Caesar’s Coin and David’s Lord

Christ knew where John’s baptism came from. Then why did he ask them, as though he did not know? He knew the Pharisees would not give him an answer. Then why ask at all, if the asking was wasted? Was it so that he could judge them out of their own mouths — or out of their own hearts? Refer these points, if you like, to the Creator’s defense, or to a comparison between the Creator and Christ. Then think what would have happened if the Pharisees had answered his question. Suppose their answer had been that John’s baptism was “from men.” They would have been stoned on the spot. And then some second Marcion, out to outdo the first, would have stood up and said: [a]

What a splendid god! How unlike the Creator’s his ways are! He knew men would throw themselves headlong over the edge — and he himself stood them right on the brink.

For that is exactly how people talk about the Creator and his law about the tree. But John’s baptism was “from heaven.” “Then why,” Christ asks, “did you not believe him?” So the one who had wanted men to believe John, and who meant to rebuke them for not believing him, belonged to the God whose sacred rite John was administering. But at any rate, when he met their refusal to say what they thought by paying them back in kind — “Then neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things” — he returned evil for evil!

“Give Caesar what is Caesar’s, and God what is God’s.” What will “the things that are God’s” be? Such things as are like Caesar’s denarius — that is, whatever carries his image and likeness. So the thing he orders to be given back to God, the Creator, is man, who has been stamped with the Creator’s image, likeness, name, and material. Let Marcion’s god look after his own mint. Christ orders the coin with a man’s stamp on it to be handed over to his own Caesar — his own Caesar, I say, not some strange god’s Caesar. And the truth has to be admitted: this god of theirs does not have a single denarius he can call his own. In any question, the fair and proper rule is that the sense of the answer should be fitted to the inquiry put. To give an answer that has nothing at all to do with the question submitted to you is simple madness. God forbid, then, that we should look for behavior in Christ that would be unfit even in an ordinary man.

The Sadducees, who said there is no resurrection, were arguing that very point when they put a case at law to the Lord. A certain woman, as the law prescribed, had been married to seven brothers, one after another, and each of them had died. The question, then, was this: in the resurrection, which of them is she to be counted as belonging to? That — notice it — was the point of the inquiry; that was the whole substance of the dispute. And Christ was bound to give it a direct answer. He had no one to fear, so there was no reason it should seem advisable to him either to get around their question or to use it as an opening for hinting sideways at a subject he was not in the habit of teaching publicly at any other time. So he gave his answer: “the children of this age marry.” See how exactly it fitted the case in hand. Because the question concerned the coming age, and he was about to declare that no one marries there, he clears the ground by laying it down that here, where there is death, there is marriage as well.

But those whom God counts worthy to possess that age and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, since they cannot die any more: they become equal to the angels, and are made children of God and of the resurrection.

If, then, the sense of an answer must turn on nothing but the question put, and if the question put is fully understood from the sense of this answer, then the Lord’s reply will bear no other interpretation than the one by which the question is clearly understood. You have been shown both the time in which marriage is permitted and the time in which it is said not to belong — and shown it not for its own sake, but because a question had been asked about the resurrection. You also have the resurrection itself confirmed, and the whole question the Sadducees raised: men who asked nothing about another god, and made no inquiry about the proper law of marriage. Now if you make Christ answer questions that were never submitted to him, what you are really saying is that he could not settle the points he was actually consulted about, and was caught out, of course, by the cunning of the Sadducees.

I will now go further than I need to, and, having laid down my rule about questions and answers, take up such arguments on their side as hang together at all. They got hold of a copy of the Scripture and made short work of its text, reading it like this: “Those whom the god of that age shall count worthy.” They tie the phrase “of that age” to the word “god,” and so make out another god, “the god of that age” — whereas the passage ought to be read like this: “Those whom God shall count worthy to possess that age.” Put the stop after “God,” so that “of that age” belongs to the words that follow: those whom God counts worthy of obtaining that age and of rising to it. For the question submitted to Christ had nothing to do with the god of that age, but only with its condition. It was: whose wife will this woman be in that age, after the resurrection? So they overturn his answer on the one thing that was at issue, marriage. They take his words, “the children of this age marry and are given in marriage,” as though they referred to the Creator’s people and to his permission for them to marry — while they themselves, whom the god of that age (the rival god, that is) has counted worthy of the resurrection, do not marry even here, because they are not children of this age. But the fact is that he had been consulted about marriage in that age, not in this present one, and he simply declared that the thing the question was about does not exist there.

The men who had caught the very force of his voice, his delivery and his expression found no other sense in it than the one that bore on the matter of the question. That is why the scribes exclaimed, “Teacher, you have spoken well.” For he had affirmed the resurrection by describing the form of it, against what the Sadducees held. And he did not turn down the endorsement of men who had taken his answer to carry that meaning.

But if the scribes thought Christ was David’s son, while David himself calls him Lord — what has that to do with Christ? David did not batter down an error of the scribes; and yet David did assert Christ’s honor, when he affirmed more prominently that Christ was his Lord than that he was his son — a title that would hardly suit the destroyer of the Creator. But see how consistent the interpretation is on our side of the question. A little earlier the blind man had called on him as “the Son of David,” and he made no remark on it then, since the scribes were not in his presence. Now he raises the point on purpose, in front of them, and of his own accord — so that the man whom the blind man, following the teaching of the scribes, had simply declared to be the Son of David, he might show to be David’s Lord as well. He thus honored the blind man’s faith, which had acknowledged that he was David’s son; and at the same time he struck a blow at the tradition of the scribes, which was keeping them from knowing that he was David’s Lord too. Whatever had to do with the glory of the Creator’s Christ, no one but the Creator’s Christ himself would guard and maintain in this way.