The Pharisees hadn’t really even considered any other possibilities. They were stuck – and in fact, the Jews, even today, remain stuck – on the idea that the Messiah had to be a political king, just like David. This king would come and lead the people of Israel to freedom, throwing off their conquerors and oppressors and renew their status as an independent political nation and as God’s chosen people.
Jesus, meanwhile, had been showing the Jews, through miracles and through the authority of his teaching, that he had been sent to them by God, the Lord of heaven and earth, and there were several who were now looking to him as their Messiah. Yes, many, if not most of those that believed in him, still believed that he would be the political king that they wanted him to be, even if Jesus continued to show them a different way, a different path. Jesus had no intention to become the political king, the ruler that they expected. He was God himself, on a mission to destroy the power of evil in our world by taking the consequences of sin upon himself, reestablishing his rule and reign in the kingdom of God. He would receive the justice that the rest of us deserved, allowing us all to go free for the sin and rebellion that we have committed, purchasing us instead from the kingdom of darkness to come into the kingdom of light.
The Pharisees and Sadducees had been coming to Jesus to ask him what they believed were difficult questions. Jesus easily handled the questions, amazing the crowds who were listening. But then Jesus decided to ask a question of his own, just to silence these religious “leaders”:
How is it that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls the Messiah Lord?
Jesus is saying that, if the Messiah is the son of David, he wouldn’t call the Messiah Lord. No, the Messiah, in that case, would call David Lord. In that case, David would be the Lord and the Messiah would be his son.
Or said another way, if the Messiah was just a human being, a political leader who would come to lead a human-based, earthly, political kingdom, why in the world would David call him Lord? Yet that is exactly what David did when he wrote Psalm 110, which Jesus quotes back to the Jews:
The Lord said to my Lord:
Matthew 22:44
“Sit at my right hand
until I put your enemies
under your feet.
It wasn’t as if the Jews hadn’t understood this verse as being prophetic, speaking of the coming Messiah. They knew that it was a Psalm that David wrote. They knew that this psalm was speaking of the Messiah, except, like many of the other prophecies, it didn’t fit their preconceived notions of who the Messiah would be. They had developed their own framework, their own idea, of who the Messiah would be, and then they tried to fit the scriptures inside of their structure, their idea of how God’s plan would be worked out. In short, they predetermined who the Messiah would be and then bent the scriptures to fit their own ideas.
Unfortunately, I believe the same thing happens very often to us today. Very often, instead of simply reading what Jesus has to say or trying to understand what he is attempting to explain to us, taking his words at face value, we prefer to put him and his teaching inside of our box. We have a structure for whom we believe the Messiah to be, we have our own idea for whom we believe Jesus to be, and then when we find something that he says that doesn’t conform to that idea, instead of listening to him and conforming our idea to what he has said, we twist and bend what he has said to fit our idea.
Because we do this, we end up far off of the tracks. We end up thinking that Jesus came to serve us. We end up thinking that God’s story is really all about me, and so, just like the Pharisees and Sadducees, we focus instead on the life that we have in this world instead of the eternity that is the true reality for which we should be living.
Yet if we would just live for Jesus, listening to what he has to say and conforming our lives to his word and his teachings, then we would, like the Pharisees and Sadducees would have found if they had just listened to Jesus in their time, find that there is so much more that he offers us. So much more than we could ever begin to imagine because his ways are different from ours. His plans are so much greater than ours. Listening to him, we will align our lives to his plan. Not our ideas nor our own plans, nor the plans of the world. Not the ideas and plans of him who is leading and guiding the system of the world, the evil one, but truly the one that we can call Lord, Jesus himself.
