E. Attempts to trap Jesus (20:19–44)
E. Attempts to trap Jesus (20:19–44)
The parable sparked off opposition to Jesus, but in view of the people’s attitude violence was risky. It might provoke a riot and no-one could tell where a riot would end. The Romans would intervene and the privileged might lose their privileges. So Jesus’ enemies chose another method: they tried to discredit him.
1. Tribute to Caesar (20:19–26)
Nobody liked paying taxes to the Romans. A question on taxation seemed certain to result in an answer which would bring Jesus into trouble with either the Romans, who wanted the taxes paid, or the Jews, who did not. The question was thus aimed at alienating Jesus’ support among the people, or alternatively putting him in a position where the Romans (not the hierarchy!) would take action.
19–20. The authorities tried to arrest Jesus, but neither Luke nor any of the other Evangelists tells us how far they went in the attempt. But they all make it clear that the reason for the failure was not any lack of will. What prevented the arrest was fear of the people. Arresting Jesus in the face of current enthusiasm was too risky a business. So they changed tactics and sent spies, people who would not be known as enemies, but who would try to provoke Jesus into some statement that would make him fall foul of the Romans. This would enable them to hand him over to the authority and jurisdiction of the governor. Jesus would be effectively removed from the scene, but they would not be held responsible.
21–22. The questioners begin with flattery, doubtless meant to put Jesus off his guard and to give themselves the appearance of sincere seekers after truth who had been impressed by this lack of respect for persons. The question concerned tribute ( phoros ; Matthew and Mark have kēnsos, ‘poll tax’), a personal tax and different from the customs duties which were levied on goods in transit. Nobody ever likes paying this sort of tax and to pay it to the hated Romans must have been particularly distasteful. The questioners ask whether this is lawful, i.e. in accord with the law of God. It was obviously in accordance with the law of Caesar, but these men were looking for a pronouncement from a religious teacher. As we have already noticed, it must have been confidently expected that Jesus would be in trouble whichever way he answered.
23–25. Jesus was not deceived, but perceived their craftiness ( panourgia carries overtones of unscrupulousness, ‘readiness to do anything’, BAGD). He called for a coin, i.e.a denarius. This was a Roman silver coin which had the effigy of the Emperor Tiberius stamped on it. It was required that the tax be paid in Roman coinage. Various other coins, such as Greek and Tyrian as well as Jewish, circulated in Judea at the time and the pious probably avoided using coins with Caesar’s head stamped on them as much as possible. But they could produce a denarius at need and when they did they held in their hands the answer to their question if they only thought hard enough about it. Jesus proceeded to ask whose likeness it was and got the answer Caesar’s. This gave him the opening to reply, Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Derrett sees a reference to the Old Testament (Eccl. 8:2) and thinks that the meaning of the words is ‘Obey the commands of the king and obey (thereby) the commandments of God.’ He comments, ‘Obedience even to non-Jewish rulers is within one’s comprehensive obedience to God.’4 The difficulty in the way of this interpretation lies in seeing why the answer should have had the effect it did. The enemy marvelled and were silenced. This answer would have been serious but not surprising. All three Synoptists make it clear that the reply confounded the critics. It left no room for an accusation of disloyalty to Caesar, but also stressed loyalty to God. Jesus is saying that we are citizens of heaven and earth at the same time. This does not mean dividing life into compartments, as though God was not supreme in all of life or the duties of either aspect of our citizenship could be discharged without reference to those of the other. It means that we can neglect neither loyalty. The state must be respected and its directions complied with in the sphere that God allots it. It follows that the state rightly collects taxes to discharge its functions. Notice that in response to the admission that the likeness and inscription are Caesar’s Jesus says Then (toinyn ) render … The obligation arises from a recognition of Caesar’s place and this is shown by the use of Caesar’s coins. It is also worth noting that, whereas the questioners ask whether it is lawful to give, Jesus answers that they should render, where the verb apodidōmi conveys the thought ‘pay what is due’. Those who benefit from the state are under an obligation to pay their dues to the state. But as we render to Caesar what is Caesar’s due, we must always bear in mind that Caesar’s rights are limited. Caesar has no rights in God’s domain. The Christian’s first and overriding loyalty is to God. This does not justify him in renouncing his loyalty to Caesar, but it does mean that the most significant area of his life does not belong to Caesar. If Caesar strays into that area he can command no loyalty.
26. Luke has a fuller description of the effect on the questioners than do the other Synoptists. They had been unable to catch him. Their question had seemed so certain to produce the desired effect, but it had turned out to be a damp squib. So they were astonished and were reduced to silence.
2. The seven brothers (20:27–40)
The restless questioning goes on, with a group of Sadducees replacing the discomfited Pharisees. There may have been some Sadducees in the earlier group (v. 19), but in any case they now come with a question of their own.
27. The Sadducees are mentioned here only in this Gospel. None of the Sadducee writings has survived so our information about them is fragmentary and we see the sect only through the eyes of its opponents. The name appears to be derived from Zadok (cf. 1 Kgs 1:8; 2:35), so that they were ‘Zadokites’. They were the conservative, aristocratic, high-priestly party, worldly-minded and very ready to cooperate with the Romans, which, of course, enabled them to maintain their privileged position. Patriotic nationalists and pious people alike opposed them. They are often said to have acknowledged as sacred Scripture only the Pentateuch, but no evidence is cited for this and it is highly improbable. The Septuagint is evidence that before New Testament times the canon of the Old Testament was practically fixed and there seems no reason why any major Jewish party should have rejected most of it. What is attested is that the Sadducees rejected the oral tradition that meant so much to the Pharisees; they accepted only written Scripture (Josephus, Antiquities xiii.297). They denied the whole doctrine of the afterlife and of rewards and punishments beyond the grave (Josephus, Antiquities xviii.16; Bellum, ii.165; cf. Acts 23:8). They probably thought of the resurrection as a new-fangled idea brought in from Persia after the Old Testament period.
28. They try to ridicule the idea of resurrection by referring to levirate marriage. This was a device to prevent a man’s name and family dying out. When a man died childless, his brother was to take the widow and raise up children to the deceased (Deut. 25:5ff.). Not many examples of the practice are recorded and interestingly those few always seem to regard the child as the child of its natural father and not of the deceased (cf. Ruth 4:5, 21). By New Testament times this custom seems to have fallen into disuse, so that the question was an academic one. But the Sadducees could argue that provision was made for it in the Law, and that the Law accordingly, at least by implication, rejects the doctrine of resurrection.
29–33. They told a story of seven brothers who all at one time or another had been married to the same woman, in each case without her bearing a child. The Sadducees posed the question of whose wife she would be when the resurrection came. Clearly they thought that a definitive answer was impossible and that the impossibility of an answer showed the impossibility of a resurrection.
34. Jesus spoke first of the conditions of this present life. The sons of this age is an expression found elsewhere in the New Testament only in 16:8, where it is distinguished from ‘the sons of light’. Here, however, it denotes all who live in this world. They marry and are given in marriage. A few MSS add ‘are begotten and beget’ and some hold that this reading was original. It seems unlikely on the evidence, but the reading points to conditions of this life which are in contrast to conditions of the life to come.
35–36. Jesus’ questioners had failed to realize that the life to come will be essentially different from this life. Where the doctrine of resurrection was held among the Jews it was usually envisaged as an indefinite prolongation of this life, though no doubt with modifications and improvements. All enemies would be overthrown and delights would be multiplied. But essentially it would be the same kind of life as the present one. Some were so sure of the continuation of earthly conditions that they seriously discussed whether the resurrected would need ceremonial purification on the grounds that they had been in contact with a corpse (Niddah 70b). Jesus rejects all this. Life in heaven will be significantly different from anything on earth. Human relationships are largely a matter of place and time: they are bound to be different when neither of these applies. Jewish thought at its best realized something of this and on occasion rejected the concept of heaven as a place of material delights in favour of the view that it is basically a ‘feasting on the brightness of the divine presence’ (Berakhoth 17a). Jesus speaks only of the saved, not of all the departed. He sees them as accounted worthy, which reminds us both that they do not earn their places by their merits and also that they have a high dignity. He goes on to speak of their attaining to that age and to the resurrection from the dead ; the resurrection is the means of attaining to that age. Jesus does not speak of the resurrection ‘of the dead’, the general resurrection, but ‘from the dead’, the resurrection of the righteous.
Of those in this group Jesus says three things. First, marriage does not apply to them. In this world it is a necessary feature of life, but life in the next world is different. Secondly, they cannot die any more. The for that links this to the preceding is important. People come together in marriage to preserve the human race, but where there is no death this is not necessary. Jesus does not say that they will not die, but that they cannot die. The quality of life in the coming age will be such that death cannot touch it. Thirdly, they are equal to angels and are sons of God. Luke may have coined the word isangelloi, equal to angels, for it is not attested before this passage. Its meaning includes possession of some of the properties of angels, for more than status is involved. It is a question also of nature and function, for marriage is specially in view. There is a sense in which believers are already sons of God. They have been born again; they have been adopted into the family in which they can say ‘Our Father’. But there is a sense in which their sonship will not be consummated until the age to come and it is this fuller sense that is in view here. The absence of marriage does not mean, so to speak, a levelling down of relations so that life is on a lower level. Rather it is a being taken up into the fullness of life in the family of God. Luke adds the reason, being sons of the resurrection (an expression not found in the parallels). Their resurrection is evidence that they possess that quality of sonship that enables them to be compared to the angels.
37–38. Jesus does not content himself with parrying the question, but proceeds to show that the resurrection is implied in the Old Testament. Moreover he does not appeal to some obscure verse, hitherto overlooked, but to the passage of central importance in which God revealed his Name, with all that that means, the passage about the bush (the Bible had not yet been divided into chapters and verses and this was their way of referring to Exod. 3:1–6). God is here called the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Each of the patriarchs named had, of course, long been dead when these words were uttered. So the statement that God is not God of the dead, but of the living can be true only if they are alive beyond the grave. The alternative is to think of God as the God of non-existent beings, which is absurd. Caird sees the argument as capable of restatement in terms with great force in our age: ‘all life, here and hereafter, consists in friendship with God … Death may put an end to physical existence, but not a relationship that is by nature eternal. Men may lose their friends by death, but not God.’ Our certainty of resurrection rests not on some speculative doctrine of the immortality of the soul, but on the fact of God’s eternal love.
Luke adds some words not in the other accounts: for all live to him, or as NEB, ‘for him all are alive’. To us they are dead, but not to God. Death cannot break their relationship to him. There is a roughly contemporary Jewish saying, ‘those who die for God’s sake live for God’ (the construction is identical with that in Luke) ‘just as do Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the patriarchs’ (4 Macc. 16:25).
39–40. That ended the Sadducees’ questioning. Some of the scribes, i.e. members of other parties, in this case probably Pharisees, paid Jesus the compliment of saying that he had spoken well: ‘that was a fine answer!’ (Moffatt). The Sadducees were not popular and probably many were glad to see them so discomfited that they no longer dared to question Jesus.
3. David’s son (20:41–44)
Jesus rounded off the session of questions by asking one himself. The problem he posed arises from the habit in antiquity of regarding earlier generations as greater and wiser than the present one. David was the ideal king and his descendants by definition were less than he. But he himself referred to the Messiah as Lord (Ps. 110:1). How then could he be David’s son, as the scribes said? Luke does not, of course, mean that Jesus is denying his Davidic descent. He has made that descent plain over and over (1:27, 32, 69; 2:4; 18:38f.) and his story of the virgin birth, from which his readers would see that Christ pre-existed, shows that even on the scribes’ premises Jesus was greater than David. But the question arose, ‘How did the scribes understand the Psalm?’ Jesus is also clearing up a misunderstanding of Messiahship. People who used the title ‘Son of David’ (18:38–39; Matt. 21:9) clearly envisaged the Messiah as someone who would defeat all Israel’s foes and bring in a new kingdom of David. They thought of David’s son as similar to David in being, outlook and achievement. There are not wanting Jewish writings of the period which speak of the Son of David in terms of a narrow nationalism that looked for Israel’s triumph over all its foes (e.g. the Psalms of Solomon). Jesus means us to see that the Messiah was not David’s son in that petty sense. He was Lord, Lord of people’s hearts and lives. To call him Lord meaningfully is to see him as greater by far than merely another David.