Jesus' opponents repeatedly tried to catch Him out over His knowledge of Scripture and tradition: they would pose some more or less familiar problem from the field of Halakha (Jewish canon law) and see how this Teacher would handle it. The Sadducees' question about the woman whose...
Jesus' opponents repeatedly tried to catch Him out over His knowledge of Scripture and tradition: they would pose some more or less familiar problem from the field of Halakha (Jewish canon law) and see how this Teacher would handle it. The Sadducees' question about the woman who had several husbands, each of whom died in turn, was of the same kind. Yet Jesus' answer proved completely unexpected. He immediately rejects not only the traditional solutions to the problem, but also the very perspective from which it is posed; He breaks, so to speak, the traditional paradigm of thought. And this is hardly surprising: for Jesus the world is the Kingdom. That is the only way He perceives it.
Such a perception does not come easily to us, whereas He was born with it. It is not that He is unable to look at the world differently, but such a view is unnatural to Him. That is why He sees unexpected and paradoxical answers to traditional questions. In this case too, the Saviour answers quite differently from what might have been expected. As always, He speaks of the Kingdom: there are no dead in it, just as there is no concept of marriage in the earthly sense. People do not, of course, become angels after the resurrection, but in some respects their life truly becomes more like the life of angels than that of people in the fallen world.
Everything is different in the Kingdom, entirely unlike what the overwhelming majority of Jesus' contemporaries imagined. For the fullness of life there is absolute: each person has his or her own fullness, yet for everyone it is absolute. There are no dead there, whereas our human mind imagines even the Kingdom within the familiar paradigm of life and death. We often imagine even immortality not as a new quality of being, but as the endless continuation of its present earthly quality, with all the relationships of this earthly life and all its problems, some of them truly insoluble if extended unchanged into infinity. This, in fact, is precisely what the Sadducees were doing when they presented their opponents with problems like the one they put to Jesus.
But He answers in His own way, from the Kingdom, from that fullness of true life which alone can be called life in the genuine sense of the word. And those who questioned Him fall silent. They have nothing more to say: the world disclosed to them in the Saviour's answers is too unlike the one to which they are accustomed, as different as heaven and earth.
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21:1 He looked up - From those on whom his eyes were fixed before. Mar 12:41.
21:5 Goodly stones - Such as no engines now in use could have brought, or even set upon each other. Some of them (as an eye witness who lately measured them writes) were forty - five cubits long, five high, and six broad; yet brought thither from another country.And gifts - Which persons delivered from imminent dangers had, in accomplishment of their vows, hung on the walls and pillars. The marble of the temple was so white, that it appeared like amountain of snow at a distance. And the gilding of many parts made it, especially when the sun shone, a most splendid and beautiful spectacle. Mat 24:1; Mar 13:1.
21:8 I am the Christ; and the time is near - When I will deliver you from all your enemies. They are the words of the seducers.
21:9 Commotions - Intestine broils; civil wars.
21:11 Fearful sights and signs from heaven - Of which Josephus gives a circumstantial account.
21:12 Mar 13:9.
21:13 It shall turn to you for a testimony - Of your having delivered your own souls, and of their being without excuse.
21:16 Mat 10:21.
21:17 Mat 24:13; Mar 13:13.
21:18 Not a hair of your head - A proverbial expression, shall perish - Without the special providence of God. And then, not before thetime, nor without A full reward.
21:19 In your patience possess ye your souls - Be calm and serene, masters of yourselves, and superior to all irrational and disquieting passions. By keeping the government of your spirits, you will both avoid much misery, and guard the better against all dangers.
21:21 Let them that are in the midst of it - Where Jerusalem stands (that is, they that are in Jerusalem) depart out of it, beforetheir retreat is cut off by the uniting of the forces near the city, and let not them that are in the adjacent countries by any means enter into it.
21:22 And things which are written - Particularly in Daniel.
21:24 They shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive - Eleven hundred thousand perished in the siege of Jerusalem, and above ninety thousand were sold for slaves.So terribly was this prophecy fulfilled! And Jerusalem shall be trodden by the Gentiles - That is, inhabited. So it was indeed.The land was sold, and no Jew suffered even to come within sight of Jerusalem. The very foundations of the city were ploughed up, and a heathen temple built where the temple of God had stood.The times of the Gentiles - That is, the times limited for their treading the city; which shall terminate in the full conversion of the Gentiles.