David Called Him Lord

Jesus has spent the day being questioned by people hoping he would slip. The chief priests wanted to know where he got his authority. The Pharisees and the Herodians came with a coin and a question about taxes, and the Sadducees came behind them with a riddle about a widow who had buried seven brothers. One scribe asked him something honest, about which commandment came first, and after that the questions stopped. He is still in the temple courts teaching, and this time the question is his.

How can the scribes say that the Christ is the Son of David?

The strange part is that the scribes were right. God had promised David a descendant whose kingdom would last, everybody in that courtyard was waiting for him, and blind Bartimaeus had already shouted the title down the Jericho road without Jesus taking it away from him. So this is not a correction. Jesus is saying the answer stops short.

Then he quotes a psalm, and before he gets to the words he tells them who wrote it and under whose influence.

Speaking by the Holy Spirit, David himself declared: 'The Lord said to my Lord, "Sit at My right hand until I put Your enemies under Your feet."'

There are two people in that line. Somebody is being invited to sit at the right hand of the Lord, and David, who is doing the reporting, calls that somebody my Lord.

David himself calls Him 'Lord.' So how can He be David's son?

Honor in that world ran up the family line and did not come back down it. A son honored his father, a grandson honored the man his father honored, and nobody addressed a descendant of his own as though the descendant outranked him. David was not just anybody's ancestor either. He was the king the whole hope was named after, and here he speaks to a son not yet born as his master. The sentence works if the son was somehow there before him, and it does not work otherwise.

Jesus lets it sit. He does not close the argument or tell the scribes what they ought to conclude, any more than he did with the coin and Caesar's face on it. He puts the psalm beside the question, and he stops.

Mark ends the scene by looking away from the scribes and at everybody else. The men who came to trap him have run out of things to ask, and the large crowd, Mark says, listened to him with delight.