Day #308

Sermon - Audio
Matt 22 & Mark 12 - Reading
Matt 22 & Mark 12 - Audio

Daily Insights - Please Comment

Matt 22

22.2-4: The first invitation was issued by John the Baptist to God’s great feast—but the leaders did not accept it (but many of the common people did—Matt. 3.1-12). The second invitation is extended by Jesus. But again, there is a negative response.

22.8-9: Who deserves to come? Those who hang out on street corners. Who hangs out on street corners? (Matthew 21.31-32)

22.11: no wedding clothes. See Revelation 19 “For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. ⁸Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear.” (Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.)” The man was not righteous, the idea here being that not just anyone gets in, not even those who have been invited from the streets, these too must bear the marks of righteousness—Hebrews 12, without holiness no one will see God. These are the people who say “Lord, Lord,” but don’t do what Jesus has commanded.

22.15-22: A moment of comedy. No one was supposed to have a Roman coin in the temple because it had an image on it. For someone to have a coin showed they were not very pious. Jesus sticks it to this group even before he gives his insight. One commentary says, “In getting them to show him a denarius, however, Jesus exposed them as hypocrites, since no patriotic Jew should have been carrying this coin, with its ‘idolatrous’ portrait of the emperor and its inscription giving him the title ‘Son of God’.

22.23-33: Jesus’ words must have hurt. To say that these people did not know the scriptures (even though they had them memorized) was a real slam. Also, to say that they did not understand them put Jesus outside the camp of the Sadducees and their way of interpreting scriptures and into the camp (at least to a certain extent) of the Pharisees

Mark 12

12.1 ff: This is a direct attack on the Sadducees. They are not caring for God’s vineyard (the people of Israel) and particularly they are not caring for his temple and those who come there. The book of Isaiah gives us a picture of Israel as the vineyard. Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. 2 He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes. Isaiah 5.1-2

12.2-3: The tenants keep the harvest for themselves rather than giving the harvest to the landowner. Not only so, but they beat his representative. These verses and those following speak of the way the prophets of God were treated until the coming of Christ.

12.7: “The inheritance” is a technical term in the day of Jesus. It means the tranquil and stable possession of the holy land crowned with all divine blessings, an experience which pious Israelites were to expect under the Messiah. Oddly, those in power believe they can grab this way of life by destroying the one who was bringing it. They believed that they could be their own Messiah.

12.9: Those who listened to this parable would have wondered why the landowner hadn’t done more earlier. The reality is that the parable is a parable of God’s patience with those who rebel against him.

12.10 – Jesus is the Cornerstone

12.13: The Pharisees and Herodians hated each other. The Pharisees sought to separate themselves from Rome, the Herodians accepted and supported the rule of Rome and the Herods.

12.15: Jesus asks for a denarius. No truly pious person would bring a denarius into the temple because it bore the image of Caesar with this inscription, “Tiberius Caesar Augustus, son of the divine Augustus”. There is idolatry on a coin, not something that should be in the temple. But somehow his questioners have this coin in the temple.

12.17: The denarius is about the size of a dime. Jesus tells them to give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s i.e. give Caesar this little coin, the rest belongs to God. The rest is the entire creation. It is a master stroke that puts Caesar in his place. Jesus basically says, really everything is God’s. But if anyone tried to accuse him of rebellion he could point to his words. Notice, that his comments do not surface at his trial before Pilate.

12.26-27: Jesus quotes from Exodus 3.6. This is very important because the Sadducees only accepted the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). In citing Exodus Jesus cuts through their objections to resurrection.

12.28-34: We get the first sincere question in this time at the temple. This was an important question of the day. Jesus answers it putting both God and people before temple worship. This theme is further emphasized by the scribe who, while standing in the temple where sacrifices are made, points that loving God and loving neighbor is better than sacrifices.

12.30: Jesus speaks of loving God with our mind. To love God this ways means that we love him fully with our intelligence and our understanding. For us not to love God fully with our minds, to engage the faith on this level, is every bit as much a failure as not loving God with our actions and our resources. The life of the mind, as understood in Roman and Greek culture, is an important part of faithfulness.

12.35-36: Part of loving God with your mind was to come to an understanding of difficulties in Scripture (notice that the scribe instead of mimicking Jesus’ words exactly speaks of loving God with “all your understanding” esv). The IVP Background Commentary says, “When Jewish teachers challenged their hearers to resolve apparent discrepancies in Scripture, they assumed that both texts were true (in this case, Jesus knows that he is both David’s son and David’s Lord) and were asking how to harmonize them. Jesus’ opponents apparently have no answer, because Jewish interpreters did not apply Psalm 110:1 to the Messiah.”