Friday in the Ninth Week of Ordinary Time, June 9, 2023

Mark 12, 35-37

As Jesus was teaching in the temple area he said, “How do the scribes claim that the Christ is the son of David? David himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said: “The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet.’  David himself calls him ‘lord’; so how is he his son?” The great crowd heard this with delight.

The events in the Gospel Reading for today’s Mass take place in the Temple courtyard during the week before the Lord Jesus died on the Cross for us.

“How do the scribes claim that the Christ is the son of David?”  It is easy to miss the significance of what Jesus is asking here.  “How do the scribes claim, etc.”  Though the books of the Jewish Scriptures contain references to the Savior whom God would send into the world, these appear in scattered verses.  To us today, these verses, especially when read st Mass, seem so obvious that we might wonder how the Jews did not recognize the Savior when he came.  But there was no single book of the Scriptures that explained God’s plan for our redemption for the Jews to read and study.  The very idea of a Savior came together very gradually and coalesced in the two hundred or so years before the Birth of our Lord.  Still, those who discerned that a Messiah would come — the Pharisees — projected their own desires onto this Messiah instead of simply accepting him as the Prophets described him.  Thus, they taught that this Messiah would come to save Israel from its enemies, and not that he would save us all from our sins, as the Prophets taught: “The Lord has said to me: You are my son, this day have I begotten you. Ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for your possession” (Psalm 2, 7-8) and “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53, 6).

When Jesus asks, “How do the scribes claim that the Christ is the son of David?”, he is not asking the more general question, How is the Christ the son of David?  The Lord wants to drive a wedge in the people’s minds between what the scribes say about the Messiah and what the Messiah actually is.  He makes the point that the scribes are incorrect about the Messiah being merely the physical descendant of David by examining a psalm long held as pertaining to the Messiah.  “The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet.”  This comes from the first verse of Psalm 110.  Jesus asks, “David himself calls him ‘lord’; so how is he his son?”  That is, to the Israelite way of thinking, the father or ancestor was always superior to the son or descendants.  Therefore, David would not call his son “lord”.  So if this psalm really is about the Messiah, as the scribes claimed, then the Messiah must be greater than David, and cannot, for that reason, be his son.  But how does this square with the belief that the Messiah would be “the son of David”?  The Lord does not address this question as his purpose was simply to show that the opinion of the scribes on the Messiah should be scrutinized and not readily accepted as though it were Scripture.  We know that the answer is that Jesus, the Messiah, the son of David, was both God and man.

“The great crowd heard this with delight.”  The crowd’s reaction may have come from their gladness to see the haughty scribes taken down a peg, but also the ingenious way with which the Lord analyzed the psalm.  The Pharisees and the scribes did not do this.  They commented on the text of the Law and the Prophets but they did not look closely at what the text said.  Again, some of the crowd may have thought that since Jesus came from Nazareth he could not be a “son of David”, but they believed Jesus to be the Messiah anyway.  His analysis of the psalm’s text showed that the Messiah need not be a biological descendent of David but a descendent in his spirit.

We pray that we may always hear the Lord’s words with great delight.