David's Son, David's Lord

One more parable, and a man with nothing to say (22:1–14)

Matthew 22 happens in a courtyard. It is Tuesday of the last week of Jesus' life, he is teaching in the temple in Jerusalem, and the men who run the place have decided to destroy him. So the chapter has a shape: one last parable, then three questions designed to trap him, then one question of his own that nobody can answer.

The parable is the third in a row aimed at the leadership. The first was about two sons, one who said no and went (21:28–32); the second about tenants who killed the owner's heir (21:33–46). This third one is a king giving a wedding feast for his son. The guests were invited long in advance, as guests were, and when the day comes and the servants go to fetch them, they will not come.

D. A. Carson, the New Testament scholar whose commentary on Matthew is the modern voice most often at our elbow in this Gospel, puts the pressure of the story in one line: "The kingdom has already dawned; invitations to the banquet have gone out and are being refused."^* This is not a story about a far-off offer. It is about a meal already cooking.

And notice whose meal it is. The feast is thrown for the son, which in a story told by this particular storyteller is not a decoration — the bridegroom language belongs to him (9:15), and the gladness of the hall is gladness about him. The host who kills the oxen, sends again after being refused, and finally fills the room off the street is doing exactly what Jesus had been doing for twenty chapters, eating with tax collectors and sinners while the respectable complained about the guest list (9:10–13). The grace in this parable is not a general kindness. It has a face.

Watch the king before the fire falls. He sends a second time, and the second message is not a threat but a menu — the oxen and the fattened cattle are killed, everything is ready. Carson notes what that is for: the king "not only graciously repeats his invitation but describes the feast's greatness in order to provide an incentive to attend it."^* The host is almost pleading.

And the refusals are so ordinary. One man goes to his farm. Another goes to his business. Matthew Henry, the English Puritan whose commentary has been read in kitchens for three hundred years, catches the ordinariness exactly: "Licitis perimus omnes—These lawful things undo us, when they are unlawfully managed, when we are so careful and troubled about many things as to neglect the one thing needful."^* Nobody in this parable turns down the kingdom for something wicked. They turn it down for errands.

Then the story turns violent. The remaining servants are seized and killed, and the king sends his army and burns the city.

Here is the first place we have to tell the truth about a disagreement. Most readers — including the best of them — hear the fall of Jerusalem in that burned city. Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch, says plainly that Jesus is "declaring beforehand the things that took place under Vespasian and Titus." Henry says the verse "points out very plainly the destruction of the Jews, and the burning of Jerusalem, by the Romans, forty years after this." Carson disagrees. He denies any veiled allusion to the events of AD 70 here, because "the language belongs to the general OT categories of judgment" — burning a rebel city is simply how the prophets talk about wrath.^* We think the tradition has the better of it here — Matthew writes after Jesus' words were vindicated in the most public way imaginable, and he does not seem to be avoiding the point. But Carson's caution is worth keeping. The parable's business is not prediction; it is the refusal of an invitation.

Because the feast will not stand empty. The servants are sent to the forks of the roads, and the hall fills with whoever is standing there — "both bad and good," Matthew is careful to say. Notice who these people are, though. At this point in the story they are not yet the Gentiles; they are the people inside Israel whom nobody important had invited, the sort Jesus had been eating with for twenty chapters. Chrysostom will not let his congregation forget the address: "Hear whence ye were called. From the highway."

Then the sting. The king comes in, finds a man with no wedding clothes, asks him how he got in, and the man has nothing to say. His fault is not that he was not good enough; the room is full of people who were not good enough. It is that he came to the king's feast on his own terms and expected that to be fine.

This is the hardest verse in the chapter, and the honest thing is to hold it loosely. A popular reading says the host handed out robes at the door, so the man's sin is refusing a free garment; Carson judges that custom unproven and probably beside Matthew's point. Calvin, the Geneva reformer, reads the garment as Christ himself put on, since "there is no other way in which we are formed anew after the image of God, but by putting on Christ." Carson resists even that, because the guests have just been described as good and bad alike, and he concludes it is "better to leave the symbolism a little vague." Oddly, Calvin agrees about the method: "we ought not to attempt an ingenious explanation of every minute clause." What both will say is this — the judgment falls not on a man who failed to bring something expensive, but on those "who shall be found in their pollution, when God shall come to make a scrutiny of his guests."^*

So the parable ends on the line everyone quotes and few finish: "For many are called, but few chosen."

It is tempting to read that as a cold arithmetic settled before the world began and to recoil from it, and that is too quick in both directions. The word for chosen is eklektoi, and Carson is right that it quietly denies that any of this catches God off guard; sovereign grace is not improvising here. Calvin, who could have turned the verse into a lecture on election and does not, says instead: "I enter no farther, at present, into the question about the eternal election of God; for the words of Christ mean nothing more than this, that the external profession of faith is not a sufficient proof." That is where we land too. God's choosing is real, and this verse is not pointed at the question of how it works. It is pointed at us, in the hall, already seated. And across all three of these parables, as Carson says, "not the beginning but the end is crucial."

The coin with the emperor's face (22:15–22)

Now the traps. The Pharisees send their disciples along with some Herodians — men who supported Herod's pro-Roman family, and who agreed with the Pharisees about almost nothing except this man. Carson is blunt about the atmosphere: "This is no dispassionate inquiry into a proper attitude to the Roman overlord."^*

The flattery that opens it is worth pausing on, because every word of it is true. They tell him he is honest, that he teaches God's way truly, that he is not swayed by anyone — and they say it as bait, counting on his integrity to walk him into the trap.

The trap is the poll tax, which was the plainest badge of Roman ownership; a generation earlier a man from Galilee had led a revolt over the census that assessed it. Say yes and lose the crowd. Say no and hand Rome a charge of treason.

Jesus asks for the coin. It is worth knowing what was in his hand: a denarius stamped with Tiberius' head and the words naming him son of the divine Augustus, and on the reverse the title of high priest.^* The coin was not just currency. It was a small sermon in silver, and every Jew holding one knew it.

"Whose is this image and inscription?" The word is eikōn, the word the Greek Old Testament uses for the image of God stamped on a human being, and a long line of preachers has heard the second half of the sentence in it — render the coin that bears Caesar's image to Caesar, and yourself, who bear God's, to God. Chrysostom already reads the verb that way: "For this is not to give but to render, and this He shows both by the image, and by the superscription."^* Carson applies a brake worth feeling: the verb need only mean pay what is due, since in no real sense has Caesar given his subjects what they are handing back. The preachers' move is a good one, but it is a sermon on the word rather than the plain force of it, and we should say which is which.

What Jesus does not do is divide life into a sacred half and a secular half. He draws a very small circle around Caesar — a coin — and leaves everything outside it to God. Calvin states the result as carefully as anyone has: the answer "lays down a clear distinction between spiritual and civil government, in order to inform us that outward subjection does not prevent us from having within us a conscience free in the sight of God." And Chrysostom adds the limit that keeps the verse from becoming a blank check for governments: when you hear render to Caesar, "know that He is speaking only of those things, which are no detriment to godliness." Where Caesar claims what belongs to God, the answer is in Acts, not here.

The God who says "I am" (22:23–33)

The Sadducees go next, and their weapon is ridicule. They denied the resurrection, and they denied angels and spirits too, so they build a cartoon: seven brothers, one childless widow passed down the line, and whose wife is she at the resurrection?

Jesus says they are wrong twice, about the power of God and about the Scriptures, and he answers in that order.

First, the power. Their question assumes the age to come is this life extended — same arrangements, running forever — and on that assumption it does collapse into farce. In the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like God's angels in heaven. Chrysostom reads the logic precisely, and the order matters: "But not because they do not marry, therefore are they angels, but because they are as angels, therefore they do not marry." Carson notices the sharp edge in the comparison — Jesus answers men who denied angels by pointing at angels, so the illustration "contains a double thrust."

This is also the place where we usually over-read him. Jesus says marriage ends; he does not say memory does. Carson is firm about it: "Some have concluded from Jesus' answer that in heaven there will be no memory of earlier existence and its relationships, but this is a gratuitous assumption." Henry, pastoring rather than speculating, puts the reason gently: "The married state is a composition of joys and cares," fitted to a changing world, and the world it is fitted to will be gone.

Then the Scriptures, and he goes to the Sadducees' own ground — Moses, at the bush. God says I am the God of Abraham, not I was. Chrysostom will not let that pass without underlining it: "For He said not, I was, but, I am; of them that are, and them that live." Three men centuries in their graves are spoken of in the present tense, because God has bound himself to them by name. Timothy Keller, the Manhattan pastor, preaching on the burning bush rather than on this chapter, pressed what that name claims: "I depend on nothing, everything depends on me." A God like that does not lose people.

So the resurrection is not a late doctrine bolted onto the Bible. It is sitting inside a sentence about a bush.

Love within the law, not instead of it (22:34–40)

A lawyer tries last, with the question the rabbis actually argued: which commandment is the great one?

Jesus answers with the Shema, the words every Israelite prayed daily — love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind — and then does what nobody asked. He binds a second command to it, love your neighbor as yourself, and says the whole law and the prophets hang on the two. The verb is kremannymi, to be suspended, the way a weight hangs from a beam. Pull these and everything comes down.

Henry ties the two together the way John's letter does: "a right love to our brother, whom we have seen, is both an instance and an evidence of our love to God, whom we have not seen."^*

But there is a correction to make here, and it is the one Carson presses hardest in this chapter. A very popular reading takes these two commands as a key that unlocks the law and quietly retires the rest of it — love is the principle, so the particulars are negotiable. Carson will not have it: "There is no question here of the priority of love over law … but of the priority of love within the law."^* Love is not a replacement for what God commanded; it is the thing without which none of it can be obeyed at all. And he adds an observation that settles the matter from the text: nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus use love as grounds for setting a commandment aside.

That bears on an older house argument, and it is worth stating both sides plainly. The classical Reformed reading sorts the law of Moses into three kinds — moral, ceremonial, civil — and says the moral law still binds while the ceremonial and civil law did its work and has been fulfilled in Christ; that is our reading, and the Westminster Confession's. Carson reaches a similar destination by another road and would not grant the sorting as the engine: for him a command's standing is decided by where we are in the story of promise and fulfillment, so the question is not which column a law sits in but what Christ has done with it. We keep our reading. We let his objection stand, because it guards against the lazy version of ours — the one that files a commandment under 'moral' and never asks what the cross did to it.

One more thing, for anyone who has heard these verses so often they have gone quiet. Keller, preaching on the end of the Sermon on the Mount, named the hazard of familiar words: "because it's so familiar almost nobody listens to it."^* The most repeated sentence in Israel was the one the expert could not live.

David's son, David's Lord (22:41–46)

Then Jesus asks his question, and it is about himself. "What do you think of the Christ? Whose son is he?"

Son of David, they answer. That is right, and it is the first line of this Gospel.

So he opens Psalm 110 — "the most frequently quoted OT passage in the NT," as Carson notes, and the whole argument rests on David having written it.^* "The Lord said to my Lord: sit at my right hand." If David calls him Lord, how is he David's son?

Hear what the question is and is not. It is not a denial that the Messiah is David's son; Matthew has been insisting on that since the genealogy that opens the Gospel (1:1–17). It is a demand that they notice the Scripture they quote says more than they are saying. The Christ is David's son and David's Lord — flesh of David's line, and enthroned at God's right hand. Calvin glosses the enthronement soberly: to sit at the right hand is "to hold the highest government and power in the name of God."^*

This is why the traps never closed. They kept trying to place him on their board — tax rebel, naive literalist, rabbi with an opinion — and he kept turning out to be the one the board was made for.

And then the silence. No one could answer him a word, and from that day nobody dared ask him anything. Carson lets the irony stand: the teacher who never attended the right schools has silenced the finest theologians in the land, and the silence is itself a tribute.^*

It is also a warning, because silence is not faith. These men went quiet and then went underground, and in three days they would find their words again in front of a Roman governor. Every mouth will be stopped in front of him eventually. The only question is whether, when ours is, he is the Lord we refused or the Lord we love.