Luke names the strategy before it unfolds: spies 20"pretended to be sincere," sent so that they might catch him in something he said. Their flattery is elaborate: 21"we know that you speak and teach rightly." Everything the spies say about Jesus is true: he speaks rightly, shows no partiality, and teaches the way of God truthfully (verse 21). They speak the truth to deceive him, and Luke reports the flattery as an accurate description of the man they mean to catch. The question is a trap with no safe answer: 22"Is it lawful for us to give tribute to Caesar, or not?" Say yes, and he alienates a population that resents Roman taxes as a badge of conquest. Say no, and he can be reported to Rome for inciting rebellion.
Jesus perceived their craftiness and refuses the binary: 24"Show me a denarius. Whose likeness and inscription does it have?" The coin carries Caesar's image, so the coin belongs to Caesar's order. The Greek word for likeness there is the word the Greek Old Testament uses for the image God stamped into humanity at creation (Genesis 1:26). If Caesar's image means that the coin is his, what does it mean that every person bears God's image? The debt to Caesar is real, and it is smaller than the debt owed to the one whose image everyone, Caesar included, carries. The spies came looking for a trap and heard something too large for their question: 26"marveling at his answer they became silent."
Next come Sadducees, who deny the resurrection, with a question built as an absurdity. Citing the law that a brother must raise up offspring for a dead brother, they imagine seven brothers and one widow, all dead, and ask 33"In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be?" The question assumes that resurrected life continues earthly arrangements unchanged.
Jesus corrects the assumption at its root. The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who attain that age and the resurrection neither marry nor are given in marriage, 36"for they cannot die anymore." Marriage answers mortality in part, by carrying a family into an uncertain future, and resurrected life no longer needs that answer. The scenario collapses because the picture of resurrection was never large enough, and the idea of resurrection is not the problem.
Then he turns to the books of Moses, the only Scripture the Sadducees accepted, and finds resurrection in the burning bush, where Moses calls the Lord the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (verse 37), long after all three had died. 38"he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him." If God still claims those patriarchs, in some real sense they live. Even scribes hostile to Jesus concede: 39"Teacher, you have spoken well." And Luke closes the chapter of hostile questioning with a quiet verdict, that no one dared to ask him any more questions (verse 40).
Bring your hardest question to Jesus this week in order to hear his answer.
Prayer
Father, thank you for an answer large enough to swallow every trap set for it, rendering to Caesar what is his while reminding us that we bear your image and belong first to you. Teach us to trust a resurrection larger than our present imagination can picture. Silence in us, as you silenced your accusers, every question asked only to trap. In Jesus' name, amen.