NOTES for Mat 22:15-40

For the disciples of Christ, for whom this Gospel was written, their faith and hope were bound in the closest way to the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead after His execution and burial. That is precisely why the brief account of Jesus' opponents, who tried to prove the impossibility of resurrection, was so important to them. Their argument, which at first may look like meaningless casuistry about a nonexistent situation (seven brothers for one wife), is in fact strong precisely because of its absurdity. There is so much absurdity and evil in the world that death appears more like a cure for pain and deadlock. What will happen if all people suddenly "rise," that is, return to this life, with all its imperfection and limitation? How can seven brothers share one unfortunate woman?

Christ answers from an entirely different position. Resurrection is necessary because every person is in one way or another connected with the living God. And this means that in the resurrection a person lives by the life of God Himself, free from human absurdity and pain.

If only we knew how to read Scripture like the Lord does, how to see its essence... In His answers about the resurrection of the dead and about the greatest commandment, He proceeds from the Pentateuch, which His opponents knew almost by heart. He not only answers the scribes' provocative questions, but also shows us how deep the meaning of the familiar words of the Bible can be.

In the mysterious name of God, "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," revealed in the story of Moses' calling in the Book of Exodus, we suddenly discover a message about the resurrection of the dead. This will be revealed directly only in the later prophets and accomplished in the Resurrection of Christ. And the two most important commandments from Deuteronomy truly turn out to be a compressed form of the Decalogue (Ex. 20), where the first four commandments speak of love for God, and the remaining six of love for one's neighbor.

The long, ornate preface poorly conceals the spite with which the Pharisees ask their provocative question. Therefore Christ's rebuke of the questioners for hypocrisy, with which He introduced His answer, looks completely natural. In answering, He did not even take the coin into His hands, but only asked them to show it to Him from a distance. Under Jewish law Jesus was not required to take into His hands a coin bearing a pagan image; afterward one was supposed to perform a washing. But it seems that here He is not only observing the law, but also demonstrating His noninvolvement with Caesar's world, while nevertheless not calling for resistance to it. In calling people to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, He calls them to give the state what necessarily follows from the reality of earthly life, but He rejects the deification of the state and its rulers. And here we see the basis for the principle of the separation of Church and state as different organized structures. They can cooperate successfully, but they must not replace each other.

The Pharisees were amazed when they heard His answer, but at what more? That He had reduced their provocation to nothing, or that He had opened new horizons for them? What if, at that moment, He managed to jolt at least some one of them out of the familiar rut of self-confidence?..

The Pharisees' question and Christ's answer about the tax to Caesar reveal an enormous difference in initial assumptions. Trying to catch the Lord, the Pharisees ask a question about priorities: what is more important, obedience to an alien but actually strong power, or national self-determination. It is important to note that both of these supposed values lie outside the religious sphere. More than that, Israel's history already knew by that time examples when national dignity required resistance, while the Lord through the mouth of a prophet called people to submit to the conqueror, because he was the Lord's instrument.

Further, the Pharisees expect that the Savior, proceeding from the idea that the Kingdom, that is, the sole rule of God, is above everything, will say that one should not obey earthly authorities. For precisely this case they called the Herodians along with them, so as immediately to hand the Lord over to those very authorities. But the whole point is that the Pharisees suppose that the Kingdom of God and the principate of Augustus are phenomena comparable in nature and scale, and that they can be correlated with one another within the framework of the proposed, even if crafty, alternative. For them the Kingdom of God is a politically successful earthly Israelite state headed by the expected Messiah.

But the Lord's answer leaves not one stone upon another of this Pharisaic assumption. The Kingdom of God and Caesar's kingdom appear in Christ's answer as two nonintersecting planes, incomparable with one another in scale. The Kingdom of God belongs to eternity and embraces everything that exists, while an earthly kingdom limited in time and space cannot even be its small likeness, just as a swarm of infusoria in a courtyard puddle cannot be a comparable likeness of Earth's biosphere. Thus Christ's answer completely rejects the Roman, and also later Jewish, sacralization of the earthly kingdom. Later the apostle Paul will give final explanations on this subject when he says that our citizenship is in heaven, and that we should obey earthly authorities only because and to the extent that they oppose evil and violence.

But the most important thing in Christ's words is the call to render God's things to God. Even the question of the relation between earthly and Heavenly kingdoms recedes into the background. The main thing is not how you arrange your earthly affairs and relationships; the main thing is how you build relationships with God. Whether to pay tax to Caesar is not such a simple and obvious question, but it can be solved. A person's life, however, is determined not by this, but by what he brings to God.

During His earthly ministry Jesus was more than once asked tricky questions and offered tests of ingenuity from the theological study aids that existed at that time. There were, of course, certain traditional answers to these tricky questions, though how convincing they were is another matter. But Jesus uses even them to bear witness to the Kingdom. That is what happened with the question put to Him about a woman who had married many times, probably referring here to the custom of levirate marriage. As can be seen, the Sadducees, and above all evidently the representatives of the temple priesthood, used this example to refute the possibility of the general resurrection in which the Synagogue believed, and first of all, of course, the Pharisees.

It is not hard to see that the main misunderstanding here is connected not with some theological subtlety, but with a wrong understanding of the Kingdom and its nature. And Jesus, without entering into abstract reasoning, draws His interlocutors’ attention precisely to this point. He tells them directly: you understand neither the Scriptures nor the way God acts in the world. And He adds: in the Kingdom of God they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but abide like angels in heaven.

The answer is remarkable. It remains only to understand just how angels “abide in heaven.” But here Jesus, as can be seen, gives His interlocutors no additional explanation. Only one thing is clear: it is not like the way of life in the untransformed world. And the point is not to try to understand what marital relations are like in the Kingdom. The point is to realize that it is unlike anything that happens in our world, and not to try to extrapolate earthly laws onto the Kingdom.

Meanwhile, judging by the question posed to Jesus, such extrapolations were common practice in the Jewish theology of that time. Jesus, as can be seen, invites His interlocutors to set aside the cliches familiar to them. And He does this not so much for their own sake, since they asked the question only to “trip Him up,” but for the sake of the listeners, because the conversation was public. It was necessary to let them understand that the Kingdom is in fact wholly different. At least those among them who can and want to hear.

It is not hard to imagine the mixed state of the Pharisees after Jesus forced the Sadducees to be silent: the One with whom they were used to arguing had put their opponents to shame. For that reason the lawyer's question about the two greatest commandments looks like a kind of probing: could He perhaps be drawn over to their side? It is hard for the Pharisees (and not only for them) to grasp that in fact they should have made the decision to cross over to His side. Moreover, even today many ideologues cannot resist the temptation to present Christ as their predecessor and like-minded ally; they too want to recruit Him into their camp. But what looks coherent in propaganda articles falls apart when it meets Reality.

And so Christ answers the Pharisee's question. But in doing so He does not simply give an answer to this particular question; He reveals the central foundations of faith and life. It is understandable that He named the words about love for God, absorbing all one's strength and aspirations, as the greatest commandment. However like it He called the commandment about love for the human person, which may have seemed strange to people accustomed to placing religious concepts above everything human. And yet this is exactly what Christ brought to people and what sets Christianity apart from all religions.

Of course, the commandment to love people is not equal to the commandment to love God; it is only like it. But in Christianity the human person is raised as high as no teaching raises him. And only Christ finally destroys the impassable barrier between God and people.

What, then, is the "newness" of the New Covenant? Is there really anything new in Jesus' words when, quoting the Old Testament, He names the chief commandments, the commandments to love God and neighbor? Yes, because before the incarnation, before God became man, people did not fulfill the Covenant made with God, but broke it.

But God is faithful to the end. He not only fulfilled the Covenant Himself, but did it also on behalf of the human being He had created, who had sinned. Fallen man could not be faithful, and God became incarnate and Himself fulfilled the Covenant given by human beings to Him. He did what we ought to do; He not only showed us an example, a path, but Himself became the Way by which we are to walk, the Truth which we can follow, in which we can believe, and the Life by which we can live.

In the different Gospels this dialogue is described in different ways. Perhaps people approached Jesus several times with this question. In Matthew's Gospel the scribe asks, apparently wanting to understand how to find the right point of orientation in that sea of commandments into which the Jewish specialists had turned God's Law. Accepting Jesus' answer, the scribe turns from an intellectual understanding of the commandments to their heart's foundation and thereby comes closer to the Kingdom of Christ. After this, those who tried to catch Jesus stop asking Him questions, perhaps afraid that a similar conversion might happen to them.

The text of the psalm that the Lord quotes to us today is astonishing in its prophetic power. It is simply hard to believe that such a thing could have existed pre factum, before the tri-hypostatic being of God was revealed to us. Therefore, of course, opponents of Christianity have always tried to disprove the fact that this was a prophecy, because it is so powerful.

For this reason John Chrysostom, in his homilies on the Psalms, greets his listeners precisely with apologetics when the discussion turns to Psalm 109. This is what he writes. "When we assert that this is plainly spoken of Christ, the Jews do not accept it, but devise something else." Then he lists the options proposed as God's interlocutor: Abraham, Zerubbabel, or even the whole people. The saint refutes all these versions with great emotion. "Is it reasonable to refer to Abraham the words: From the womb before the morning star I begot Thee?" How can this be applied to David, or Zerubbabel, or the people? What is said here surpasses human nature. Moreover, the text speaks of a "Person who has an extraordinary and wondrous priesthood: Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek." But then "they say: 'How do you allow another Lord, when Scripture clearly says: "The Lord your God. The Lord is one, and Him alone shall you serve, and there is no God besides Him" (Deut 4:35, 6:13). But for whose sake, tell me, was this said? Chiefly for the sake of your ignorance, O Jew. Why was nothing like this said to Abraham, or Isaac, or Jacob, or Moses, but only to you, when, after coming out of Egypt, you made yourself a calf?"

But we know that we confess monotheism. Of course, it is much easier for a person of our century than for a person of John Chrysostom's time to understand this apparent contradiction. We understand that inter-hypostatic communion is possible, because it has been revealed to us by Christ. Yet the unity is not violated. More than that, we ourselves are called to realize the same unity, a unity undivided and unconfused. "As You, Father, are in Me, and I in You, may they also be one in Us" (John 17:21).