For Teaching

Matthew 22: What the Passage Says

116 claims across 46 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Matthew 22 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

Jesus tells a parable about a king whose wedding invitations are refused, whose servants are killed, and who then fills the hall with people from the streets, one of whom is thrown out for not wearing wedding clothes. Then three groups question him in turn: Pharisees and Herodians about paying taxes to Caesar, Sadducees about marriage after the resurrection, and a legal expert about the greatest commandment. Jesus answers each one, then asks the Pharisees how the Christ can be both David's son and David's Lord. No one can answer, and no one dares question him again.

Claim by Claim

22:1
- Jesus answered and spoke to them again in parables.
- Jesus said the following.
22:2
- The kingdom of heaven has been likened to a man who is a king.
- The king made a wedding feast for his son.
22:3
- The king sent out his servants to call those who had been invited to the wedding feast.
- Those invited were not willing to come.
22:4
- The king again sent out other servants.
- The king told them to say to those invited: I have prepared my dinner.
- The king said his oxen and fattened cattle had been slaughtered.
- The king said everything was ready.
- The king said: come to the wedding feast.
22:5
- Those invited paid no attention and went away.
- One went to his own field.
- Another went to his business.
22:6
- The rest of those invited seized the king's servants.
- They treated the servants shamefully.
- They killed the servants.
22:7
- The king was angered.
- The King James says the king heard of what happened.
- The king sent his armies.
- The armies destroyed those murderers.
- The armies burned their city.
22:8
- The king then said to his servants that the wedding feast was ready.
- The king said those who had been invited were not worthy.
22:9
- The king told the servants to go to the places where the roads go out.
- The king told them to invite to the wedding feast as many as they found.
22:10
- Those servants went out into the roads.
- The servants gathered together all whom they found, both evil and good.
- The wedding hall was filled with guests reclining at table.
22:11
- The king came in to look at the guests reclining at table.
- The king saw there a man not wearing a wedding garment.
22:12
- The king said to him: Friend, how did you come in here without having a wedding garment?
- The man was silent.
22:13
- The king then said to the attendants to bind the man's feet and hands.
- The king said to throw him out into the outer darkness.
- The King James says to take him away.
- The king said that in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
22:14
- Many are called.
- Few are chosen.
22:15
- The Pharisees then went and took counsel together.
- Their purpose was to trap Jesus in a word.
22:16
- The Pharisees sent their disciples to Jesus along with the Herodians.
- They addressed Jesus as Teacher.
- They said they knew that Jesus was true.
- They said Jesus taught the way of God in truth.
- They said Jesus cared about no one's opinion.
- They said Jesus did not look at the face of men.
22:17
- They asked Jesus to tell them what he thought.
- They asked whether it is lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not.
22:18
- Jesus knew their wickedness.
- Jesus asked why they were testing him.
- Jesus called them hypocrites.
22:19
- Jesus told them to show him the coin used for the tribute.
- They brought him a denarius.
22:20
- Jesus asked them whose image this was.
- Jesus asked whose inscription this was.
22:21
- They said the image and inscription were Caesar's.
- Jesus then told them to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's.
- Jesus told them to render to God the things that are God's.
22:22
- When they heard this they marveled.
- They left Jesus and went away.
22:23
- On that same day the Sadducees came to Jesus.
- The Sadducees say there is no resurrection.
- The Sadducees questioned Jesus.
22:24
- They addressed Jesus as Teacher.
- They said Moses said that if a man dies having no children, his brother shall marry his wife.
- They said Moses said the brother shall raise up offspring for his brother.
22:25
- They said there were seven brothers among them.
- They said the first married and died.
- They said the first had no offspring.
- They said the first left his wife to his brother.
22:26
- They said the same happened with the second brother.
- They said the same happened with the third brother.
- They said the same happened down to the seventh brother.
22:27
- They said last of all the woman died.
22:28
- They asked whose wife of the seven she will be in the resurrection.
- They said all seven had her as wife.
22:29
- Jesus answered them that they were in error.
- Jesus said they did not know the scriptures.
- Jesus said they did not know the power of God.
22:30
- In the resurrection people do not marry.
- In the resurrection people are not given in marriage.
- In the resurrection they are like angels in heaven.
- The King James says they are as the angels of God in heaven.
22:31
- Jesus asked concerning the resurrection of the dead whether they had not read what was spoken to them by God.
- God said the following.
22:32
- God said: I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.
- God is not the God of the dead.
- God is the God of the living.
22:33
- The crowds heard this.
- The crowds were astonished at Jesus' teaching.
22:34
- The Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees.
- The Pharisees gathered together in one place.
22:35
- One of them, a lawyer, questioned Jesus.
- He questioned Jesus to test him.
22:36
- He addressed Jesus as Teacher.
- He asked which commandment in the law is great.
22:37
- Jesus said to him: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.
- Jesus said: with all your soul.
- Jesus said: with all your mind.
22:38
- Jesus said this is the great and first commandment.
22:39
- Jesus said a second commandment is like it.
- The second is: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
22:40
- Jesus said the whole law hangs on these two commandments.
- Jesus said the prophets hang on these two commandments.
22:41
- While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus questioned them.
22:42
- Jesus asked what they thought about the Christ.
- Jesus asked whose son the Christ is.
- They said to him: David's.
22:43
- Jesus asked them how then David in the Spirit calls him Lord.
- David said the following.
22:44
- The LORD said to my Lord: sit at my right hand.
- The LORD said: until I put your enemies under your feet.
22:45
- Jesus said that if David calls him Lord, then he asked how the Christ is David's son.
22:46
- No one was able to answer him a word.
- From that day on no one dared to question him any more.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

22:1: A parable is a short invented story used to make a point. Jesus tells them without explaining them, so the hearer has to work out who in the story stands for whom.
22:2: "The kingdom of heaven" is Matthew's usual phrase where Mark and Luke write "the kingdom of God." Jewish writers of the period often said "heaven" as a respectful way of avoiding the word God, and the two phrases mean the same thing. The word behind "kingdom" means a reign or rule rather than a stretch of territory. "Made a marriage" means he put on the wedding feast, an event lasting several days and hosted by the groom's family.
22:3: Invitations went out in two stages: a first invitation, accepted well in advance, and then a second call on the day itself telling guests the food was ready. The people in the story had already accepted the first, so refusing the second was a public insult, and a public insult to a king at that.
22:4: "Fatlings" are animals specially fattened for a feast. Once butchered, the meat could not be kept, so a refusal at this point wasted the whole banquet.
22:5: "Made light of it" means they treated the invitation as unimportant. "Merchandise" means goods a person buys and sells, so this man went off to his shop or trading business.
22:6: In 1611 "entreat" meant to treat or handle someone, not to beg. "Entreated them spitefully" means they mistreated the servants, not that they pleaded with them.
22:7: Killing a king's messengers was not rudeness but rebellion. Envoys carried the authority of the person who sent them, so attacking them counted as attacking the king himself, and a military response was the expected answer.
22:9: "Highways" translates a phrase meaning the places where the main roads run out of the city, the open crossings where anyone at all might be found. It does not mean a paved highway in the modern sense.
22:10: "The wedding was furnished with guests" simply means the hall was filled with guests.
22:11: A wedding garment was not a special costume but clean, fresh clothing suitable for a feast. Whether a host of this kind was expected to supply such clothing to his guests is debated, and the story does not say.
22:12: The word translated "Friend" is not the ordinary word for a friend. It is a cool, formal form of address; Matthew uses it elsewhere for a landowner speaking to a hired man he is about to send off, and for Jesus speaking to Judas.
22:13: "Outer darkness" is the darkness outside the lit banquet hall, the night beyond the doors. "Gnashing of teeth" means grinding the teeth together, a stock expression for rage or extreme distress.
22:14: "Called" translates the same word rendered "bidden" earlier in the chapter, that is, invited. The saying repeats the parable's own vocabulary.
22:15: The Pharisees were a movement devoted to strict observance of the law of Moses, including the body of oral tradition built up around it. They were influential teachers among ordinary people rather than officeholders.
22:16: The Herodians supported the family of Herod, who ruled parts of the region under Roman authority. They had no natural alliance with the Pharisees apart from a shared opposition to Jesus. "Master" is the KJV's word for teacher, the title a student used for the man he studied under. "Thou regardest not the person of men" is a Hebrew idiom, literally about not looking at people's faces: it means judging without regard to rank or appearance.
22:17: The tax in question was the head tax the Romans imposed on each person in Judea after taking direct control of it in AD 6. Paying it was an acknowledgment of Roman rule, and refusal to pay had already sparked an armed revolt. "Caesar" was the title of the Roman emperor, at this time Tiberius. Either answer was dangerous: "no" was rebellion against Rome, "yes" would offend those who resented Roman rule.
22:18: In the King James, "tempt" usually means to test or put someone on the spot, not to lure them into sin.
22:19: "A penny" translates denarius, a silver coin worth roughly a day's pay for a laborer. The KJV used the English coin of its own day; "penny" here does not mean a trivial amount.
22:20: "Image and superscription" means the portrait stamped on the coin and the inscription running around its edge. The denarius in circulation carried the head of Tiberius and named him Caesar and son of the deified Augustus.
22:21: "Render" means to give back or hand over what is owed, not simply to give. The word assumes the thing already belongs to the one receiving it.
22:23: The Sadducees were a wealthy, largely priestly party centered on the temple in Jerusalem. They denied the resurrection of the dead, holding that it was not taught in the books of Moses, which they treated as the decisive authority.
22:24: This is the practice set out in Deuteronomy 25:5-10, known as levirate marriage, from the Latin word for a husband's brother. If a man died childless, his brother was to marry the widow, and the first son of that marriage counted legally as the dead man's son, so that his name and his share of the family land were not lost. "Raise up seed" is the KJV's literal rendering of the Hebrew idiom for producing offspring.
22:25: "Issue" in the King James means children. "Deceased" simply means died.
22:29: "Ye do err" means you are mistaken, led off the track. "The scriptures" means the Hebrew scriptures, the only ones in existence at the time.
22:30: The two verbs are not a repetition. The first was used of the man, who takes a wife; the second of the woman, who is given in marriage by her father. Together they cover both sides of the arrangement.
22:32: The quotation is from Exodus 3:6, God speaking to Moses at the burning bush. It comes from the books of Moses, the part of scripture the Sadducees held to be decisive. The argument turns on the tense: God says "I am," not "I was," the God of men who died centuries before.
22:33: "Doctrine" in 1611 simply meant teaching, either the act of teaching or its content. It did not carry today's sense of a fixed system of beliefs.
22:34: "Put to silence" translates a word that literally means muzzled, as one would muzzle an animal.
22:35: A "lawyer" here is an expert in the law of Moses, a scholar of scripture, not an attorney practicing in a courtroom.
22:36: Jewish teachers of the period debated how the many commands of the law ranked against one another, which were weighty and which were light. Asking for the greatest was a standard test of a teacher's judgment.
22:37: Quoted from Deuteronomy 6:5, part of the passage known as the Shema, recited daily by observant Jews. "Heart," "soul" and "mind" are not three separate compartments of a person. Piling up the words is a way of saying the whole self, with nothing held back.
22:39: Quoted from Leviticus 19:18. In its original setting "neighbour" meant a fellow member of the community, and how far out the word reached was itself a matter of argument among teachers.
22:40: "Hang" is used as a door hangs on its hinges: the whole weight of the rest rests on these two. "The law and the prophets" is a standard way of referring to the Hebrew scriptures as a whole.
22:42: "Christ" is a title, not a name: it is the Greek for the Hebrew "Messiah," meaning the anointed one, a king marked out by having oil poured on his head. "The son of David" means a descendant of King David, and was a recognized way of speaking of the promised king.
22:43: "In spirit" means by the Spirit of God, that is, speaking as a prophet rather than in his own person. The discussion takes for granted that David composed the psalm quoted next.
22:44: The quotation is Psalm 110:1. In the KJV, "the LORD" printed in capitals stands for the personal name of God in the Hebrew, while "my Lord" is an ordinary word for a master or superior. So the line has God addressing a second figure, whom David calls his own superior. A footstool is the low stool a seated ruler rests his feet on; enemies made into a footstool is the picture of a conqueror standing over the defeated.
22:46: "Durst" is the old past tense of "dare."

Read Matthew 22