Day: October 16, 2022

“He had answered them well”

The context is controversy, and quite intense. It always is in matters of spiritual truth. Truth which unites frequently divides; yet it is only through the divisions of our hearts that a deeper unity may sometimes be grasped. Only when our hearts are broken and opened to view may we discover what truly matters, what is truly to be believed and looked for; in short, what belongs to the truth of ourselves. Sometimes it takes controversy to move us beyond our limited and partial perspectives and dogmatic attachments to a larger and more comprehensive understanding, to the truth which is greater than ourselves.

This is to say that we learn through controversy. “Which is the first commandment of all?” Jesus is asked by a member of the literary caste, the scribes. This scribe, about whom Jesus will ultimately say, “thou art not far from the Kingdom of God”, perceived that “[Jesus] had answered them well” in the context of reasoning and disputing with others. Who are they and about what? Well, first, there are “the chief priests and the scribes and the elders” (Mk.11. 27) who challenge his authority about what he is saying. This leads to the parable about the tenants or, as the King James version puts it more accurately, the husbandmen of the vineyard, the farmers (literally, ‘earthworkers’) who are supposed to be taking care of the vineyard for the Lord but instead beat up and kill those sent by the Lord including “his beloved son” (Mk. 12. 1-11). A kind of foreshadowing of Christ’s crucifixion as well as a commentary on Creation and the Fall, they see the parable as being told against themselves and so try to arrest him (Mk. 12. 12).

There are, secondly, “the Pharisees and some of the Herodians” (Mk. 12. 13), a curious coincidence of opposites – the Pharisees as the strict sect of Jewish law in its fullness and separateness from political life, and the Herodians, Jews who collaborated with the Roman authorities. They conspire “to entrap him in his talk” about whether “it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” (Mk. 12. 14), a question about our fundamental loyalties. Jesus replies with the famous “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Mk. 12. 17), thus cutting through the false dichotomy or divide which they both assume to the principle of God himself from whom all authority ultimately derives and which is delegated even to Caesar. As Jesus will say to Caesar’s man, Pilate, at his trial, “thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (Jn.19.11).

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