Matthew 22

⁴¹ Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, ⁴² saying, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” ⁴³ He said to them, “How is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying, ⁴⁴ “‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet”’? ⁴⁵ If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?” ⁴⁶ And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

In a 1957 article in Christianity Today entitled “I Believe: The Deity of Christ,” Andrew W. Blackwood wrote:

At Yale in 1955 a distinguished bishop of a major evangelical denomination delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching. In the midst of much sound material about God’s Good News came a paragraph that seems to have escaped public attention. The brilliant lecturer voiced dissent from a recent statement by the World Council about “Jesus as God.” That statement may have originated on the Continent, where the majority of leading theologians believe in Christ’s Deity. Not so the bishop.

The statement does not please me, and it seems far from satisfactory. I would much prefer to have it say that God was in Christ, for I believe that the testimony of the New Testament taken as a whole is against the doctrine of the deity of Christ, although I think it bears overwhelming witness to the divinity of Jesus (p. 125).

Blackwood, commenting on the bishop’s words, wrote:

If this were the teaching of many New Testament scholars today, and if I had to follow them, I should exclaim: “They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him!”[1]

I should as well! Why? Because the deity of Jesus Christ is taught in numerous different ways in the scriptures, our passage being one of the more important ones.

Jesus decides to end the shenanigans of His opponents.

Jesus has allowed Himself to be subjected to the ill-intentioned questions of His opponents for long enough. Now we read:

⁴¹ Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question…

Notice, first, that Jesus asks the Pharisees a question as they “were gathered together.” He does not need to go after the weakest member of the herd who has separated himself. Rather, Jesus will take all comers here.

Secondly, the question signals Jesus’ decision to end this tactic of the opposition. And, indeed, the question He will ask does end it. “Jesus now turns the tables on his questioners,” observes Craig Blomberg.[2] Michael Card observes even more pointedly, “You begin to get the feeling that Jesus has had just about enough by now.”[3] Put another way, Jesus has allowed His opponents to feel as if they were on the offensive, but, in reality, Jesus has always been completely in charge. Now He will unveil His superiority in a question that truly stumps them into silence and, tellingly, ends their questions, as we see in verse 46:

⁴⁶ And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

A wise move indeed!

Jesus forces them to an uncomfortable conclusion about who He really is.

Even so, Jesus’ coming question was not merely tactical. It was also part of the stock and trade of teachers of the time. Craig Keener makes the interesting observation that “Jewish teachers often asked didactic questions that functioned as ‘haggadic antinomy,’ in which both sides of a question were correct but their relationship needed to be resolved.”[4] In a moment, we will see how “both sides [of the] question were correct,” but, for now, let us observe that Jesus indeed felt that the Pharisees needed to “resolve” the issue at hand. The issue being the true identity and nature of Jesus.

⁴¹ Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, ⁴² saying, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” ⁴³ He said to them, “How is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying, ⁴⁴ “‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet”’? ⁴⁵ If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?” ⁴⁶ And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

The progression of what is happening here is plain enough:

• Jesus asks whose son “the Christ” (i.e, the Messiah) is.
• The Pharisees respond by saying that the Christ would be David’s son.
• Jesus points out that David himself had “in the Spirit” called the Christ “Lord.”
• The Pharisees cannot answer Him and asked no more questions.

When Jesus quoted David, He was quoting David from Psalm 110:1. Here is that psalm in its entirety.

¹ The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”² The Lord sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your enemies! ³ Your people will offer themselves freely on the day of your power, in holy garments; from the womb of the morning, the dew of your youth will be yours. ⁴ The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, “You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.” ⁵ The Lord is at your right hand; he will shatter kings on the day of his wrath. ⁶ He will execute judgment among the nations, filling them with corpses; he will shatter chiefs over the wide earth. ⁷ He will drink from the brook by the way; therefore he will lift up his head.

Psalm 110 is a messianic psalm in which the Lord refers to the Messiah as Lord. He is also depicted in this psalm as the ruler, as powerful, as “a priest forever,” as the shatterer of kings, and as the one who will bring judgment. This is a crucial psalm for helping us understand who Jesus is. Psalm 110 is appealed to by both Peter in his Pentecost sermon (Acts 2:34) and by the writer of Hebrews to distinguish Jesus from angels: “And to which of the angels has he ever said, “‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet’?” (Hebrews 1:13).

The point is clear enough: in one sense the Christ is the son of David, yes, but, in another sense, on the basis of Psalm 110, He is so much more. In fact, He is Lord! Notice that, in our text, Jesus does not even press explicitly the point that He is the Christ, the Messiah. He speaks simply of “the Christ,” almost, seemingly, in the abstract. But the point was clearly not lost on them: Jesus was claiming to be Lord, to be God! He was not speaking in the abstract at all, and he knew it!

Here we have, then, one of the great assertions of the deity of Jesus Christ. He is the Christ who is called Lord by the Lord God in Psalm 110. As we will see, He does not deny that He is the son of David. He simply denies that He is only the son of David! This is the “haggadic antimony” spoken of earlier: both sides are true. But they need to see the other side! He is Lord!

John Chrysostom said of Jesus’ approach in these verses that Jesus here “is now quietly leading them to the point of confessing that he is God” so that “his true identity and divinity might be more clearly recognized.” The unknown author of an ancient commentary on the book of Matthew wrote of these verses that Jesus “was ready to show them that it was not a man who was tempted [by the questioning Pharisees and Sadducees] but God, whom no one is able to tempt.”[5]

Blackwood points out that “Pliny the Younger (died c. 113 A.D.), not a believer, wrote about early Christians as gathering before daybreak to ‘sing in turn a hymn of praise to God.’”[6] I observe as well that in the Alexamenos Graffito (a famous 3^rd century anti-Christian graffiti in Rome), the young man, Alexamenos, is depicted as worshiping Christ crucified (mockingly depicted in the graffiti as having the head of a donkey), with the words “Alexamenos worships his God” scratched underneath. It is a strange and sad thing when even pagans understand the content of Christian faith more than many liberal theologians.

Jesus indeed leads the Pharisees to a conclusion that is both uncomfortable and unavoidable: He is Lord and God!

Jesus establishes not only His deity but His humanity.

I mentioned earlier Craig Keener’s observation that Jesus is employing a common teaching technique in this passage: “‘haggadic antinomy,’ in which both sides of a question were correct but their relationship needed to be resolved.” Now we can understand what is meant by “both sides of a question” being correct. Namely, Jesus is not denying that He is the son of David. He is rather saying that He is more than the son of David. He is also the Son of God! Both sides are correct, but their relationship needs to be resolved.

Why do we say that Jesus is not denying that He is the son of David? Jesus is frequently called the “son of David” by those who address Him—by the two blind men (Matthew 9:27), by “the people” (Matthew 12:23), by the Canaanite woman (Matthew 15:22), by “the crowds” (Matthew 21:9), by “the children” (Matthew 21:15)—without correcting them. What is more, in Matthew 1, Matthew himself begins his gospel with an acknowledgment of this fact:

¹ The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

Furthermore, when the angel Gabriel speaks to Mary in Luke 1, he refers to Jesus as the son of David:

³² He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David

Jesus is not, then, saying that the Pharisees are wrong in what they say. He is saying that what they say is incomplete and that they do not even seem to understand the part they get right! Jesus is no mere political figure, no mere king, for that matter. He is son of David. He is Son of God!

It is a beautiful thing that our passage presents both of these, for they help flesh out a robust and full vision of who Jesus Christ is. Consider:

• Son of David: Jesus is fully human.
• Lord: Jesus is fully God.

Here we have the New Testament foundation for the theological category of “Christology,” or our doctrine of Christ. Jesus is fully God and fully man, Son of God and son of David. The Nicene Creed captures this beautifully when it says:

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.

Even stronger is the Creed of Chalcedon from the mid-fifth century:

Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin; as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the God-bearer; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.

Yes, this can be theologically dizzying stuff! Even so, it is born out of the point to which Jesus was driving the Pharisees: He is a man, yes, but He is Lord. Fully God and fully man!

I think few people expressed the implications of our passage quite as beautifully as Saint Augustine, who saw in these verses evidence of both the deity and humanity of Jesus. He wrote:

            Thus you have heard that Christ is both David’s Son and David’s Lord: David’s Lord always, David’s Son in time. David’s Lord, born of the substance of his Father; David’s Son, born of the Virgin Mary, conceived by the Holy Spirit. Let us hold fast both. The one of them will be our eternal habitation; the other is our deliverance from our present exile.[7]

It is no wonder, then, that the Pharisees asked no more questions. Tragically, they did not stop their plotting. Regardless, for us, we do not come to interrogate Jesus, but to marvel in wonder and worship in awe! King of kings and Lord of lords! This Jesus is amazing!

 

[1] https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1957/october-14/i-believe-deity-of-christ.html

[2] Blomberg Craig L. Matthew. The New American Commentary. Gen. ed. David S. Dockery. Vol. 22 (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 19920), p.336.

[3] Michael Card. Matthew. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013), p.199.

[4] Craig Keener, Matthew. The IVP New Testament Commentary Series. 1 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), p.330.

[5] Simonetti, Manlio. Matthew 14–28. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Gen. Ed. Thomas C. Oden. New Testament Ib (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), p.160.

[6] https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1957/october-14/i-believe-deity-of-christ.html

[7] Simonetti, Matthew 14–28, p.161.