Four questions and a counter-question: the wedding feast, Caesar, the resurrection and the greatest commandment

Matthew 22 belongs to the days of controversy that follow the entry into Jerusalem. Jesus is teaching in the temple courts in Passion Week, and the leaders who had challenged his authority (21:23) now try to trap him in public. The first Gospel is ascribed by tradition to Matthew the tax collector, one of the Twelve (9:9), on the early testimony of Papias. Many modern scholars hold that it is the work of an unnamed Jewish Christian scribe who used Mark. If Mark came first, Matthew falls around AD 70 to 90. Those who hold an earlier date or Matthean priority place it before 70. The readers were most likely Jewish Christians in a mixed church, and the chapter's argument from the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms suited them.

Three groups appear. The Pharisees were a lay movement devoted to careful keeping of the Law and to the traditions interpreting it, and they believed in the resurrection. The Herodians were supporters of the Herod family and its rule under Rome. The Sadducees were mostly priestly and aristocratic, accepted the written Torah as their authority, and denied resurrection, angels and spirits (compare Acts 23:8). The Jewish historian Josephus confirms that the Sadducees denied life after death.

Mark 12:13-37 and Luke 20:20-44 have the same sequence of taxes, resurrection and the son of David. Mark's scribe who asks the greatest commandment is friendly and agrees with Jesus (Mark 12:28-34), while Matthew has him test Jesus, as Luke has a lawyer do in a different setting (Luke 10:25-28). The parable of the wedding banquet has a cousin in Luke 14:15-24, but the details differ so much that many scholars think they are two parables, and others see one parable told differently.

The chapter is a sequence of a parable and four exchanges in the form of ancient disputation. In such a debate a question is set to trap, the answer is a short argument from authority, and the response of the audience shows who won. Here the authority is always Scripture. Jesus answers the Sadducees from the Torah, because that is what they accept, and he answers the Pharisees by pressing a psalm they also accept. Reading the exchanges as a chain shows their design: the three attempts to catch him fail, and he asks the question that ends the contest.

The parable is allegorical in a way that parables seldom are. The king, the son, the servants, the burned city and the wedding hall all correspond to figures in the story of Israel and the church, and it follows the parable of the tenants (21:33-46) closely. As with all parables, one should look for the main point, the invitation refused and the invitation widened, and treat the rest as the supporting detail.

Two cautions apply. The line about the king burning the city (22:7) is read by many as an allusion to Jerusalem's destruction in AD 70 and by others as the ordinary stock of a story about a king and his rebels. And the word 'hypocrites' in verse 18 is aimed at the particular group in the scene, not at any people as such.

Verses 1–14

The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. The servants who call the invited guests are refused. A second sending, with the meal ready, is met with indifference ('one to his field, another to his business') and then violence: the rest 'seized his servants, mistreated them, and killed them.' The king sends his troops, destroys the murderers and burns their city. Then he sends servants to the crossroads to gather 'everyone they could find, both evil and good', and the hall fills. Feasts at the end of time were a prophetic image of salvation (Isaiah 25:6-8), and the invited guests are those to whom the prophets had been sent. The second scene, of the guest without wedding clothes, is told only by Matthew. The king asks, 'Friend, how did you get in here without wedding clothes?', and the man is speechless and is cast into 'the outer darkness'. The meaning of the garment is not stated. Readers have taken it as righteousness or repentance shown in a changed life, or as Christ's righteousness given to the guest. The text does not say that the garment was supplied by the host, although some commentators assume it. The point is that those called must still respond. 'For many are called, but few are chosen.'

Verses 15–22

The Pharisees plot, send their disciples with the Herodians, and begin with flattery. 'Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?' The question is a trap. If he says yes, he offends the many Jews who resented Roman rule and its tax. If he says no, the Herodians can report him to Rome as a rebel. Jesus calls them hypocrites and asks for the coin. A denarius carried the emperor's portrait and an inscription making large claims for him. 'Whose image is this?' 'Caesar's.' So: 'Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's.' The coin bears Caesar's image and so belongs to Caesar. But people bear God's image (Genesis 1:26-27) and belong to God. Jesus affirms a limited duty to the state while placing it under God. They are amazed and go away.

Verses 23–33

The Sadducees bring a story of a woman who married seven brothers in turn, according to the levirate law in Deuteronomy 25:5-10, which required a brother to marry a childless widow to raise up a name for the dead man. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection? Jesus says they err because they do not know 'the Scriptures or the power of God'. Resurrection life is not a resumption of this one: people neither marry nor are given in marriage but are 'like the angels in heaven'. The likeness is in the matter of marriage, since they will not die and need no offspring; it does not turn people into angels. Then he turns to the Torah. God said at the burning bush, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob' (Exodus 3:6), and he is 'not the God of the dead, but of the living.' Because God calls himself their God in the present, the patriarchs are still his. The crowds are astonished at his teaching.

Verses 34–40

The Pharisees regroup, and a lawyer asks which commandment is greatest. Jewish teachers debated how to weigh the 613 commandments they counted in the Law. Jesus answers with Deuteronomy 6:5, the heart of the Shema: love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind. This is 'the first and greatest commandment'. The second, 'like it', is Leviticus 19:18: love your neighbour as yourself. 'All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.' The Greek verb means to hang from a hook, as a door hangs on its hinge. Love for God and neighbour is the principle that holds the rest.

Verses 41–46

Jesus now asks his own question. Whose son is the Christ? 'David's.' How then does David 'in the Spirit' call him 'Lord', in Psalm 110:1, 'The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at My right hand until I put Your enemies under Your feet'? 'If David calls Him Lord, how can He be David's son?' The question does not deny that the Christ is David's son; the Gospel affirms it (1:1). It asks what kind of son he is, one whom David himself addresses as Lord and who sits at the right hand of God. No one can answer, and from that day no one dares to question him again.

Several truths run through the chapter. The first is that the kingdom is a gift offered by a king, with a real invitation and a real refusal. The invitation goes first to those who were already invited, then to anyone, and the judgment falls on rejection and on the unchanged guest. God's grace and his demand are not set against each other here (compare 7:21-23).

The second is the relation of the believer to the state. Jesus' answer about Caesar is the base on which Paul writes in Romans 13:1-7 and Peter in 1 Peter 2:13-17, where duty to rulers is real. It is limited by the claim of God that goes beyond what Caesar can ask, which the early martyrs and Acts 5:29 later lived out.

• The third is the doctrine of the resurrection. The Old Testament teaches it in Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2, and Jesus grounds it in the character of the God who made covenants with the patriarchs. Paul argues from the same ground in 1 Corinthians 15.
• The fourth is the unity of the Law around love, which Paul (Romans 13:8-10; Galatians 5:14) and James (2:8) take up.
• The fifth is the identity of the Messiah. Psalm 110 is the Old Testament chapter most cited in the New: Acts 2:34-35, Hebrews 1:13 and 5:6, and 1 Corinthians 15:25 all use it.

The chapter ends with the question about who the Christ is, and it is the most direct statement of Jesus' identity in the debates. Jesus reads Psalm 110:1 as David speaking by the Spirit of the Messiah as his Lord. The Messiah is David's descendant, as Matthew has said from the first verse, and he is also David's Lord, enthroned at God's right hand. The apostles repeat the reading in Acts 2:34-35, and Hebrews 1:13 uses the same verse. This is fulfilment, set out by Christ himself.

The parable puts Jesus in the position of the king's son whose wedding the feast honours (22:2). The Gospel's other wedding images, the bridegroom of 9:15 and 25:1-13, show him as the one the banquet celebrates. The authority of Jesus in the exchanges is also the authority of the one who knows what the Law is for. When he says that all the Law and the Prophets hang on love for God and neighbour, he speaks as the one who said that he came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfil them (5:17), and the love he names is the love he will show on the cross. In his answer on the resurrection he speaks as the one who will himself be raised.