Parable time. Yes, again. This time the kingdom of heaven is a wedding feast. The reader is reminded (by me, not the Bible) that not everything is meant to have a 1:1 analogous counterpart here, the point is the story. A king throws a celebration for his son who is getting married and all the important people in town are expected to come, less so the peasants and ratcatchers and what not. His servants go to distribute invites but no one comes, even after he sends them again with tantalizing mentions of food. Free food. Everyone shows up for free food. By here we should realize who the father and the son are, the wedding feast is the kingdom of heaven, and the servants are prophets. Which puts it into context when some people go off ignoring the servants in favor of their routine duties and other kill them. The king sends armies to kill them in response. Jesus is issuing a warning from God: keep this up and your rebellion is getting crushed. Some point to the second temple being burned in 70 AD to be the fulfillment of this. The king tells the servants that the original guests weren’t worthy and to go pull whoever they find on the roads. Any ol’ guy will do and the servants did just that, pulling good and bad people alike to the hall. I think the outsiders are meant to refer to gentiles but other commentators offer alternate views, especially in light of there being some bad ones, suggesting Jews who fell away. In either case, there was a guy who didn’t come dressed for the occasion. He was INVITED and he has ATTENDED but he’s not committed. Not entirely sure what it’s meant to represent, but something was asked of everyone and he blew it off. I’ve seen where the king would provide wedding clothes to people in attendance, so the idea is the king would’ve given him clothes to wear so this guy must’ve refused. The king addresses him as “friend” but it’s not like one of the earlier parables where the king is chill. This is the calm before the storm. Like asking a kid with a mouth covered in crumbs where the cookies went, this guy stands there speechless as an unanswerable question is posed to him–he has made an enormous error in judgement. Alright whelp, off to the outer darkness with you. Weeping and gnashing of teeth have made and will continue to make appearances as descriptors of God’s eternal judgement. Whatever it’s meant to refer to, we can at least come away knowing that you don’t just get to show up to heaven without meeting SOME standard God has for you and, like many things, this will vary by denomination. For that reason, the wedding garment can represent faith in Jesus. Many are called, few are chosen. The invitation goes out to the masses but how many will accept? How many will show up? Will they have done what was asked of them? They won’t be chosen to stay if they haven’t.

We’re 3 parables deep and the pharisees are DONE now. They’re off to plot how to trap Him. Not surprising. These guys are duplicitous, without integrity, status and power hungry. Jesus is the antithesis to everything they stand for and is cutting their legs off in front of everyone. Without a hint of self awareness (or possibly not caring to begin with) they prove that they’re exactly the villains the parables set out to demonstrate. The problem is, He hasn’t given them enough rope to hang Him. His claims to be the Son of God have been indirect and His miracle working has made Him enormously popular. They’re stuck in another John the Baptist situation. They send some of their students along with Herodians, Jews loyal to the Herods (a family none too thrilled with Jesus if you recall) and wanting to negotiate with the Romans. The young men approach with flattery and sweet words before deploying the next trap: should we pay taxes to Caesar? This tax was the census head-count that pretty much everyone paid, Jew or Roman, but the Pharisees hated the idea of supporting anyone beyond their people. Why should money leave their community to support a hostile ruling government? Surely Jesus would also believe this and His denial of the tax would signal the revolt against Rome, for which He could be arrested. Alternatively, if He’s pro-tax (pro-Rome) then He’s a softer target to go after because the people won’t like that answer. Win-win, and there was a rep from each side to report Him in either response.

Jesus not only calls them out for trying to trap Him, He clearly calls them out as liars. The Greek use of “hypokites” is used to describe actors, He knows the flattery and the supposed tension between Pharisees and Herodians was insincere as well. He shows them a coin with a reference to the “divine” Augustus and Pax, the goddess of peace. Jews were not thrilled with having to carry blasphemous coins around and they tried to fight a battle over it but Romans stomped it out quickly. They acknowledge it’s Ceasar on the coin, and Jesus gives His famous “render unto Caesar” line. The coin has his face on it. His name. In Caesar’s land. The coin is already his, so give it to him. You can honor the demands of the secular government without being an affront to God, so what does it matter? This is unrelated to Mosaic law. Sorry, try again. But what are we giving to God? Well we know the coin belongs to Caesar because it bears his image, so what bears the image of God? What or who is made in God’s image? Yeah it’s you and me. We give ourselves to God because we’re already His. Poetic. Soundly defeated, they wander off.

Sadducees come to Him and as it says, they don’t believe in the resurrection because they don’t believe in an afterlife at all. No spirits, angels, nothing. In Deuteronomy, there’s an obligation for a brother to marry a widow in the event the husband died. So they create a scenario in which there’s some genetic disaster going on and an increasing line of brothers keeps dying until there’s 7 dead brothers, the wife has passed, no kids left behind. In the next life, who will she be wed to? Everyone had married her by this point. Jesus replies that they know neither the scriptures (they only stuck to the first 5 books of the OT, so no afterlife stuff) or the power of God. The Sad’s were very material people. Wealthy, political, in tight with the Romans and not so much with the average man about town. The idea that God was ever present and actively influencing life around them at all times didn’t occur to them. Men will not marry or be paired up like that in heaven. I know people who struggled with this line because they lost their spouse and the idea that in heaven they wouldn’t be married or anything was distressing, which is reasonable. But it doesn’t say you’ll be nothing to each other. I think of it like when you’re a toddler, your pacifier is the coolest object in existence. When you’re in middle school, holding hands with a girl is the coolest thing ever. Young adult, you like to party and drink. But by the time you’re married and have kids, the further you look back, the more trivial each of those things seem. Really incredible for their time in your life, but you’ve outgrown them. I think when you see your loved one in heaven, you’ll be able to cherish them in the light of God that makes your time on earth with them seem like the immature hand holding. It’s cute, but look at this thing we have NOW. Those are just my thoughts, so don’t take that as theology. What you CAN take to heart is we simply don’t know what our day to day eternal life is going to resemble but you can be sure it’s better than this. Don’t fear heaven because it won’t have the comforts you got used to on earth. You’ll find out when you get there. Jesus then goes on to crush them with a single line from Exodus, one of the 5 books they were supposedly familiar with.

The P’s find out the S’s got smacked and they try their hand at it again, asking which commandment is the greatest. He answers with the first, to love God with all your heart. The second is to love your neighbor as yourself. Oh. ….Oh you want me to tell you “who” your neighbor is. And what it means to love them. I’ll make that a separate study some time. Short version is you have primary obligations to your family (the ones under your roof) and then immediate physical proximity. After that I’m going to say that whatever love hardens your heart the strongest is the one you should work on next. Whoever you hate most should be the recipient of all excess love not being spent on your family and literal neighbors, how’s that? I cannot imagine Jesus giving you a hard time because you accidentally loved the wrong person too much. If you’re asking who to love and who is your neighbor, you’ve revealed a spirit issue. Any time you ask “well what EXACTLY is asked of me”, it’s because you’re looking for a loophole and see how much you can get away with. No one is serving God with their whole heart when they’re spending time seeking technicalities to do whatever THEY want.

Jesus says that the Law and Prophets (read that as the entire faith back then) flow downstream from those two commandments. This is going horribly for the Pharisees. Every trap is backfiring enormously. The Book of Mark will tell this story and the Pharisee who asked Jesus not only agrees, but Jesus approves of the agreement and blesses the Pharisee. Jesus has a question of His own and it cuts to the chase: Who is the Christ and whose son is he? “Son of David” is the obvious answer, but Jesus never asks obvious questions. “Then how does David call the Christ ‘Lord’?” How can the king call his own son “lord”? It only makes sense if the Messiah has some other claim to status beyond just being his son. Well, it works if He’s also the son of God. Which the Pharisees are absolutely NOT going to hear right now and they give up setting traps for the day.