The Best Defence (Part One: the Parry)

The great thing about Scripture is what you tend to notice for the first time, no matter how familiar the verse may be.

In Matthew I couldn't help but grin at how Jesus deftly sidestepped the traps His counterparts set for Him. I kept reading, heedless of the chapter break.

[Of course, on some level I know that Chapter and verse were added after the letters were Canon, and did not even exist in the original text. But, like so many others, my brain takes a cue from the chapter break and chops the story up into neat compartments.]

As I was saying, I blew right past the chapter break, no Selah, not even a swig of Java, and just kept on going. It occurred to me that Jesus demonstrated a seamless transition from defence to offence. Because I usually pause where Chapters do, and sometimes forget that they can describe the same encounter, I had been oblivious to it. But there it was, plain as day.


Jesus took the circumstance, and worked it to suit His purposes.

Days before His crucifixion, his enemies dropped the gauntlet. They publicly challenged him with lose-lose questions, trying to draw Him into their area of strength: lawyer-speak and sophistry. Their aim was to turn public opinion against Him by besting him at nit-picking.

They were surprised to learn He did not play by their rules.

I am referring, of course, to Matthew Chapter 22.

He is teaching the parable of the wedding feast, and the Pharisees, ignoring the actual teaching, throw out a trick question that will force Him to choose to support Roman taxation (and make Him repugnant to the crowds), or to denounce it. To denounce it will endear Him to the crowds, but will allow them to accuse Christ of insurrection.

By answering in the way He did, He refused to be painted into a corner by their arguments. Instead, He re-framed the issue (to use modern language), into terms which would suit His reply.

As you may know, the Pharisees and Sadducees were bitter rivals. Jesus had bested the Pharisees, and if the Sadducees could, in turn, better Jesus, that puts them in an even better light.

Having spotted nothing in Jesus teaching they could refute, the Sadducees set themselves up a straw-man argument. They use legal instructions to frame their argument: The Law provides that a married man who dies childless is to have his brother take the widow (social justice, to care for her), and the first child they have together will be, legally, the son of the dead brother.

The Sadducees try to transpose civil law enacted by God to provide civil order, and use it in an attempt to disprove the afterlife.

Jesus, again, was not drawn into quibbling. He was endowed with sufficient wisdom to see clearly what the root issue was, and to address it directly. The Sadducees wanted to use their straw-man argument to "prove" their pet doctrine. Jesus bypassed their circular argument as circular arguments cannot be decisively "won".

Instead, He chastised them for not truly believing scripture, and taught them what the afterlife was truly like. That done, He used a text that even the least religious of the crowd would recognize, and used it to demonstrate eternal life.

The Pharisees tried again. These great lawyers tried to pin Him down again. They wanted Him to proclaim what the Greatest Commandment was. Doubtless, they had some prepared objections to any of His expected replies. So He did the unanticipated. He answered the question masterfully. His reply both edified the crowd, and disarmed His antagonists. His reply we now remember as "the Golden Rule".

(You will remember at other times, he gave conditional responses: "I will give an answer, if you are willing to answer my question.") The trend is that He took the question, answered honestly and fairly (even the unfair questions). He did NOT use canned answers, or get drawn into convoluted debates.

Let us learn from His example.