Biblion Bible Commentary
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What Is Exalted Among Men
Luke 16:14-18
14 The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, also heard all these things, and they scoffed at him. · WEB
They laugh at him, and are told that the standard they are measured by is not the one they can see.
The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, also heard all these things, and they scoffed at him Luke 16:14.
The description is this account's and it explains everything on both sides of it. The teaching about mammon has just landed on people whose relation to money is being named, and the response is not argument but derision. The verb means to turn up the nose.
"You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of men, but God knows your hearts" Luke 16:15.
The charge is not hypocrisy in the sense of deliberate acting. It is that the audience is wrong. Self-justification requires a jury, and theirs was a human one — which is a workable arrangement until it is pointed out that the case is being heard elsewhere.
"For that which is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God." The word abomination is the law's term for what is detestable in worship, and using it of high public standing is deliberately shocking. Not less impressive; the strongest available word.
In this Gospel that is not a stray remark. It is the Magnificat's line about princes and the lowly Luke 1:52, the woe on those everyone speaks well of Luke 6:26, and the advice about the lowest seat Luke 14:10, stated as a principle.
"The law and the prophets were until John. From that time the Good News of God's Kingdom is preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it" Luke 16:16.
A hinge is described. John stands at the end of one period and the announcement begins a new one — the same placement given him in the tribute earlier Luke 7:28. And the crowd pressing in is the sort of thing the men scoffing had not joined.
"But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tiny stroke of a pen in the law to fall" Luke 16:17.
The next sentence forecloses the obvious misreading. A new period has begun and the law has not lapsed; the smallest mark of it will outlast the physical universe. Both verses stand together, and the pairing is the answer to anyone who reads the first as an ending.
"Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery" Luke 16:18. The example follows immediately, and it is not a change of subject. The treatment of the question is given in Matthew's account Matthew 19:1–12, where the appeal goes behind Moses to the creation. Its function here is as a demonstration of the verse before it: men who prided themselves on the law had built a procedure that made a commandment optional, and the standard is restated at full strength.
settled What this mark means