Whose Son is the Messiah?

        Only about two days before the crucifixion, Mark tells us, “Jesus was teaching in the temple courts.” After Herod’s reconstruction of the temple, these were huge flat areas outside but surrounding the temple building itself. Most were open to the sky, but there were also four covered sections on the perimeter, the eastern of which was Solomon’s Colonnade (John 10:22), above the Kidron Valley. 

        As He was teaching, again in Mark’s words, “the large crowd listened to him with delight.” (12:37) This is intriguing. Just what was He teaching them? For the people to be ‘filled with delight’, it must have been something they enjoyed—nothing accusatory, nothing harsh, nothing to condemn them. Possibly what they learned that day was a true understanding of the law and how its burden could be lifted. They may have learned to understand the prophets better. They may even have learned whose son the Messiah would be. In fact, this is the question Jesus raised, but apparently left unanswered. 

        In three simple verses (Mark 12:35-37), Jesus touches on prophecy of the Messiah, His incarnation, and His ultimate victory. It’s delightful to see the puzzle Jesus raised. As an aside, Gary Weeks did a similar thing in his book, Could You Ever Love Me Again? Gary asked, “How can a person born once, die twice; and a person born twice, die once?” 

     But, to get back to Jesus’ puzzle… Surprisingly, the teachers of the law were right. The problem was that they weren’t following through. To be true to Scripture, they should have looked more closely at Psalm 110. 

        It is a psalm of David. In the first verse, the LORD, God, Jehovah speaks, and He speaks to David’s Lord. And David’s Lord is sitting at God’s right hand, until a battle has been fought and a victory gained. The apparent impossibility in this text is for David to call any of his descendants, ‘Lord’. It should always be his descendants calling him, ‘Lord’. 

        But where does it say that Messiah is David’s son? For that we have to go to several Old Testament scriptures that start with a wider focus—a descendant of Judah (Gen.49:10), of the house of David (Isa.9:7), in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2), of a virgin (Isa.7:13, 14). The teachers of the law knew all this—they could have gone through all these prophecies, checked them off, one by one, and known that Jesus was the fulfillment. Why didn’t they? It seems they just weren’t ready to humble themselves, unlike Nicodemus. Pride and power-hunger held them back. Getting back to the crowd and their experience—how delighted we are too, as we work our way through the stories of Jesus. He walked on water, He calmed the waves, He raised the widow’s son in Nain, He healed the madman of Gerasa. This is the Man who is our Lord, too. We belong to Him. ‘Delighted’ is hardly enough (Are we getting too mystical‽) —we have a better word— ‘thrilled’, ‘captivated’, even ‘enraptured’, might be our choice.