David himself calls him ‘lord,’ how comes it, then, that he is to be his son?”
The mass of the people listened to Jesus with delight.
how delightful
watching bigwigs squirmnew synonyms muddy old waters
old verities collide into new elementsthat beyond our ken
resides within our loinsprevious assumptions
break open when talked throughwatching systems change
how unsettling
Jesus has found a fault line in the scriptures that were currently in use about the Messiah. What had been a tool to keep the Messiah just out of reach, has been flipped and the crowd goes wild—a rookie has bested the veterans. The heartbreak of defeat has turned into the release of victory.
Of course one set-up battle is not a proven way to win a war.
To catch a better glimpse of what was at stake in the gotcha sermon illustration, listen to Myers164,
In the Temple again, Jesus finally addresses the question of Davidic Messianism directly. Here “sonship” has to do not with genealogy, but with political ideology. The scribes assumed that the Messiah would act to restore the Davidic monarchy, and that this would further aggrandize their own position. But citing Psalm 110, Jesus reverses the equation: Even David is subordinate to the sovereignty of God. Jesus has no interest in rehabilitating the old dreams of Davidic empire, for it is the politics of domination that is the problem.
Wright174, keeps it a bit more within the usual lines of expectation but still extends the question of the vehicle through which G*D’s presence will have effect in the world,
What we find…is a challenge to the idea that the Messiah will be simply a king from David’s line. He will be David’s Lord as well as David’s son.
Humans like to set up rules about how things will be set right again, where both justice and mercy are experienced as parallel concepts. One tradition has been about bloodlines and so Jesus must be born in David’s royal city and be a Davidic descendant through his absent father, Joseph. This scene questions a Reader’s requirements for healing individuals and whole systems—dominion or partnership?