As I stated last week, chapters 21 and 22 are structured around a revolving cast of authorities who ask various questions that are meant to trap Jesus into saying something actionable; that is, to align him with one faction and thus cut his support with the others, or to say something blasphemous so he can be arrested, or to say something treasonous so that the Romans will get involved.
The temple keepers, the chief priests and elders, questioned his authority to preach and to perform in society (for example, healing the sick and cleansing the temple). Jesus countered with a question and then told three parables to raise questions about their authority. Next, the disciples of the Pharisees aided by the Herod party asked whether they should pay taxes to a pagan emperor. They also failed to trap him, so the Sadducees now come along and try their tricks.
22: 23-28. The same day some Sadducees (who say there is no resurrection) came to him and asked him a question: “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies childless, his brother shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother.’ Now there were seven brothers among us; the first married and died childless, leaving the widow to his brother. The second did the same, so also the third, down to the seventh. Last of all, the woman herself died. In the resurrection, then, whose wife of the seven will she be? For all of them had married her.”
They sound like a theoretical physicist; Einstein called such stories ‘thought experiments’. His thought experiments gave us the special theory of relativity. The Sadducees do say, “there were seven brothers among us,” however, the same parable in another context (Luke 20: 27-40) gives no such sense of verisimilitude.
The Sadducees were at odds with the Pharisees, agreeing only that Jesus had to be stopped. The Sadducees mainly followed the Pentateuch (first five or six books of the Bible) and so constantly tried to show that the Pharisees were wrong to talk about resurrection or life after death. They would pose these hypothetical questions where the answer might contradict Scripture. This time they reference Deuteronomy 25: 5-6.
“When brothers reside together and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the deceased shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her, taking her in marriage and performing the duty of a husband’s brother to her, and the firstborn whom she bears shall succeed to the name of the deceased brother, so that his name may not be blotted out of Israel” (Deuteronomy 25: 5-6).
Perhaps you yourself can already see a flaw in the Sadducees’ argument. It is the failure to take the context into account. Moses is preparing the Israelites to live in the Promised Land. There are other people living there and so the ‘stranger’ must not be permitted to marry an Israelite widow and then make a claim to the land. The land will be allotted by family, and a man’s name and allotment will be remembered in genealogies.
A man with no offspring eventually disappears from the genealogy and loses his land allotment because he has no descendants. In fact, having a name perpetuated into the next generation was a form of eternal life in the thinking of pre-monarchic Israelites. So, the levirate law (‘levir’ means brother-in-law in Latin) has a context and a function; but these no longer apply in the current situation of the Jews. The Sadducees question is outdated (see discussion in Witherington, Matthew, 2006, pages 414-415).
Jesus spoke to the other major flaws by quoting directly from a more foundational theology.
22: 29-33. Jesus answered them, “You are wrong because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like angels of God in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead but of the living.” And when the crowds heard it, they were astounded at his teaching.
The function of the levirate becomes irrelevant in the afterlife because people don’t die there, and widows are not in need there. Also, the names of the brothers who died are now perpetuated whether they have children or not. So, getting married does not serve the purposes Moses had in mind.
Jesus then moves on to the thinly veiled reason for the question in the first place. The Sadducees want to make the resurrection seem absurd. Jesus counters with one of the most significant entries in God’s resume.
“God also said to Moses, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is my name forever, and this is my title for all generations” (Exodus 3: 15).
If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive by God, then ‘case closed’.
22: 34-40. When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, an expert in the law, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”
This account takes a different shape than the other two gospel accounts (Mark 12: 28-34, Luke 10:25-28). However, we are working at the moment with the story as Matthew tells it. In Matthew’s account, there is no response to Jesus’ declaration about the greatest commandment; only silence.
Not that the audience didn’t have their own ideas. The question is one that was often debated in the first century. All the commandments are considered important, but a couple of them might be foundational to the others. The question was, which ones?
Notice that the discussion is not limited to the Ten Commandments, nor is Jesus’ answer so limited. Some thought that “Honor your father and mother” was the greatest. Rabbi Akiba, coming after the time of Jesus, argued that “Love your neighbor” was the greatest commandment (Craig Keener and John Walton, footnotes in The NRSV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, 2019, page 1671).
Out of all the commandments, Jesus goes straight to an oft-quoted passage called The Shema. Observant Jews of the time prayed it every morning.
“Hear O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children…” (Deuteronomy 6: 4-7).
The phrase ‘you shall love’ is ve'ahavta’ in Hebrew (Keener and Walton, page 1671), and the same Hebrew word used in the second commandment that Jesus quotes.
“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD” (Leviticus 19: 18).
When Jesus says that “on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets,” he means that any interpretation of the other laws and any preaching of the prophets must not contradict these two commandments. These two are the interpretative touchstones for the rest. For example, one cannot say, ‘I am exempt from loving my neighbor because it would make me unclean to touch him’ (the Good Samaritan parable, Luke 10: 25-37). Or one cannot say, ‘I am exempt from caring for my parents because I have dedicated all my goods to God’ (a practice carried out by some of the Pharisees and scribes, Matthew 15: 1-9).
Question for you: Why does Jesus say that loving one’s neighbor is like loving God?
22: 41-46. Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them this question: “What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” He said to them, “How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet’? If David thus calls him Lord, how can he be his son?” No one was able to give him an answer, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.
Let’s look at Psalm 110 whose first four verses read this way:
“Of David. A Psalm. The LORD (Yahweh) says to my lord (Adonai), ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’ The LORD (Yahweh) sends out from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your foes. Your people will offer themselves willingly on the day you lead your forces on the holy mountains. From the womb of the morning, like dew, your youth will come to you. The LORD (Yahweh) has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek’.”
I have said before that, in the first century when the Old Testament did not have chapter divisions and verse numbers, so when a person quoted a line, that was a signal for the listeners to go read the whole text. That is a good rule of interpretation, as we see here.
Footnote: Chapter divisions were created for the Bible by the English Bishop Langton in 1227 AD, and first showed up in print in the Wycliffe Bible in 1382 AD. Verse divisions were created for the Old Testament by Rabbi Nathan in 1448 AD, and for the New Testament by a French monk named Stephanus in 1555. The Geneva Bible was the first one that was printed with both chapter divisions and verse divisions in 1560 AD. An exception is that the Psalms were always divided into 5 books and 150 psalms.
First, this psalm “speaks of a ruler of the nations, a priest like Melchizedek who is distinct from God the Father yet also called ‘Lord’” (Keener and Walton, page 1671). Notice that the person is a descendant of David and so carries that pedigree. This person is also a priest in the order of Melchizedek who comes out of nowhere in Genesis 14: 17-24. This ‘person’ is also invited to sit at the right hand of God and thus his destiny is empowered by God. So, this passage takes on a messianic quality which becomes clear in the person and legacy of Jesus. This interpretation is applied to Jesus by the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews in an extended analogy (chapters 5, 6, and 7).
Thus, Jesus alludes to his identity in several ways. He is a Son of David, but not a military man; he is a wise king like Solomon, but greater than Solomon; and he is a priest, but not in the usual Levite line. He is so different that David calls him ‘Lord’.
This argument overpowered his interrogators, and they questioned him no more. However, Jesus thinks that it is necessary to warn the crowds about the deceptions of the Pharisees and other leaders who just verbally assaulted him; and that is what he does in the next chapter.