A LESSON IN LINEAGE

Eighteenth Sunday after TRINITY

11 October, AD 2009

TEXT:  St. Matthew 22: 41 – 46.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.

“If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?  And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.” (St. Matthew 22:45 – 46).

It has been theorized by researchers in the fields of psychology and anthropology that the condition of the entire human race is such that only six degrees of separation divide us from each other.  The theory maintains that all people on earth are connected to one another by no more than six individuals; all people having the potential to know one another on a first name basis through mutual acquaintances.  I suppose this is only natural, since we are all related in some form or fashion by our original parents, Adam and Eve.  Much time and money has been spent on this type of project which has created the desire, in some, to find out their own lineage and there are many professionals who, for a fee, will find out your ancestry and help you find your place in this world-wide “human” web.  We have a question about lineage before us today in the Gospel, but its answer has far more important and eternal implications than who we are and where our ancestors came from.  But we have to, first, set the scene.

Jesus, just previously to our Gospel lection, has put to silence the Scribes, the Sadducees, and now, the Pharisees about such things as taxes to Caesar, the truth of the Resurrection, and the greatest Commandment of the Law – all in attempts by those groups to entrap Jesus and to try and entangle Him in His words so that they can bring, in their eyes, legitimate charges against Him in order to silence Him once and for all.  Jesus, knowing their motivation in each case, has skillfully turned their own arguments against them and defeated them at their own game.  In their confusion about what to do next, Jesus asks the Pharisees a question about who they think the Messiah is.  It is very important that we understand what Jesus does and does not ask.  He doesn’t ask them, “Who do you think I am?” or anything about Himself, personally, like He did with His Apostles.  But, rather, Jesus asks them, what they think is an easy question – “What do you think about the Christ or the Messiah?  Whose son is he?  Without hesitation, the Pharisees answer, “The son of David!”  Case closed, next question.  And then Jesus begins to close the net around His would-be attackers and asks, simply, “Well if that is so, tell me; How is it, then, that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying, “The LORD said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.”?  If then David calls him Lord, how is he (the Lord) his (David’s) son?”  And no one could answer Him a word, nor did anyone dare ask Jesus any more questions.

Why is it that one small verse from Psalm 110 has dumbfounded these legal specialists of the Jewish law?  What is Jesus saying here?  It’s very much true that Psalm 110 was considered by all to be a Messianic Psalm; one that put forward that the Messiah would be of royal descent and, as such, a “son” of David.  II Samuel, a number of other Psalms, Isaiah, and Jeremiah all confirm this fact that the Messiah would be of the house and lineage of David.  On that respect all agree, even Jesus and his adversaries.  But there is more.  And you have to see it to believe it.

In that first verse of Psalm 110, when you look it up, you find that the first LORD is in all capital letters, while in the second “Lord” only the first letter is capitalized.  This is true both for the King James version of the Psalter and for Coverdale’s translation of Psalm 110 in the Prayer Book.  This is no accident.  It was done on purpose.  The first “LORD” in all caps stands for LORD GOD or Yahweh.  So we could say The Lord God Almighty said to David’s Lord, that is, Jesus, sit thou on my right hand, etc.  Jesus is saying to his accusers that the Messiah foretold in Scripture is the son and scion of David, to be sure, but you have to also admit that He is David’s Lord.  In other words, that the Messiah would be both Son of Man and Son of God – that He would be both human and Divine.  This called for either total acceptance or rejection of Jesus as Messiah and Lord.  There could be no middle ground.  Jesus is God Incarnate as God and of the house and lineage of King David as Man!  This is the greatest verbal claim that Jesus ever made.  In it He addresses the Jews’ erroneous conception of who the Messiah would be.  For it is not enough to think of Jesus as a Prince of the Davidic Kingdom, an earthly Prince and conqueror, a leader of earthly armies, you must go beyond that and acknowledge Him as Son of God as well.  For only by the Holy Ghost can anyone proclaim Jesus as Lord.  For in Jesus came not the earthly conqueror who would repeat the earthly military triumphs of King David, but One who was God, Himself, Emmanuel, who would demonstrate to all humanity how much God loved them by sacrificing Himself upon the hard wood of the Cross.  As the great expository scholar and preacher, William Barclay said of this passage,

     “There would be few that day who caught anything like all that Jesus meant; but when Jesus said that, even the densest of them felt the shiver in the presence of the eternal mystery.  They had the awed and uncomfortable feeling that they had heard the voice of God, and for a moment, in this man, Jesus, they glimpsed the very face of God.”

Unfortunately, this was too much for the majority of the Pharisees to bear.  They had been dumb-founded and silenced by this Jesus, this insurrectionist, for the last time.  From now on they would secretly plot to put Jesus to death.  

Just as surely as Jesus posed His question to the Pharisees, He poses it eternally to us.  Although, like a practice test, He gives us the opportunity to work on the answer here on earth as we, hopefully, grow into and understand what it means to be, truly be, a Christian and not just give it lip service while harboring all sorts of secret sins within our soul; which to God aren’t secrets at all!  Our Lord has given us the safety of Holy Mother Church within which are His Holy Word and Sacraments to help us, to feed us, to nourish and guide us to our proclamation of Jesus as Our Lord and Our God.  When we stand before Him in our hour of Death, that is when He will ask us for real, “What think ye of Christ?  Who is He?”  All other “theological” questions are irrelevant until we believe that Jesus is who He said He is.  And the most important question we will ever answer, the one that depends upon where we will spend eternity is what we believe about Jesus Christ.  When that time comes, and it will come for us all, that is when we answer, “You are my Lord and my God.”  Nothing else will do.      

And now, unto God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost be ascribed all might, majesty, power, and dominion as is most justly due this day both now and forever; world without end.  Amen.

SOLI DEO GLORIA – JEU+