Monday Devotional: Son of David, Son of God (Mark 12:35-37)

Jesus is Lord of All

While Jesus was teaching in the temple, he said, “How can the scribes say that the Messiah is the son of David? David himself, by the Holy Spirit, declared,

‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at my right hand,
until I put your enemies under your feet.”’

David himself calls him Lord; so how can he be his son?” And the large crowd was listening to him with delight (Mark 12:35-37).

God is not beholden to our political ambitions. God’s thoughts and ways are different from ours. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa 55:9). We are often tempted to think God sees things just as we do. Such thinking involves a failure of imagination. Our vision falls short of the goodness, breadth, and beauty of God’s plans and purposes. One of our tasks as Christians, however, is to seek the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in conforming our will to God’s will, our thoughts to God’s thoughts. When we do this, we will see that God’s work in Jesus Christ, while related to the various political orders by which we organize our societies, is identical to none of them. We are called not into conformity with the patterns of this age, but rather with the will of God through the renewal of our minds.

This is one of Mark’s trickier passages, but some background will open up a bit. Here Jesus continues his conflict with the scribes. They oppose Jesus because they misunderstand the Scriptures and the work of God. They are supposed to be experts in the law, but they are unable to perceive its true meaning, which is fulfilled in Jesus. Thus they lead the people astray.

Jesus objects to their description of the Messiah as the “son of David.” In the biblical world, to call a man the “son of X” is to say he shares the qualities of X. The qualities of the son are derivative of those of the father. Thus the son of David will be like David. More specifically, the son of David will be a king like David. That understanding of the Messiah, says Jesus, is inadequate.

Does Jesus thus reject his Davidic lineage? Is he saying he did not descend from David? No. In Mark 10:47-48, Bartimaeus refers to Jesus as the “son of David.” Jesus offers no corrective or disapproval, but rather rewards Bartimaeus’s faith. In Mark 11:10, the crowds shout, “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!” They aren’t wrong in identifying Jesus with the line of David. They are wrong, however, to think that Jesus’ kingdom will recreate the finite political and military order of David’s.

Jesus is in fact a very different figure than David. In particular, David is a man of war. Jesus is a man of peace. David established his kingdom through conquest. Jesus establishes his kingdom through preaching, healing, and casting out demons. Ultimately he will conquer through his death and resurrection. His kingdom will transcend the kingdoms of this world.

Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Quoting from Psalm 100, a psalm of David, Jesus argues that the Messiah is greater than David. In fact he is a different kind of figure altogether. Jesus reads the psalm christologically—as pointing forward to his own ministry. “The Lord said to my Lord,” is a way of saying, “God said to my Lord, the Messiah….” Yet, Jesus asks, how the Messiah can be David’s son (derivative of David’s power and authority) if he is David’s Lord? Jesus can be David’s son or David’s Lord, but not both.

This passage teaches us, then, that while Jesus descends from David, he is far greater than David. He is, in fact, the Son of God. (For more on this, see Strauss, Mark, 2014). As the Son of God, he bears qualities of God. He can forgive sins. He has power over the wind and the sea. He is Lord of the Sabbath. He can heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out demons. His is not the kingdom of David, but the kingdom of God, which transcends all earthly rule.

The bystanders hear Jesus with delight because they recognize the truth and weight of his teachings. It is the same for those with ears to hear today. We who follow Jesus can still hear his voice cutting through the noise emanating from the chattering classes. Just as during his earthly ministry, Jesus invites us into a kingdom that comes to bear on, yet transcends, the politics of this world. This is part of what it means to say that he is Lord of all.

Prayer: God, help me to hear your voice and follow in your ways. Teach me what it means to follow you as Lord of all in the midst of a world of competing values and visions of life.

Questions:

1. Why do the scribes misunderstand the nature of the messianic kingdom?

2. How is Jesus’ kingdom different from worldly kingdoms and other political systems?

3. What are the challenges we face in our allegiance to the kingdom of God today?