Jesus and His Bible, Part 14

The Messiah and Politics

In Mark 11, Jesus entered Jerusalem to wild acclaim, disrupted the Temple businesses by throwing the vendors out and overturning their tables, and signaled his sense that the temple system was fruitless and would die by cursing the fig tree. Subsequently, through Mark 12, people ask him a long series of questions.  The first, asking where he got his authority from, he answered with a question. The second, asking if it was according to Jewish law to pay taxes to Caesar, Jesus answered with the famous “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” The third, asking about whose wife the much married woman would be in the resurrection, and the fourth, asking which was the greatest commandment in the Jewish Law, we have already discussed.

Now Jesus poses a question of his own. “How is it that the scribes say that the Christ, the Messiah, is the son of David? David himself said in the Holy Spirit, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put thine enemies beneath thy feet.’ So if David calls him Lord, in what sense is he David’s son?” (Mark 12:35-37). 

The religious authorities do not answer this question. And it is a puzzler.  

Here is the context in Jesus’s scripture:

Psalm 110:1 “The Lord says to my Lord: sit at my right hand until I make thine enemies a footstool for thy feet.” This Psalm is full of political promises. God tells the king to rule over his enemies. Later in the psalm, God promises that he will be at the king’s right hand, shattering kings, judging nations, filling them with corpses. The scribes and religious leaders cannot safely talk about this psalm without sounding like rebels against Rome.  

Further, this Psalm is a promise made by God to the king, promising him a priesthood like Melchizedek’s, an ancient priest/king at the time of Abram.  Both Saul and David occasionally took priestly roles. Additionally, Melchizedek is also possibly a pun meaning rightful king (Jewish Study Bible, 1408, n.). I suspect its interpretation was controversial at the time of Jesus, and Jesus knew it.  

The way Jesus quotes it is to take David as the speaker and the “my lord” as a son of David.  This is not a self-evident interpretation. Some present-day Jewish commentary suggests instead that David is the psalmist writing about himself as king in the third person and reinforcing the idea that God is on his side. 

Though Christian commentators adopt the whole of this psalm as a prophecy for which Jesus is the Messianic fulfillment, it is in fact full of puzzles. For example, the victories described are military and partisan, in that God works judgment upon “the nations, crushing heads far and wide.” This does not accurately describe the work Jesus said he came to do. Further, expecting that Jesus in a Second Coming will be qualitatively different, even militant and violent, does its own violence to the character of Jesus demonstrated at his first coming. Jesus was militant against hypocrisy, greed, power-hunger, and pride when he came the first time, and these will be the great enemies he defeats when he returns.

Jesus quoted this verse to silence those baiting him. He asked the people how it is that the scribes say the Messiah is the son of David, particularly since David in his Messianic psalm calls his “son” my Lord.  The crowd enjoyed hearing him riddle the religious experts. (This reminds me of the religious debates so popular with the ordinary folks in the 17^th century in England, a time when people went to war over versions of the Christian religion.) 

But it is hard to imagine Jesus simply engaging in riddling one-ups-manship. Why this riddle at this time?  The immediate context in Mark is one in which Jesus was frequently quoting the Hebrew scriptures at his enemies, making clear that he knew they were opposing him, making clear that he would be the murdered son of the vineyard owner, who is God, and making clear that God is the God of the living, not corpses, and that death will not be the end. He also made clear that the mission of Israel was not self-involved purity but loving each other as neighbors and loving the stranger as oneself also.  They were meant to bring God to the world, not keep God to themselves.

He followed this quotation with specific criticism of the hypocrisy of the religious experts, who showed off their prayers while impoverishing the helpless.  This reinforces his teachings elsewhere about taking care of human need as being more important than religious observances.

This particular quotation spoke to the Jewish hope for military victory over national enemies, and Jesus invoked this in a way that both put his questioners on the spot and undercut this political understanding of the Messianic aspect of the psalm.