Matthew 22:46 No one could say a word in reply, and from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions.
Many people like to watch game shows. Some of the craziest come from Japan. Those contestants are willing to totally humiliate themselves trying to do the crazy stunts. They play the game for the fun of it, and perhaps a token prize.
Jeopardy is one of the most famous game shows in history. You answer in the form of a question. You get money as a prize, with some notoriety thrown in on the side. I worked with a nurse who won the show twice. She knew lots of facts!
Our text is the end of a first century game show, or at least that is how I am framing it. There is a series of representatives of various opposition groups who come to Jesus with “tricky” questions for Him to answer.
They start by trying to get Jesus to take a political stance against the Roman government. They want Him to advocate resistance to Roman taxes. This is not a good idea! Opposing the rule of Rome brought sever consequences.
Then, just to make things even more interesting and dicy, they bring up a question about marriage and heaven, two very controversial topics. The group that brings this questions doesn’t even believe in heaven!
The third round wants to trap Jesus with the very Law that they hold sacred. They want Jesus to choose what is the most important law, out of all the laws. They were all about keeping the Law, so knowing which had priority of application would help settle the frequent disputes among their leaders. But they are doing it to prove Jesus didn’t know what He was talking about.
For the Lightning Round, Jesus gets to ask them a question. You see, Jesus had answered their three questions in such a way that they were silenced. They didn’t stand a chance of rebuttal. Jesus had shown their motives and the weakness of their attempts to trip Him up.
Jesus question to them went right to the heart of their theology about the coming Messiah, the One promised since the beginning who would set all things right again. Jesus asks about the Messiah’s lineage. “Whose sin is he?”
Now this seems to modern ears as not much of an issue. Back then they would have automatically said, “David.” The Scriptures had declared that Messiah would be of the line of David. This was the obvious answer.
But Jesus throws a twist into their thinking. He asks a question about lineage and then shows from their scriptures, Psalm 110:1 in particular, that David called the Messiah Lord. Now this would never happen in the natural realm. A father would never call his son “Master.” Elders were respected to the Nth degree.
But that Psalm says even more. In the Hebrew of that Psalm, the original language, the first “Lord” is the proper name for God that was revealed to the Jewish nation. It is translated and represented as LORD, all caps, in the text of that Paslm in our modern bibles.
The Creator of the Universe (LORD) tells the psalmist (David) that David’s master is commanded to “Sit at my right hand.” David’s master is in the position of power in the universe. He is seated with God in the heavenly realms. David calls him “Lord, Master.”
Jesus then brings it to a conclusion, David isn’t the father of the Messiah. The Messiah has an ancestry that is before David himself.
And all Jesus’ contestants are silenced. They can’t answer Jesus’ wisdom and understanding of the Scriptures, even though they have the wisdom of all the centuries of scholarship of the Jewish community at their beck and call. They have missed a most obvious point. The Messiah is of a different nature than David. He is Emmanuel, God with us.
The Arnold Journey 