of God when he came.
The writer of the gospel adds as his comment the terrible things
which did in fact happen to the nation which would not take the way of
Christ. And it is indeed the simple historical fact that if the Jews had
accepted the way of Christ, and had walked in love, in humility and in
sacrifice they would never have been the rebellious, warring people who
finally provoked the avenging wrath of Rome, when Rome could stand their
political machinations no longer.
(ii) Equally this parable has much to say on a much wider scale.
(a) It reminds us that the invitation of God is to a feast as
joyous as a wedding feast. His invitation is to joy. To think of
Christianity as a gloomy giving up of everything which brings laughter
and sunshine and happy fellowship is to mistake its whole nature. It is
to joy that the Christian is invited; and it is joy he misses, if he
refuses the invitation.
(b) It reminds us that the things which make men deaf to the
invitation of Christ are not necessarily bad in themselves. One man went
to his estate; the other to his business. They did not go off on a wild
carousal or an immoral adventure. They went off on the, in itself,
excellent task of efficiently administering their business life. It is
very easy for a man to be so busy with the things of time that he
forgets the things of eternity, to be so preoccupied with the things
which are seen that he forgets the things which are unseen, to hear so
insistently the claims of the world that he cannot hear the soft
invitation of the voice of Christ. The tragedy of life is that it is so
often the second bests which shut out the bests, that it is things which
are good in themselves which shut out the things that are supreme. A
man can be so busy making a living that he fails to make a life; he can
be so busy with the administration and the organization of life that he
forgets life itself.
(c) It reminds us that the appeal of Christ is not so much to
consider how we will be punished as it is to see what we will miss, if
we do not take his way of things. Those who would not come were
punished, but their real tragedy was that they lost the joy of the
wedding feast. If we refuse the invitation of Christ, some day our
greatest pain will lie, not in the things we suffer, but in the
realization of the precious things we have missed.
(d) It reminds us that in the last analysis God's invitation is
the invitation of grace. Those who were gathered in from the highways
and the byways had no claim on the king at an; they could never by any
stretch of imagination have expected an invitation to the wedding feast,
still less could they ever have deserved it. It came to them from
nothing other than the wide-armed, open-hearted, generous hospitality of
the king. It was grace which offered the invitation and grace which
gathered men in.
22:11-14 The
king came in to see those who were sitting at table, and he saw there a
man who was not wearing a wedding garment. "Friend," he said to him,
"how did you come here with no wedding garment?" The man was struck
silent. Then the king said to the attendants, "Bind him hands and feet,
and throw him out into the outer darkness. There shall be weeping and
gnashing of teeth there. For many are called, but few are chosen."
This is a second parable, but it is also a very close
continuation and amplification of the previous one. It is the story of a
guest who appeared at a royal wedding feast without a wedding garment.
One of the great interests of this parable is that in it we see
Jesus taking a story which was already familiar to his hearers and using
it in his own way. The Rabbis had two stories which involved kings and
garments. The first told of a king who invited his guests to a feast,
without telling them the exact date and time; but he did tell them that
they must wash, and anoint, and clothe themselves that they might be
ready when the summons came. The wise prepared themselves at once, and
took their places waiting at the palace door, for they believed that in a
palace a feast could be prepared so quickly that there would be no long
warning. The foolish believed that it would take a long time to make
the necessary preparations and that they would have plenty of time. So
they went, the mason to his lime, the potter to his clay, the smith to
his furnace, the fuller to his bleaching-ground, and went on with their
work. Then, suddenly, the summons to the feast came without any warning.
The wise were ready to sit down, and the king rejoiced over them, and
they ate and drank. But those who had not arrayed themselves in their
wedding garments had to stand outside, sad and hungry, and look on at
the joy that they had lost. That rabbinic parable tells of the duty of
preparedness for the summons of God, and the garments stand for the
preparation that must be made.
The second rabbinic parable told how a king entrusted to his
servants royal robes. Those who were wise took the robes, and carefully
stored them away, and kept them in all their pristine loveliness. Those
who were foolish wore the robes to their work, and soiled and stained
them. The day came when the king demanded the robes back. The wise
handed them back fresh and clean; so the king laid up the robes in his
treasury and bade them go in peace. The foolish handed them back stained
and soiled. The king commanded that the robes should be given to the
fuller to cleanse, and that the foolish servants should be cast into
prison. This parable teaches that a man must hand back his soul to God
in all its original purity; but that the man who has nothing but a
stained soul to render back stands condemned.
No doubt Jesus had these two parables in mind when he told his
own story. What, then, was he seeking to teach? This parable also
contains both a local and a universal lesson.
(i) The local lesson is this. Jesus has just said that the king,
to supply his feast with guests, sent his messengers out into the
highways and byways to gather all men in. That was the parable of the
open door. It told how the Gentiles and the sinners would be gathered
in. This parable strikes the necessary balance. It is true that the door
is open to an men, but when they come they must bring a life which
seeks to fit the love which has been given to them. Grace is not only a
gift; it is a grave responsibility. A man cannot go on living the life
he lived before he met Jesus Christ. He must be clothed in a new purity
and a new holiness and a new goodness. The door is open, but the door is
not open for the sinner to come and remain a sinner, but for the sinner
to come and become a saint.
(ii) This is the permanent lesson. The way in which a man comes
to anything demonstrates the spirit in which he comes. If we go to visit
in a friend's house, we do not go in the clothes we wear in the
shipyard or the garden. We know very well that it is not the clothes
which matter to the friend. It is not that we want to put on a show. It
is simply a matter of respect that we should present ourselves in our
friend's house as neatly as we can. The fact that we prepare ourselves
to go there is the way in which we outwardly show our affection and our
esteem for our friend. So it is with God's house. This parable has
nothing to do with the clothes in which we go to church; it has
everything to do with the spirit in which we go to God's house. It is
profoundly true that church-going must never be a fashion parade. But
there are garments of the mind and of the heart and of the soul--the
garment of expectation, the garment of humble penitence, the garment of
faith, the garment of reverence--and these are the garments without
which we ought not to approach God. Too often we go to God's house with
no preparation at all; if every man and woman in our congregations came
to church prepared to worship, after a little prayer, a little thought,
and a little self-examination, then worship would be worship indeed--the
worship in which and through which things happen in men's souls and in
the life of the Church and in the affairs of the world.
22:15-22 Then
the Pharisees came, and tried to form a plan to ensnare him in his
speech. So they sent their disciples to him, along with the Herodians.
"Teacher," they said, "we know that you are true, and that you teach the
way of God in truth, and that you never allow yourself to be swayed by
any man, for you are no respecter of persons. Tell us, then, your
opinion--is it right to pay tribute to Caesar, or not?" Jesus was well
aware of their malice. "Hypocrites," he said, "why do you try to test
me? Show me the tribute coin." They brought him a denarius. "Whose image
is this," he said to them, "and whose inscription?" "Caesar's," they
said to him. "Well then," he said to them, "render to Caesar the things
which are Caesar's, and to God the things which are God's." When they
heard this answer, they were amazed, and left him and went away.
Up to this point we have seen Jesus, as it were, on the attack.
He had spoken three parables in which he had plainly indicted the
orthodox Jewish leaders. In the parable of the two sons (Matthew 21:28-32)
the Jewish leaders appear under the guise of the unsatisfactory son who
did not do his father's will. In the parable of the wicked husbandmen (Matthew 21:33-46) they are the wicked husbandmen. In the parable of the king's feast (Matthew 22:1-14) they are the condemned guests.
Now we see the Jewish leaders launching their counterattack; and
they do so by directing at Jesus carefully formulated questions. They
ask these questions in public, while the crowd look on and listen, and
their aim is to make Jesus discredit himself by his own words in the
presence of the people. Here, then, we have the question of the
Pharisees, and it was subtly framed. Palestine was an occupied country
and the Jews were subject to the Roman Empire; and the question was: "Is
it, or is it not, lawful to pay tribute to Rome?"
There were, in fact, three regular taxes which the Roman
government exacted. There was a ground tax; a man must pay to the
government one tenth of the grain, and one fifth of the oil and wine
which he produced; this tax was paid partly in kind, and partly in a
money equivalent. There was income tax, which was one per cent of a
man's income. There was a poll tax; this tax had to be paid by every
male person from the age of fourteen to the age of sixty-five, and by
every female person from the age of twelve to sixty-five; it amounted to
one denarius (Greek #1220)--that
is what Jesus called the tribute coin--and was the equivalent of about
4p, a sum which is to be evaluated in the awareness that 3p was the
usual day's wage for a working-man. The tax in question here is the poll
tax.
The question which the Pharisees asked set Jesus a very real
dilemma. If he said that it was unlawful to pay the tax, they would
promptly report him to the Roman government officials as a seditious
person and his arrest would certainly follow. If he said that it was
lawful to pay the tax, he would stand discredited in the eyes of many of
the people. Not only did the people resent the tax as everyone resents
taxation; they resented it even more for religious reasons. To a Jew God
was the only king; their nation was a theocracy; to pay tax to an
earthly king was to admit the validity of his kingship and thereby to
insult God. Therefore the more fanatical of the Jews insisted that any
tax paid to a foreign king was necessarily wrong. Whichever way Jesus
might answer--so his questioners thought-he would lay himself open to
trouble.
The seriousness of this attack is shown by the fact that the
Pharisees and the Herodians combined to make it, for normally these two
parties were in bitter opposition. The Pharisees were the supremely
orthodox, who resented the payment of the tax to a foreign king as an
infringement of the divine right of God. The Herodians were the party of
Herod, king of Galilee, who owed his power to the Romans and who worked
hand in glove with them. The Pharisees and the Herodians were strange
bed-fellows indeed; their differences were for the moment forgotten in a
common hatred of Jesus and a common desire to eliminate him. Any man
who insists on his own way, no matter what it is, will hate Jesus.
This question of tax-paying was not of merely historical
interest. Matthew was writing between A.D. 80 and 90. The Temple had
been destroyed in A.D. 70. So long as it stood, every Jew had been bound
to pay the half-shekel Temple tax. After the destruction of the Temple,
the Roman government demanded that that tax should be paid to the
temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome. It is obvious how bitter a
regulation that was for a Jew to stomach. The matter of taxes was a real
problem in the actual ministry of Jesus; and it was still a real
problem in the days of the early Church.
But Jesus was wise. He asked to see a denarius, which was
stamped with the Emperor's head. In the ancient days coinage was the
sign of kingship. As soon as a king came to the throne he struck his own
coinage; even a pretender would produce a coinage to show the reality
of his kingship; and that coinage was held to be the property of the
king whose image it bore. Jesus asked whose image was on the coin. The
answer was that Caesar's head was on it. "Well then," said Jesus, "give
it back to Caesar; it is his. Give to Caesar what belongs to him; and
give to God what belongs to him."
With his unique wisdom Jesus never laid down rules and
regulations; that is why his teaching is timeless and never goes out of
date. He always lays down principles. Here he lays down a very great and
very important one.
Every Christian man has a double citizenship. He is a citizen of
the country in which he happens to live. To it he owes many things. He
owes the safety against lawless men which only settled government can
give; he owes all public services. To take a simple example, few men are
wealthy enough to have a lighting system or a cleansing system or a
water system of their own. These are public services. In a welfare state
the citizen owes still more to the state--education, medical services,
provision for unemployment and old age. This places him under a debt of
obligation. Because the Christian is a man of honour, he must be a
responsible citizen; failure in good citizenship is also failure in
Christian duty. Untold troubles can descend upon a country or an
industry when Christians refuse to take their part in the administration
and leave it to selfish, self-seeking, partisan, and unchristian men.
The Christian has a duty to Caesar in return for the privileges which
the rule of Caesar brings to him.
But the Christian is also a citizen of heaven. There are matters
of religion and of principle in which the responsibility of the
Christian is to God. It may well be that the two citizenships will never
clash; they do not need to. But when the Christian is convinced that it
is God's will that something should be done, it must be done; or, if he
is convinced that something is against the will of God, he must resist
it and take no part in it. Where the boundaries between the two duties
lie, Jesus does not say. That is for a man's own conscience to test. But
a real Christian--and this is the permanent truth which Jesus here lays
down--is at one and the same time a good citizen of his country and a
good citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven. He will fail in his duty neither
to God nor to man. He will, as Peter said, "Fear God. Honour the
emperor" (1 Peter 2:17).
22:23-33 On
that day the Sadducees, who deny that there is any resurrection, came to
him, and questioned him. "Teacher," they said, "Moses said, 'If anyone
dies without children, his brother shall marry his wife, and shall raise
up a family for his brother.' Amongst us there were seven brothers. The
first married and died, and, since he had no children, he left his wife
to his brother. The same thing happened with the second and the third,
right to the end of the seven of them. Last of all the woman died. Of
which of the seven will she be the wife in the resurrection? For they
all had her." Jesus answered: "You are in error, because you do not know
the Scriptures or the power of God. In the resurrection they neither
marry nor are married, but they are as the angels in heaven. Now, in
regard to the resurrection of the dead, have you never read what God
said, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.'
God is not the God of dead men, but of those who live." When the crowds
heard this answer, they were amazed at his teaching.
When the Pharisees had made their counter-attack on Jesus and been routed, the Sadducees took up the battle.
The Sadducees were not many in number; but they were the
wealthy, the aristocratic, and the governing class. The chief priests,
for instance, were Sadducees. In politics they were collaborationist;
quite ready to cooperate with the Roman government, if co-operation was
the price of the retention of their own privileges. In thought they were
quite ready to open their minds to Greek ideas. In their Jewish belief
they were traditionalists. They refused to accept the oral and scribal
law, which to the Pharisees was of such paramount importance. They went
even further; the only part of scripture which they regarded as binding
was the Pentateuch, the Law par excellence, the first five books of the
Old Testament. They did not accept the prophets or the poetical books as
scripture at all. In particular they were at variance with the
Pharisees in that they completely denied any life after death, a belief
on which the Pharisees insisted. The Pharisees indeed laid it down that
any man who denied the resurrection of the dead was shut out from God.
The Sadducees insisted that the doctrine of life after death
could not be proved from the Pentateuch. The Pharisees said that it
could and it is interesting to look at the proofs which they adduced.
They cited Numbers 18:28
which says, "You shall give the Lord's offering to Aaron the priest."
That is permanent regulation; the verb is in the present tense;
therefore Aaron is still alive! They cited Deuteronomy 31:16
: "This people will rise," a peculiarly unconvincing citation, for the
second half of the verse goes on, "and play the harlot after the strange
gods of the land"! They cited Deuteronomy 32:39 : "I kill and I make alive." Outside the Pentateuch they cited Isaiah 26:19
: "Thy dead shall live." It cannot be said that any of the citations of
the Pharisees were really convincing; and no real argument for the
resurrection of the dead had ever been produced from the Pentateuch.
The Pharisees were very definite about the resurrection of the
body. They discussed recondite points--Would a man rise clothed or
unclothed? If clothed, would he rise with the clothes in which he died,
or other clothes? They used 1 Samuel 28:14
(the witch of Endor's raising of the spirit of Samuel at the request of
Saul) to prove that after death men retain the appearance they had in
this world. They even argued that men rose with the physical defects
with which, and from which they died--otherwise they would not be the
same persons! All Jews would be resurrected in the Holy Land, so they
said that under the earth there were cavities and, when a Jew was buried
in a foreign land, his body rolled through these cavities until it
reached the homeland. The Pharisees held as a primary doctrine the
bodily resurrection of the dead; the Sadducees completely denied it.
The Sadducees produced a question which, they believed, reduced
the doctrine of the resurrection of the body to an absurdity. There was a
Jewish custom called Levirate Marriage. How far it was ever carried out
in practice is very doubtful. If a man died childless, his brother was
under obligation to marry the widow, and to beget children for his
brother; such children were legally regarded as the brother's children.
If the man refused to marry the widow, they must both go to the elders.
The woman must loosen the man's shoe, spit in his face, and curse him;
and the man was thereafter under a stigma of refusal (Deuteronomy 25:5-10).
The Sadducees cited a case of Levirate Marriage in which seven
brothers, each dying childless, one after another married the same
woman; and then asked, "When the resurrection takes place, whose wife
will this much-married woman be?" Here indeed was a catch question.
Jesus began by laying down one principle--the whole question
starts from a basic error, the error of thinking of heaven in terms of
earth, and of thinking of eternity in terms of time. Jesus' answer was
that anyone who reads scripture must see that the question is
irrelevant, for heaven is not going to be simply a continuation or an
extension of this world. There will be new and greater relationships
which will far transcend the physical relationships of time.
Then Jesus went on to demolish the whole Sadducean position.
They had always held that there was no text in the Pentateuch which
could be used to prove the resurrection of the dead. Now, what was one
of the commonest titles of God in the Pentateuch? "The God of Abraham,
and of Isaac, and of Jacob." God cannot be the God of dead men and of
mouldering corpses. The living God must be the God of living men. The
Sadducean case was shattered. Jesus had done what the wisest Rabbis had
never been able to do. Out of Scripture itself he had confuted the
Sadducees, and had shown them that there is a life after death which
must not be thought of in earthly terms. The crowds were amazed at a man
who was a master of argument like this, and even the Pharisees can
hardly have forborne to cheer.
22:34-40 When
the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered
together. One of them, who was an expert in the Law, asked him a
question as a test: "What commandment in the Law is greatest?" He said
to him, "'You must love the Lord your God with your whole heart, and
your whole soul, and your whole mind.' This is the great and the chief
commandment; and the second is like it, 'You must love your neighbour as
yourself.' On these two commandments the whole Law and the prophets
depend."
In Matthew this question looks like a return to the attack on
the part of the Pharisees; but in Mark the atmosphere is different. As
Mark tells the story (Mark 12:28-34)
the scribe did not ask Jesus this question to trip him up. He asked it
in gratitude that Jesus had confuted the Sadducees and to enable Jesus
to demonstrate how well he could answer; and the passage ends with the
scribe and Jesus very close to each other.
We may well say that here Jesus laid down the complete definition of religion.
(i) Religion consists in loving God. The verse which Jesus quotes is Deuteronomy 6:5.
That verse was part of the Shema, the basic and essential creed of
Judaism, the sentence with which every Jewish service still opens, and
the first text which every Jewish child commits to memory. It means that
to God we must give a total love, a love which dominates our emotions, a
love which directs our thoughts, and a love which is the dynamic of our
actions. All religion starts with the love which is total commitment of
life to God.
(ii) The second commandment which Jesus quotes comes from Leviticus 19:18.
Our love for God must issue in love for men. But it is to be noted in
which order the commandments come; it is love of God first, and love of
man second. It is only when we love God that man becomes lovable. The
Biblical teaching about man is not that man is a collection of chemical
elements, not that man is part of the brute creation, but that man is
made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27).
It is for that reason that man is lovable. The true basis of all
democracy is in fact the love of God. Take away the love of God and we
can become angry at man the unteachable; we can become pessimistic about
man the unimprovable; we can become callous to man the machine-minder.
The love of man is firmly grounded in the love of God.
To be truly religious is to love God and to love the men whom
God made in his own image; and to love God and man, not with a nebulous
sentimentality, but with that total commitment which issues in devotion
to God and practical service of men.
22:41-46 When
the Pharisees had come together, Jesus asked them a question: "What is
your opinion about The Anointed One? Whose son is he?" "David's son,"
they said. He said to them, "How, then, does David in the Spirit call
Him Lord, when he says, 'The Lord said to my Lord, Sit on my right hand
till I put your enemies beneath your feet.' If David calls Him Lord, how
is he his son?" And no one was able to give him any answer. And from
that day no one any longer dared to ask him a question.
To us this may seem one of the most obscure things which Jesus
ever said. This may be so, but none the less it is a most important
statement. Even if, at first sight, we do not fully grasp its meaning,
we can still feel the air of awe and astonishment and mystery which it
has about it.
We have seen again and again that Jesus refused to allow his
followers to proclaim him as the Messiah until he had taught them what
Messiahship meant. Their ideas of Messiahship needed the most radical
change.
The commonest title of the Messiah was Son of David. Behind it
lay the expectation that there would one day come a great prince of the
line of David who would shatter Israel's enemies and lead the people to
the conquest of all nations. The Messiah was most commonly thought of in
nationalistic, political, military terms of power and glory. This is
another attempt by Jesus to alter that conception.
He asked the Pharisees whose son they understood the Messiah to
be: they answered, as he knew they would, "David's son." Jesus then
quotes Psalm Isaiah 10:1
: "The Lord says to my Lord; Sit at my right hand." All accepted that
as a Messianic text. In it the first Lord is God; the second Lord is the
Messiah. That is to say David calls the Messiah Lord. But, if the
Messiah is David's son, how could David call his own son Lord?
The clear result of the argument is that it is not adequate to
call the Messiah Son of David. He is not David's son; he is David's
Lord. When Jesus healed the blind men, they called him Son of David (Matthew 20:30). When he entered Jerusalem the crowds hailed him as Son of David (Matthew 21:9).
Jesus is here saying, "It is not enough to call the Messiah Son of
David. It is not enough to think of him as a Prince of David's line and
an earthly conqueror. You must go beyond that, for the Messiah is
David's Lord."
What did Jesus mean? He can have meant only one thing--that the
true description of him is Son of God. Son of David is not an adequate
title; only Son of God will do. And, if that be so, Messiahship is not
to be thought of in terms of Davidic conquest, but in terms of divine
and sacrificial love. Here, then, Jesus makes his greatest claim. In him
there came, not the earthly conqueror who would repeat the military
triumphs of David, but the Son of God who would demonstrate the love of
God upon his Cross.
There would be few that day who caught anything like all that
Jesus meant; but when Jesus spoke these words, even the densest of them
felt a shiver in the presence of the eternal mystery. They had the awed
and the uncomfortable feeling that they had heard the voice of God, and
for a moment, in this man Jesus, they glimpsed God's very face.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)