Invitations Refused and Questions Turned Around

Nobody has asked a question; “answered” in the Hebrew idiom means he took up speaking, in response to the plot of 21:46. This is the third parable in a row aimed at the same listeners, after the two sons and the tenants, and the third to involve a father and a son.

A wedding feast in that world could run for seven days, as Samson’s did (Judges 14:12). A king marrying off his heir was a state occasion, the setting of Psalm 45, the royal wedding psalm. To refuse was to refuse the king, not a host.

Guests were invited ahead, then summoned when the meal was ready, as Haman was first invited and then fetched by the king’s chamberlains (Esther 5:8; 6:14). “Would not come” is imperfect in Greek: they kept being unwilling. The first refusal is to the summons, not the invitation.

“Dinner” is ariston, the midday meal that opened a feast day. “Fatlings” are animals fattened on grain. Meat once killed had to be eaten, so “all things are ready” is urgent. Wisdom’s feast in Proverbs 9:2–3 is set the same way: her beasts killed, her maidens sent out to call.

“Made light of it” is ameleo, to be careless about, to not bother. Luke’s guests offer excuses (Luke 14:18–20); Matthew’s give none and simply go, one to his own field, one to his trading. “Merchandise” is emporia, business, used nowhere else in the New Testament.

“Entreated” was 1611 English for treated; “spitefully” translates hybrizo, to outrage or insult, the root of hubris. Killing messengers over a dinner invitation makes no sense as an ordinary account of a feast, which is a sign that the parable has become the tenants of 21:35 again.

Many read the burned city as an allusion to Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70; others note that sending troops against a rebellious city was stock language for judgment in the prophets. Either way, the parable’s realism bends: a war is fought while the dinner waits.

“Worthy” is axios, the word used when the twelve were sent out: find who is worthy in each town, and if the house be worthy, let your peace come on it (10:11–13). “Not worthy of me” was said three times in 10:37–38. Worthiness in Matthew is shown by the welcome given.

“Highways” is literally the outlets of the roads, the points where city streets run out into the country roads. Travellers, beggars and day labourers gathered there, like the idle men in the marketplace of 20:3.

“Both bad and good”, and the bad come first. The gathering is like the dragnet of 13:47–48, which takes in every kind and sorts them afterwards. The oldest manuscripts read that the bridechamber, nymphon, was filled, not the wedding.

Zephaniah 1:7–8 gave the image already: the LORD has prepared a sacrifice and bidden his guests, and on that day he will punish “all such as are clothed with strange apparel”. The Talmud tells a later parable of a king’s banquet where the wise came dressed and the foolish came in their work clothes (Shabbat 153a).

“Speechless” is phimoo, to muzzle, the verb used in verse 34 when Jesus “put the Sadducees to silence”. The king asks a direct question that allows an answer; the man has none. Being addressed as “Friend” in this book is never good news.

The binders are diakonoi, table servants, not the douloi who carried the invitations. “Outer darkness” is a phrase only Matthew uses (8:12; 22:13; 25:30); at a night feast it meant the dark outside the lamplit hall. Weeping and gnashing of teeth is his refrain too, six times in the book.

The saying is a pun. “Called” is kletoi, from the same verb as “bidden” (kekelemenoi), which has run through the whole parable; “chosen” is eklektoi. Second Esdras has a near relative: “There be many created, but few shall be saved” (2 Esdras 8:3).

“Entangle” is pagideuo, to snare, from pagis, a bird trap; this is its only use in the New Testament. “Took counsel” is the phrase used when Pharisees first plotted to destroy him after a sabbath healing (12:14), and it returns four times in the passion (27:1, 7; 28:12).

The Pharisees send their students, not themselves. The Herodians, backers of Herod’s dynasty and so of the Roman arrangement, appear only here in Matthew. “Regardest not the person of men” renders a Hebrew idiom, to lift the face, meaning to show partiality (Leviticus 19:15; Deuteronomy 1:17).

“Tribute” is kensos, the census tax paid straight to Rome since AD 6, when Judea became a Roman province. That year Judas the Galilean led a revolt against it (Acts 5:37), and Josephus counts his movement among the roots of the war with Rome. Either answer was dangerous.

“Tempt” is peirazo, to test, the verb of the devil in the wilderness, who is simply called “the tempter” (4:3). “Hypocrites” is the word for stage actors, apt for men who have just performed deference in verse 16.

The coin is the denarius, and Jesus has to ask for one; his questioners produce it in the temple courts. The commonest denarius in Judea then was Tiberius’s, the coin traditionally called the tribute penny.

The Tiberius denarius read in abbreviated Latin, “Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus, Augustus”, and on the reverse “Pontifex Maximus”, high priest. The image claimed divine descent and priesthood for the emperor. Jesus asks them to read it aloud.

Their question in verse 17 used “give”; Jesus answers with apodote, give back, return what is owed. Many readers, from Tertullian on, have heard Genesis 1:27 behind the answer: the coin bears Caesar’s eikon, image, and man bears God’s. That is an inference; the text leaves it for the hearer.

The three rounds of questioning each end in a reaction: they marvelled here, the crowd was astonished in verse 33, and in verse 46 no one could answer. Leaving him and going their way is the posture of men who came for a quotation and got none.

Matthew compresses the week: this is “the same day”. Josephus says the Sadducees held that the soul perishes with the body and rejected rewards after death, and Acts 23:8 adds that they denied angels and spirits as well. They were largely the priestly aristocracy.

The law of levirate marriage is Deuteronomy 25:5–6; “levir” is Latin for brother in law. Their wording blends it with Genesis 38:8, where Judah tells Onan to “raise up seed to thy brother”. The verb for marrying the widow, epigambreuo, is a technical term for marrying as next of kin.

“With us” sets the case as if it happened in their own circle. A widely known account lay close at hand: in Tobit, Sarah had been given to seven husbands, each killed on the wedding night (Tobit 3:8). The Sadducees may have borrowed its shape.

“Likewise” disposes of five weddings and five funerals in one word. The Talmud later held that a woman widowed twice or three times should not be married again, fearing she brought death (Yevamot 64b). The Sadducees’ case is built to press the law beyond any real family.

“Last of all” is the phrase of 21:37, where the owner sends his son last of all. The levirate law existed to give the dead man an heir, and seven times it has produced none. Their example quietly shows the law failing at its own purpose.

“They all had her” is the language of possession, and “whose wife” asks only which of seven owners wins the claim. The woman herself is never given a name or a view. The question assumes the risen life must settle a property dispute.

“Err” is planao, to wander off course, the verb used of the sheep “gone astray” in 18:12. Jesus names two failures, and his answer takes them in reverse: the power of God in verse 30, then the Scriptures in verses 31–32.

Acts 23:8 says the Sadducees denied angels too, so the comparison is made with beings they would not grant. First Enoch 15:6–7 gives a Jewish rationale current at the time: angels do not marry because they do not die, and marriage exists for those who must have children.

“Spoken unto you by God”: Jesus treats the words at the burning bush as addressed to the men in front of him, not only to Moses long ago. This is the third “have ye not read” in these Jerusalem debates (21:16, 42).

Jesus argues from Exodus 3:6, in the five books of Moses whose authority the Sadducees gave the highest place. Fourth Maccabees makes a similar point about the martyrs: those who die for God live unto God, as do Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (4 Maccabees 16:25).

“Astonished at his doctrine” is the phrase with which the crowds received the Sermon on the Mount (7:28). “Doctrine” in 1611 means teaching. The crowds hear his first long teaching and his last public debates with the same astonishment.

“Were gathered together” is the phrase of Psalm 2:2 in the Greek Old Testament, where the rulers are gathered together against the LORD and his anointed. The early church read that psalm over the passion in exactly this way (Acts 4:25–27).

A “lawyer” is a Torah expert, a scribe; the word appears only here in Matthew. In Mark the scribe is friendly and Jesus tells him he is not far from the kingdom (Mark 12:28–34). Matthew makes the question another test.

The rabbis later counted 613 commandments in the Torah, 248 positive and 365 negative (Babylonian Talmud Makkot 23b), and weighed which were heavy and which light. Hillel was remembered for summing up the law to a would be convert standing on one foot (Shabbat 31a).

Deuteronomy 6:5, the opening command of the Shema, recited morning and evening. The Hebrew reads heart, soul and might; Matthew’s wording has heart, soul and mind, dianoia. “Might” has become “mind”, a whole person claim in the vocabulary of Greek speakers.

Jesus has answered the question asked, and could stop here. “First” and “great” are both given: first in order, greatest in weight. Everything in the next verse is more than the lawyer requested.

This is the third time Matthew quotes Leviticus 19:18 (5:43; 19:19). In Leviticus the neighbour is first “the children of thy people”, but the same chapter extends the command to the stranger: “thou shalt love him as thyself” (Leviticus 19:34). “Like unto it” is homoia, of the same kind.

“Hang” is kremannymi, to hang from a peg or hinge. The Mishnah uses a similar picture of laws that are like “mountains hanging by a hair”, many rulings from few verses (Hagigah 1:8). “The law and the prophets” echoes 7:12, where the golden rule is said to be the law and the prophets.

In Mark the question is put to the crowd in the temple (Mark 12:35). Matthew addresses it to the Pharisees while they are still assembled from verse 34. For the first time in the week, Jesus is the one asking.

“What think ye?” once more, Matthew’s formula for inviting judgment. The expected answer is the standard one: the Psalms of Solomon, a century before, pray God to raise up their king, “the son of David” (Psalms of Solomon 17:21).

“In spirit” means speaking as a prophet, moved by the Spirit, as David claimed in his last words: “The Spirit of the LORD spake by me” (2 Samuel 23:2). Both sides accept the psalm as David’s, as its heading says, and the argument depends on that.

The King James prints the divine name as LORD in capitals and the second title as Lord: in Hebrew, YHWH says to adoni, my lord. Psalm 110:1 is quoted or echoed in the New Testament more than any other Old Testament verse. Conquerors set their feet on the necks of defeated kings (Joshua 10:24).

In that world a father did not call his son “lord”; the son honoured the father. The whole argument turns on the possessive: David’s “my Lord”. It is a question, and Jesus leaves it one.

Mark puts “no man after that durst ask him any question” after the scribe’s question (Mark 12:34); Matthew moves it to the end of the whole series. From here there is no more interrogation, and chapter 23 is Jesus speaking unanswered.