32. Matthew 22
A Parable about a
Wedding Banquet (Mt.22:1-14)
The issue of Jesus’ authority, his
political authority as Messiah of God’s heavenly kingdom continues to be at
issue here. Ancient peoples, Jews among them, did not know the separation our
modern world has erected between religion and political. For them everything
had political significance and everything had religious significance. Jesus had
occupied and announced the destruction of the temple, disputed with the Jewish
leadership over his authority, and retold Israel’s sad history of default on
their calling to be God’s Abrahamic people, which had finally led to this
moment of final crisis with Jesus. It was him or the Jews as other than this
Abrahamic people given over to bearing God’s blessing to the world. And Jesus’
authority as God’s agent in dealing with the Jews bookends this section
(21:23-22:46).
Within these “authority” bookends
Matthew tells two sequences of three: three parables (the two sons, the
vineyard and a royal feast) and three temptations (paying tax to Caesar, the
resurrection, and the greatest commandment).[1]
The former narrate Israel’s rebellious history against Yahweh in different
respects. The latter deal with Israel’s relation to Rome, its eschatology, and
the law.
Ch.22 begins with a parable about a
royal wedding feast, a parable drawn in extraordinary and extreme terms. And
for that it has been subject to criticism for the unseemly seeming violence of
the king’s reaction. I think, however, that a typological and political reading
of this parable will help with this concern. Everything is political about this
parable. A royal wedding is a state function. Attendance is more than good
manners, it is mandated. To refuse to attend, or to mistreat the messengers
sent to invite one to this event is treason or rebellion. And the king deals
with treasonous rebellion as is their habit, violence with extreme prejudice.
To show up to such a royal,
political event in improper attire (vv.11-14) is not simply bad manners but
insult and disrespect of your sovereign. Again the king responds the way an
ancient king would respond to such behavior.
Even with the political reference,
however, this parable lacks the historical verisimilitude of the vineyard
parable. How do we explain its extremity? That’s where the typological understanding
helps. To whom do the original invitees to the wedding banquet refer? And the
second wave of invitees? It is common to take the Israel of Jesus’ time for the
first and the church after Jesus’ death and resurrection as the second wave.
The king’s reaction, then, killing the unwilling invitees and the burning of
the city refers to the war with Rome in 70 a.d. But a typological perspective invites
us to look deeper. We have reached the point in Matthew’s retelling of Jesus’
story as Israel’s story of the period beyond the divided kingdom. That is, the
time of the destruction of Israel and the temple and exile in Babylon in the 6th
century b.c. Leithart explains the correspondences:
“Yahweh invites Israel to share in the
festivity of His son (the king), but they instead reject the invitation and
abuse and kill the messengers. The king’s destruction of their city is not, as
usually supposed, a prediction of AD 70, but a description of Nebuchadnezzar’s
destruction of Jerusalem. Jesus’ ministry and that of the disciples thus begins
in v. 8, when others are called from the streets and highways. The king’s
coming to inspect (v.11) is the same event that Jesus describes in Matthew 13
and again in Matthew 25; it is the “end of the age” when the king is going to
separate tares and wheat, good and bad fish, sheep and goats. The parable is
about what is happening in the temple on the day that it is told. The temple is
the site of the wedding feast of the Son. Jesus has invited lame and blind in.
Some guests, though, are improperly dressed. The warning is to the priests and
elders, those who wear the garb of temple ministry. Such clothing is not
sufficient.”[2]
To recap, the initial wedding
invites went out to Israel to celebrate God’s rule through his Davidic son. The
messenger, the prophets, were abused or killed however. And God at long last
made good on his threat of destruction and exile and Nebuchadnezzar sacked the
city and the temple in 586 b.c. A next group of invitees, a rather motley crew,
“both good and bad” (v.10), and they came. It is to this gathering of second
invitees that the king himself comes to see (Jesus) and he critiques the
religious leaders who oppose him and promises on them will fall the “end of the
age” (the end of national Israel’s serving as God’s Abrahamic people (“the
outer darkness,” “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” v.14).
The
Three Temptations (Mt.22:15-40)
Caesar
and Taxation (vv.15-22)
This would have made good, if
unpalatable, sense to Jewish readers in the 1st century. That Jesus’
opponents come together to question Jesus and try to catch him saying something
that might lessen his appeal to the people or any of the leadership sympathetic
to him. The first temptation concerns tax and Caesar (vv,15-22).
“One of the most famous Jewish leaders when Jesus was a boy,
a man called Judas (a good revolutionary name in the Jewish world), had led a
revolt precisely on this issue. The Romans had crushed it mercilessly, leaving
crosses around the countryside, with dead and dying revolutionaries on them, as
a warning that paying the tax was compulsory, not optional. The Pharisees'
question came, as we would say, with a health warning. Tell people they
shouldn't pay, and you might end up on a cross.”[3]
A perfect issue to spearhead an
attack on Jesus! And the Jewish leaders try to wedge him between a rock and
hard place. “Should we pay the emperor taxes or not?” The great longing of the
Jews for God and not the emperor to be king over Israel would make the people
cry “No!” Any leader plumping for their support would need to say no to the
leaders’ question. But that answer would make him, as it did Judas earlier, a
marked man by Rome. If Jesus answered “yes” he would lose his base of support
among the people and be neutered as a political threat.
Jesus begins his effort to slice
through this Gordian knot by asking his interlocutors for a coin. Someone
produces one. “Whose image is on it?” he asks. Roman coins were adorned with
the image of Caesar, of course, and had the inscription “Son of God . . . high
priest” around its edges. Jews allowed no images on their coins and would have
been repulsed by such an inscription. What Jew would carry around a piece of
blasphemy like that!
After they reply “The emperor’s,” Jesus tells
them to give it back to him. “And give God what belongs to him,” he continues.
We must remember this is not a statement of political philosophy on Jesus’ part
but a polemical rejoinder to a political trap. His reply is of a piece with his
earlier announcement in the Sermon on the Mount “But
strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to
you as well” (6:33). His response is on the level of ultimate commitments not
political jockeying. But his clever way of saying it avoids answering the
question directly while leaving room for divergent interpretations. A listener
could make the case that Jesus has affirmed paying the tax or that he denied
the necessity of paying it. They would go away arguing among themselves about which
answer he intended and Jesus would have completely blunted the sharp edge of
this temptation by exposing his questioners as unquestionably in bed with the
empire! No wonder the listeners left “amazed” (v.22)!
Wright
summarizes this situation well:
“We can only
fully understand what Jesus was doing when we see his answer in the light of
the whole story. Jesus knew - he had already told the disciples - that he was
himself going to be crucified, to share the fate of the tax-rebels of his
boyhood. He wasn't trying to wriggle out of personal or political danger. He
was continuing to walk straight towards it. But he was doing so on his own
terms. His vocation was not to be the sort of revolutionary they had known. The
kingdom of God would defeat the kingdom of Caesar, not by conventional means,
but by the victory of God's love and power over the even greater empire of
death itself. And that's what the next story is all about.”[4]
Sadducees and the Resurrection (vv.23-33)
Later that day some Sadducees try
their hand at upending Jesus. Sadducees, you remember, do not believe in the
resurrection as most other Jews did, finding nothing about it in the Torah, the
first five books of Moses, which was the portion of scripture they accepted as
authoritative. So they pose a trick question of their own to Jesus.
Collaborators with the empire, the Sadducees were interested in exposing Jesus
as a revolutionary to bring the imperial hammer down on him. A doctrine of
resurrection was an important tool in the any revolutionary Jewish movement. To
make this teaching seem silly was an important tactic for them.
They turn to the Torah not
unexpectedly and cite Dt.25:5 to him. “When brothers
reside together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the deceased
shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother
shall go in to her, taking her in marriage, and performing the duty of a
husband’s brother to her.” This law was designed to keep family identity
intact – an important concern for Jews. For the Sadducees apparently this was
close to an ultimate concern. And they press this matter to absurd lengths.
“What if seven brothers serially marry the first’s childless widow but she dies
childless nonetheless. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection (which,
again, they did not believe in). This is a sport of spoof on belief in the
resurrection.
Jesus’ rejoinder to this temptation
exposes the Sadducees’ failure to grasp either the power or Israel’s scriptures,
even the Torah, the part they held sacred (v.29).
“The Sadducees can only conceive of
a world organized by marriage, family, continuity through procreation. They
cannot imagine a world where marriage has reached its climax in something else,
something greater. But that is what Jesus says is the case. In the
resurrection, marriage will come to an end. He is not simply saying that there
will be no new marriages. The question has to do with existing marriages, and
how they continue in the resurrection. Jesus’ simple answer is, ‘They do not.’
We will not be like angels in every respect, but in this one respect we will be
– no more marriage. This is consistent with the regular theme in the gospel,
Jesus’ relativization of family. The true family is the one that gathers around
Jesus to do the will of the Father. If you do not hate father or mother, sister
or brother, wife or children, for the sake of Jesus, you are not worthy to be
His disciple. This does not mean that marriage and family are useless, merely
that their use comes to an end at the resurrection Whatever comes after will be
greater, better, deeper, but it will not be marriage.”[5]
And that leads into the reality and
power of scripture, of the Torah. Jesus turns to God’s own self-revelation at
the Burning Bush in Ex.3. The “I am” declares he “is” (present tense) the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and as Jesus points out “He is God not of the
dead, but of the living” (v.32). And if God “is” their God the patriarchs
themselves must be alive and kept by him for the new age the Sadducees deny.
The patriarchs are, in fact, said to keep on enjoying the blessings of the
covenant though they had long been in their graves (Gen.24:12,27,48; 26:24;
28:13; 32:9; 46:1,3–4; 48:15–16; 49:25).[6]
This time the crowd is “astounded” (v.33) and the Sadducees flummoxed.
The
Unquestionable Answer and Unanswerable Question[7]
(vv.34-40)
The Pharisees try one more time to
derail Jesus. A lawyer among confronts him with this question: “which
commandment in the law is the greatest?” (v.36). Jesus answers with what Scot
McKnight calls “the Jesus’ Creed.”[8]
Jesus combines the Love-God Shema of Dt.6:4-5, the central piece of
Jewish faith and formation, with Lev.19:18 to form his Love-God-Love-Others Shema:
“Hear, O Israel,
the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul,
with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
The second is
this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
There is
no commandment greater than these.”
This legal expert from the
Pharisees appears to want to get Jesus to give an answer to a question that was
widely discussed among Jewish teachers hoping to cost him support among those
who did not agree with him and their constituents. But Jesus foils this gambit
too and hits a home run by combining the Shema of Dt.6 with Lev.19:18
which the “venerable Rabbi Akibah declared . . . to be a ‘great principle in
the Torah’ (Gen. Rab. 24:7), an opinion that was likely expressed also
in Jesus’ day, with which this expert in the law would be familiar.”[9]
Disagreement over this formulation
was unlikely.
Jesus then goes on the offensive
himself posing a question for the Pharisees: “Whose son is the Messiah?” They think
they know the answer to this, as we would expect: “the son of David” (v.42). But
Jesus has a surprise for them. An unpleasant one. If David, who worked under
the inspiration of the Spirit, called his son “Lord” (citing Psa.110), how can
he be his son? (v.45). And if the Lord, then can he really be contained and
constrained by the image of David. Can the Lord, Immanuel, God with us, who
will soon instruct his disciples to go into the world to bring the reconciling
good news of God’s love for his world – Gentile as well as Jew, Gentile through
Jew – be the militaristic, nationalistic figure come to save Israel and raise
it to world prominence over all other peoples, thrash the Romans, and rule the
nations with a “rod of iron”?
Jesus entered Jerusalem to cries of
acclamation as the “son of David: (21:9). He concludes his public controversies
here with the religious leaders by revealing the abject poverty of their
insight into who this “son of David” truly is.
We are now ready to climb back up a
mountain for his final address to his disciples on the coming conflict in
chs.23-25.
[1] Leithart, The Gospel of Matthew: 2393-2409.
[2] Leithart, The Gospel of Matthew: 2415-1420.
[3]
Wright, Matthew for Everyone: 86-87.
[4] Wright, Matthew for Everyone: 88.
[5] Leithart, The Gospel of Matthew: 2530-2535.
[6] Wilkins, Matthew: 6862, n.334.
[8] Scot McKnight, The Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving
Others (Paraclete Press, 2004).
[9] Wilkins, Matthew: 4763.
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