Luke 20

Today’s Passage: Luke 20

This is a day of questions, and you should picture it as one long day. Jesus has ridden into Jerusalem, wept over the city, cleared the temple of its traders, and now He is standing in those same courts teaching the crowds who come early to hear Him. The men who run the place cannot arrest Him with the people packed around Him, so they try to destroy Him with words instead, and they come at Him in waves. First an official delegation of chief priests and scribes and elders, demanding to know by what authority He acts. He answers with a question about John’s baptism that leaves them stranded, unable to say either yes or no. Then He tells the people a parable about a vineyard, and tenants who beat the owner’s servants and finally murder his beloved son, and everyone in the courtyard understands exactly whom the story is about. Then spies, sent to flatter Him into a sentence that Rome could hang Him for, with a question about the imperial tax. Then the Sadducees, who did not believe in resurrection at all, with an invented riddle about a woman and seven husbands, and they get back one of the great resurrection arguments in all of Scripture, drawn from a single sentence God spoke at a burning bush. And when nobody dares ask Him anything more, He asks His own question, out of Psalm 110, about how the Christ can be both David’s son and David’s Lord. The chapter closes with a warning about religious men who love long robes and long prayers and quietly devour the houses of widows.

As you read, hold this: They question Him all day long in the temple courts, and every answer He gives shows them who He is: the Heir they are about to kill, the Stone God has made the cornerstone, and the Lord whom David himself called Lord.

Luke 20:1–8 (BSB)

¹ One day as Jesus was teaching the people in the temple courts and proclaiming the gospel, the chief priests and scribes, together with the elders, came up to Him. ² “Tell us,” they said, “by what authority are You doing these things, and who gave You this authority?” ³ “I will also ask you a question,” Jesus replied. “Tell Me: ⁴ John’s baptism—was it from heaven, or from men?” ⁵ They deliberated among themselves and said, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ He will ask, ‘Why did you not believe him?’ ⁶ But if we say, ‘From men,’ all the people will stone us, for they are convinced that John was a prophet.” ⁷ So they answered that they did not know where it was from. ⁸ And Jesus replied, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”

Notice first what He is doing when they arrive. He is teaching the people and proclaiming the gospel, and He does it in the open, day after day, in their own courts. Then the deputation comes and asks the one question that goes to the root of everything: by what authority (ἐξουσία) exousia, pronounced ex-oo-SEE-ah. Strong's G1849, authority, rightful power, the right to act. Exousia is one of Luke’s favorite words, and it means the right to act, the standing to do a thing, rather than raw force. Luke keeps setting it in front of you all through the Gospel: the crowds are astonished that His message carries exousia, He commands unclean spirits with exousia and they obey, He tells a paralyzed man that the Son of Man has exousia on earth to forgive sins, and He hands exousia to the Twelve and to the seventy-two when He sends them out. It is not a word about strength. A soldier has power; an officer has authority, and the difference is that authority has someone behind it. That is why the question in the temple court is the right question badly asked. These men wanted to see His credentials, a rabbi’s ordination or a council’s warrant. What stood behind Him was the Father who tore open heaven at His baptism. And notice, twenty verses later, that the same word is used of the governor, “the rule and authority of the governor,” which is Luke’s quiet way of showing you the two thrones in this chapter. Rome had real authority, and Jesus says so. But the authority that made the world and forgives sins was standing in the courtyard being interrogated by men who could not tell heaven from a public relations problem. are You doing these things, and who gave You this authority? It is, on the face of it, a fair question. If a man walks into the temple and overturns the tables of the licensed traders, somebody ought to ask who sent him. But the Lord does not answer it, and He does not answer it for a reason that becomes plain the moment you read what happens next. He puts a question back to them, and it is not a dodge. John’s baptism, was it from heaven or from men? Heaven had already spoken once, in the wilderness, through a preacher these very men had watched draw the whole country out to the Jordan. If they could not receive God’s word through John, no answer about Jesus would land anyway.

And now watch them, because Luke lets you overhear the huddle, and it is one of the most self-condemning conversations in the Gospels. Read it again and see what is missing from it. Not one of them asks, “What is true?” They ask only what each answer will cost. If we say from heaven, He has us on why we did not believe. If we say from men, the crowd will stone us. So they say the one thing that is certainly false: we do not know. These are the official interpreters of the Word of God, the men whose whole vocation was to tell the nation what heaven had and had not said, and they plead ignorance to save their position. Then comes the Lord’s reply, and it is not petty. It is judicial. A man who will not answer God honestly when he already knows the answer has forfeited his right to the next revelation. Sit with that for a moment, because it is a mercy as much as a warning. God gives light to those who will walk in it.

Luke 20:9–14 (BSB)

⁹ Then He proceeded to tell the people this parable: “A man planted a vineyard, rented it out to some tenants, and went away for a long time. ¹⁰ At harvest time, he sent a servant to the tenants to collect his share of the fruit of the vineyard. But the tenants beat the servant and sent him away empty-handed. ¹¹ So he sent another servant, but they beat him and treated him shamefully, sending him away empty-handed. ¹² Then he sent a third, but they wounded him and threw him out. ¹³ ‘What shall I do?’ asked the owner of the vineyard. ‘I will send my beloved son. Perhaps they will respect him.’ ¹⁴ But when the tenants saw the son, they discussed it among themselves and said, ‘This is the heir. Let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’

He tells this one to the people, not to the delegation, though the delegation is standing right there and misses none of it. And the first line would have rung a bell in every Jewish ear in that courtyard, because Isaiah had sung a song about a vineyard seven hundred years before, and everyone knew how it ended.

"For the vineyard of the LORD of Hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah are the plant of His delight. He looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard a cry of distress." Isaiah 5:7 (BSB)

Hold Isaiah’s song beside this parable and you will see at once what Jesus has changed. Isaiah’s complaint was against the vineyard itself, which yielded sour grapes. Here the vineyard is fine. The problem is the tenants, the men left in charge of it, and that shift is the whole point. This is not a story about a nation under judgment. It is a story about stewards who came to believe that the property they managed was theirs. Everything in the parable is arranged to make that clear. The owner plants it, at his own cost. He rents it out. He goes away for a long time, and that long absence is what does the damage, because absence lets a caretaker forget he is a caretaker. Then, at harvest, he simply asks for his share, which is his by right, and the servants who come asking for it are beaten one after another with rising violence. Anyone listening knew who the servants were. The prophets had been coming for centuries with the same errand, asking God’s own vineyard for God’s own fruit, and Jerusalem had a long history with them.

Then the owner says something that stops the story cold. “What shall I do? I will send my beloved son. Perhaps they will respect him.” That word beloved is not decoration. The reader of Luke has heard it twice already, at the Jordan and on the mountain, spoken out of heaven over this same Man, and now He drops it into a parable in front of the men who are planning His death. And look at what the tenants say when they see him coming, because it is the plainest picture of sin’s logic in all the Gospels: “This is the heir. Let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.” It is not madness, exactly. It is arithmetic. They recognize him. That is the horror of it. They do not kill the son by mistake; they kill him because they know exactly who he is and they want the vineyard without the owner. And before you settle comfortably into thinking this is about somebody else in the first century, turn it where it belongs. Every one of us is a tenant. Nothing in your hands is yours. Your years, your strength, your household, your work, the Word you have been given to keep, all of it is rented ground, and the temptation of a long absence is exactly the same now as it was then, to enjoy the fruit and resent the Owner. The writer of these lines needs that warning as much as anyone who reads them.

Luke 20:15–19 (BSB)

¹⁵ So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? ¹⁶ He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.” And when the people heard this, they said, “May such a thing never happen!” ¹⁷ But Jesus looked directly at them and said, “Then what is the meaning of that which is written: ‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’? ¹⁸ Everyone who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed.” ¹⁹ When the scribes and chief priests realized that Jesus had spoken this parable against them, they sought to arrest Him that very hour. But they were afraid of the people.

They threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. Do not hurry over the order of those two verbs. Within a few days the Lord who told this story would be led out through a city gate and executed on a hill outside the wall, and He tells the crowd in advance, in a story, and they do not yet know what they are hearing. Then He asks the question a hearer cannot avoid: what will the owner do? And He answers it Himself, soberly, without a trace of relish. The vineyard will be taken from those who kept it for themselves and given to others who will render the fruit. The crowd cries out at once, “May such a thing never happen!” Notice who says that. The people, the ordinary worshipers standing in the temple that morning, recoil from the very idea. This parable was never aimed at them, and Luke says so as plainly as words allow in verse nineteen: the scribes and chief priests realized that Jesus had spoken this parable against them. Against those particular men, in that particular week, over their particular stewardship. Remember as well that the Man telling the story, the disciples around Him, and the whole crowd crying out in horror are Jewish to the last soul. Anyone who has ever used these verses as a weapon against a people has taken the Lord’s warning to stewards and turned it into exactly the sin it condemns.

Then Jesus looks directly at them, and Luke wants you to feel that look, and He quotes the psalm the pilgrims had been singing on the road up to the feast. “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone (γωνία) gōnia, pronounced go-NEE-ah. Strong's G1137, corner, angle; the head of the corner. The Greek phrase Luke gives is kephalēn gōnias, literally “head of the corner,” and gōnia is simply the ordinary word for a corner or an angle. You meet it elsewhere in the New Testament for the four corners of the earth and for the street corner where the hypocrites liked to stand and pray. Builders in the ancient world had two stones that could be called the head of the corner, and readers have long divided over which is meant here. One is the foundation cornerstone, the first great block laid at the angle of the building, cut true, from which every wall and course takes its line, so that if that stone is wrong the whole structure is wrong. The other is the capstone or keystone set at the summit, the last stone laid, which locks the arch and finishes the work. It hardly matters which picture the psalm intended, because Christ is both and Scripture says so. Nothing in the building of God is measured except from Him, and nothing in it is completed except by Him. What is worth noticing is that a stone is not a decoration you may take or leave. It is either under you, holding everything you are, or it is over you. And the apostles who heard Him say this in the temple never let the image go. Peter stood before this same council not long after and told them to their faces that the stone the builders rejected had become the cornerstone, and that there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved. .” It is an astonishing move. The builders, the professionals, the men whose trade is knowing which stone goes where, examine the stone and throw it on the rubbish heap. And God picks it up and sets it at the corner, and the whole building is measured from it. Their rejection does not defeat the plan; God builds with the very stone they discarded. And then a word to sober anyone: everyone who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed. There is no third way with Christ. You may come and fall on Him and be broken, which is what repentance actually is, the ending of a man’s pretensions in the dust before God, and then be built into the house He is raising. Or you may leave Him lying there and be found standing beneath Him at the last. Broken now by mercy, or crushed then by judgment. Every soul who has ever heard His name is choosing between those two.

Luke 20:20–26 (BSB)

²⁰ So they watched Him closely and sent spies who pretended to be sincere. They were hoping to catch Him in His words in order to hand Him over to the rule and authority of the governor. ²¹ “Teacher,” they inquired, “we know that You speak and teach correctly. You show no partiality but teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. ²² Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” ²³ But Jesus saw through their duplicity and said to them, ²⁴ “Show Me a denarius. Whose image and inscription are on it?” “Caesar’s,” they answered. ²⁵ So Jesus told them, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” ²⁶ And they were unable to trap Him in His words before the people. And amazed at His answer, they fell silent.

Since they cannot take Him by force, they try to take Him by a sentence. The spies are coached and rehearsed, sent to pretend sincerity, and they open with flattery so thick you can hear it drip: You speak and teach correctly, You show no partiality, You teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Every word of that is true, and not one of them believes it. Then the hook. Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Understand what a beautiful trap it is. Say yes, and the crowd that has been hanging on His words hears a Galilean prophet endorsing the tribute of an occupying power, and His following in the city dissolves by evening. Say no, and there are witnesses standing ready to carry the sentence straight to Pilate, which is exactly what verse twenty told you they were after. There was no answer that would not cost Him, and He knew what they were, for Luke says He saw through their duplicity.

“Show Me a denarius. Whose image (εἰκών) eikōn, pronounced ay-KOHN. Strong's G1504, image, likeness, visible representation. Eikōn is the word for a likeness, a portrait, a stamped or carved representation, and it is the ordinary term for the emperor’s head on a coin or his statue in a public square. That everyday meaning is what makes the Lord’s question so quiet and so devastating. He does not argue about Roman policy. He asks whose portrait is on the metal, and then leaves the second half of His sentence to do its work. In the Greek Old Testament this same word stands in Genesis, where God makes man in His own eikōn, and the New Testament writers never forgot it. Paul calls the Son the image of the invisible God, and says that those God foreknew were predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, and that we are being transformed into that same image with intensifying glory. Follow the line and see what it costs and what it promises. It means no human being is a small thing, whatever the census lists or the pay scale says, because every one bears the stamp of the Maker. It means that what is owed to God is not a portion carved out of your life and handed over, but the life itself, since the whole of it is minted with His likeness. And it means that the defacing of that image in us by sin is not the end of the story, because the Son who is the perfect Image came to restore it in a ruined coinage. Praise God that He did not melt us down. and inscription are on it?” They have to produce the coin, and they have to say the word themselves: Caesar’s. The little silver disc in the hand carried the head of Tiberius and a legend naming him son of the deified Augustus. Then comes the sentence that has been quoted, and misquoted, in every century since: “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Take it slowly and precisely, because it is easy to make it serve whatever cause we already hold. He does not say the empire is righteous, and He does not say the empire is nothing. He says the coin bears Caesar’s likeness and Caesar’s name, and it may go back to him. Taxes are dust. Pay them. But do not miss where the weight of the sentence falls, because it falls on the second half, and He leaves it unexplained on purpose so that every hearer has to finish it. What is stamped with the image of God? Not a coin.

"So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them." Genesis 1:27 (BSB)

There it is. The coin carries Caesar’s image, so hand it over and think no more about it. You carry God’s image, and therefore you owe Him not a percentage but the whole of yourself, your body, your hours, your loyalty, your love. Caesar may have the metal. God will have the man. And the spies, who came to trap Him, are left standing in the courtyard with a coin in their hand and nothing to say. Luke’s word is that they were amazed, and they fell silent.

Luke 20:27–33 (BSB)

²⁷ Then some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to question Him. ²⁸ “Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man is to marry his brother’s widow and raise up offspring for him. ²⁹ Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a wife but died childless. ³⁰ Then the second ³¹ and the third married the widow, and in the same way all seven died, leaving no children. ³² And last of all, the woman died. ³³ So then, in the resurrection, whose wife will she be? For all seven were married to her.”

Here is the only place in Luke’s Gospel where the Sadducees appear, and he tells you the one thing you must know about them before they open their mouths: they say there is no resurrection. So this is not an inquiry. It is a set piece, polished and reused, the sort of thing a clever man brings out at dinner to make the other party look ridiculous. They begin, shrewdly, from Moses, because the Law was the ground they trusted most, and they cite the levirate provision honestly enough.

"When brothers dwell together and one of them dies without a son, the widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother is to take her as his wife and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law for her." Deuteronomy 25:5 (BSB)

It was a merciful law. In a world with no pension and no property rights for a childless widow, it kept a woman inside a family that would feed her and kept a dead man’s name from being erased. But watch what they build out of it. Seven brothers, one after another, each dying childless, until the arithmetic becomes absurd, and that absurdity is the whole design. They are not asking about a real woman or a real hope. They are proving, as they think, that resurrection is a silly notion, because it generates puzzles no one can answer. And notice, with sorrow, how the woman functions in their story. Seven times widowed, seven times bereaved, and then this: “And last of all, the woman died.” A lifetime of loss reduced to the final term in a debating problem. That is what unbelief does to a person. It cannot hold the weight of an actual grief, so it turns grief into a joke. Every generation has its own version of this question, put in the same tone, and the Lord’s reply is worth memorizing by anyone who has to sit across a table from it.

Luke 20:34–40 (BSB)

³⁴ Jesus answered, “The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage. ³⁵ But those who are considered worthy to share in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage. ³⁶ In fact, they can no longer die, because they are like the angels. And since they are sons of the resurrection, they are sons of God. ³⁷ Even Moses demonstrates that the dead are raised, in the passage about the burning bush. For he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ ³⁸ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to Him all are alive.” ³⁹ Some of the scribes answered, “Teacher, You have spoken well!” ⁴⁰ And they did not dare to question Him any further.

He answers in two movements, and the first one dismantles their puzzle by showing that they had imagined the age to come as nothing more than this age extended. The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage. Those raised do not. Now, some readers hear that and feel a cold hand on the heart, because they love someone dearly and cannot bear to think of losing what they have. So say only what the Lord says, and say it carefully, and do not go one inch past it. He does not say that love ends, or that the raised will not know one another, or that anything good is taken away. He gives three positive statements, and every one of them is glory. They can no longer die. That is the reason marriage as we know it belongs to this age: a world under death needs the giving in marriage, needs the generations, needs the name carried on, which is the very law the Sadducees were quoting. Where death is finished, that provision has finished its work. They are like the angels, deathless and unfailing in the presence of God. And they are sons of the resurrection, and therefore sons of God, which is the highest thing that could possibly be said of a creature. Whatever else the age to come holds, it holds no funerals, and none of us has yet been given the language to describe what that will be like.

Then the second movement, and it is one of the great arguments in Scripture. They came fortified with Moses, so He meets them in Moses, and He does not go to some obscure corner. He goes to the burning bush. God said to Moses, at that bush, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”

"Then He said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God." Exodus 3:6 (BSB)

Now weigh it. Abraham had been in his grave for centuries when God spoke those words. Isaac and Jacob likewise. And God does not say I was their God. He says I am. The Lord Jesus rests the doctrine of the resurrection on the tense of a verb in a sentence God spoke out of a bush, and you should let that settle in you, because it tells you what He thought of the precision of Scripture. Not the general drift of it. Not the sweep of it. The exact words, down to the form of the verb, are the words of God and will bear the weight of eternity. And the substance of the argument is even better than the method. God binds His own name to men. He calls Himself the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and having taken that name He will not be the God of a handful of dust. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living. So Abraham must live, and Isaac, and Jacob, and every soul God has ever covenanted with. Then the sentence Luke sets at the end, which is perhaps the most comforting five words in the chapter: “for to Him all are alive.” The dead are out of our sight. They are not out of His. Even the scribes, no friends of His, could not help themselves: “Teacher, You have spoken well!” And after that no one dared ask Him anything.

Luke 20:41–47 (BSB)

⁴¹ Then Jesus declared, “How can it be said that the Christ is the Son of David? ⁴² For David himself says in the book of Psalms: ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at My right hand ⁴³ until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.”’ ⁴⁴ Thus David calls Him ‘Lord.’ So how can He be David’s son?” ⁴⁵ In the hearing of all the people, Jesus said to His disciples, ⁴⁶ “Beware of the scribes. They like to walk around in long robes, and they love the greetings in the marketplaces, the chief seats in the synagogues, and the places of honor at banquets. ⁴⁷ They defraud widows of their houses, and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will receive greater condemnation.”

Now that the questioners have run out of questions, He asks one, and it is the deepest of the day. Everyone in Jerusalem knew the Christ would be David’s son. It was the settled expectation, sung in the streets that very week. So Jesus opens the Psalms at the hundred and tenth and reads them a line David wrote: “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.’” And then the question. A father in that world did not call his own descendant lord. Honor ran the other way, up the generations, not down. Yet David, the king, the greatest man in the nation’s memory, looks down the centuries at his own descendant and calls Him Lord, and sees Him seated at the right hand of God. How can He be David’s son?

He does not answer, because the answer was standing in front of them, and because a question left open goes on working in a man long after an answer would have been filed away. But you may answer it, and the whole New Testament does. He is David’s son, born of Mary in Bethlehem, true flesh, true bone, true weariness on a Judean road. And He is David’s Lord, before Abraham, the Word who was with God and was God, who now sits at the right hand of the Majesty on high. Both, at once, forever, in one Person. Every one of the day’s questions had been an attempt to get a handle on Him, to place Him in some manageable category. And with one line from a psalm He shows them that the category does not exist. Worship is the only fitting response left.

Then, in the hearing of all the people, He turns to His disciples with a last warning, and it is worth noticing that He gives it publicly. Beware of the scribes. And what follows is a portrait so exact that it can still be recognized. The long robes, worn to be seen. The greetings in the marketplaces, the title spoken in public, the small pleasure of being known. The chief seats in the synagogue, facing the congregation. The places of honor at banquets. None of these is a scandal by itself, which is exactly why the Lord lists them first, since a heart is usually lost by inches. And then the two things that turn vanity into something monstrous. They defraud widows of their houses (κατεσθίω) katesthiō, pronounced kat-es-THEE-oh. Strong's G2719, to eat up, devour, consume entirely. Katesthiō is a strong, ugly word, and it is a pity that our English versions have to soften it. It is esthiō, to eat, with a prefix that means all the way down, so it means to eat up, to devour, to consume until nothing is left. It is used of birds eating up the seed on the path in the parable of the sower, and of a fire that consumes, and of animals devouring prey. It is not the word for a shady deal or a sharp bargain. It is the word for a house being swallowed whole. Whatever the exact mechanism was, and readers have suggested several, an estate mismanaged as trustee, a legacy pressed for, hospitality taken from a woman who could not afford to give it, the picture the Lord chooses is of a predator at a meal. And the meal is a widow’s house, the one asset standing between her and destitution, in a society where she had no other protection. Set that beside the long robes and the lengthy prayers and you see why this is the note the chapter ends on. God has never been impressed by religious appearance, and He has always, from the Law through the prophets, watched over the widow with particular fierceness. If our religion costs the vulnerable anything, it is not religion. It is appetite in a long robe. , and for a show they make lengthy prayers. Read those two side by side and do not separate them. The prayers are not incidental to the fraud; they are the instrument of it, the reputation for piety that gets a man trusted with an unprotected woman’s estate. That is why the sentence lands where it does: these men will receive greater condemnation. There are degrees, and the man who used the name of God as a tool will answer for the tool as well as the theft.