Collisions between the logic of Christ and any version of human logic are always instructive. The Sadducees do not merely want to debate with another opponent; they need to lower the level at which spiritual questions are considered. And so they make one of many attempts to trap Christ, although the artificial situation they present sounds far too much like a joke. But Christ not only does not fall into the trap; in His answer He reveals the mystery that there is no death, that the Living God is the God of the living, and that the life He gives is entirely different, unlike human notions.

When we consider Scripture only by the letter, we sometimes risk falling into arguments akin to the 'Sadducean' kind, trying to apply the logic of our own limited understanding to complex concepts. Yet God's ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts. But although they are not available to us in their fullness, Christ has given us the possibility of reflecting on His logic and thereby drawing nearer to a right understanding of what He proclaimed.

What does it mean to "sanctify God in the heart"? Perhaps it means holding within ourselves, with all our strength, faith in God's holiness, in His ultimate and absolute goodness. From this faith then flow the desire to glorify God, to thank Him, and to worship Him.

God's goodness is also the source of all our hope, all our trust. An account of our hope, then, is our witness to His goodness, His love, and therefore to Christ, His death, and His resurrection.

This witness was commanded to us by the Lord in His "Great Commission": to go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature, to go and make disciples of all nations. We know how to shield ourselves from this commission, for example, with Jesus' words: "Do not cast pearls before swine" (cf. Matt 7:6), silently implying that everyone we do not want to talk with is swine. The apostle Peter calls us to crawl out of that shelter and give an account to "everyone."

The words "with gentleness and reverence" are remarkable. Reverence is understandable, since we must speak about God's holiness. Foolish jokes and comparisons are plainly out of place here, although our speech should be convincing, "with salt," as the apostle Paul says. And gentleness means that we must not force our listeners to accept our testimony or lecture them from above. We can share our experience with them, the experience of the Church, but we have no right to encroach on their freedom to decide.

Today's passage is devoted, as we will soon see, to the theme of Tradition and to how differently different people can make use of it depending on their intentions. This passage consists of three dialogues that the Savior conducts with different interlocutors.

The first of them (vv. 13-17) is plainly provocative in character. The question of whether it was permissible to pay taxes to the Roman authorities, under whose rule Palestine then was, was usually raised by representatives of the most radical part of the Synagogue of that time, whom the Gospel calls "Zealots," that is, "the zealous." These people held views of the Kingdom of God not very different from those that were generally accepted in the times of Joshua and the Judges. For them, the Kingdom of God and Roman power in Palestine were incompatible things. They considered armed struggle against Roman rule a religious duty for every believing Jew, and the payment of taxes to Roman authority a violation of the Law. To all that has been said, one need only add that all who looked at things less radically, even if they were their fellow believers, were considered by the Zealots to be apostates and enemies of the faith, deserving death. The question about taxes, asked of Jesus publicly, in a crowd where both Zealots and secret agents of Roman power were certainly present, placed the One answering in an obviously losing position: to answer "yes" meant bringing upon Himself the wrath of the Zealots; to answer "no" was equivalent to a state crime in the eyes of the Romans, for under Roman laws public calls to refuse payment of taxes to the lawful authority were treated as rebellion.

The second question (vv. 18-27) most of all resembles a problem from a theology textbook, or one of the traditional "hard questions" of its time that opponents of faith in the resurrection used against believers. Of course, to this question, as to all similar questions in all times, there existed an answer, and perhaps more than one, well known to everyone who had received the corresponding education. But what was known about Jesus was precisely that He had not studied theology, and it was all the more interesting to those asking the question what this, as it appeared to them, ignorant man from Galilee would answer.

The third dialogue (vv. 28-34) was caused, evidently, not by a desire to catch the Teacher in His words, but by a real desire to understand what He thought about the Law. Apparently the questioner understood that this astonishing Man truly had to understand something important and central in the Law, and he wanted to learn what it was. And Jesus, in reply, refers him to those traditional answers that were perfectly well known to the questioner himself. It is interesting that in this answer only the first part, speaking of love for God, has a direct correspondence in the text of the Law (Deut. 6:4-5). The second part of the commandment is a formula of rabbinic tradition that in Gospel times had already become generally accepted. And in this case Jesus confirms Tradition by His own authority.

In neither the first nor the second dialogue does He do this. Of course, in these cases too the questioners appeal to Tradition, but here the matter evidently has more to do with abuse of Tradition than with relying on it. This is no surprise: authentic Tradition always reflects the experience of real, living communion with God preserved in the memory of the community. But if the goal turns out not to be communion with God but something else, for example the desire to catch an opponent in his words or to assert oneself at the expense of one's interlocutor, the spirit of Tradition disappears, and only its empty, dead form remains, giving nothing except support for equally empty, dead religiosity and human pride.