Friday in the Ninth Week of Ordinary Time, June 5, 2020

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.

We see here some of the expectations the Jewish people had for the Messiah at the time of Christ. The words under contention are taken from Psalm 110.  We see here that the Jews understood this Psalm in terms of a prophecy of the Messiah, the Christ.  Several other psalms were understood in this way as well, Psalm 2, for instance.  

“The Lord said to my lord: Sit at my right until I put your enemies under your feet.”  The point Jesus makes here is that it is King David who is speaking, so this is not an anonymous composer saying that God is speaking to his king.  Since David is speaking, we understand that he is referring to two “lords”.  The first must be God, since he is the most powerful of the two.  But who is the other?  The scribes teach, and Jesus confirms this, that the second “lord” is the Messiah.  The question Jesus asks is, “David himself calls him ‘lord’; so how is he his son?”  That is, to the Jewish way of thinking, the father is always greater than the son, no matter if the son is an adult or not.  The son of a king would address his father as his “lord”.  The second “lord” in the verse, the Messiah, is either not David’s son, or, if he is, then the Messiah must be incomparably greater than the great David — he would have to be the Son of God.  

“The great crowd heard this with delight.”  The crowd understood what Jesus was saying: that the Messiah was their God come to earth, that Jesus and not the scribes explained the psalm, and that therefore Jesus must be the fulfillment of the psalm’s prophecy.  All the scribes could tell the people was that the Messiah was “the son of David”.  They could not say much more, or even interpret the rest of the psalm, which remained a strange puzzle to them and to the people.  The only one who could explain it would be the One to whom it pertained, the Son of God standing revealed before them.