How Christ used David's Psalm to expose the misconceptions of his enemies
Christ’s question about David’s 'Lord' revealed the their inability to recognise the divine Person who stood before them.
Christ’s question about David’s ‘Lord’ revealed the their inability to recognise the divine Person who stood before them.
Editor’s Notes
This chapter continues on directly from the previous – for more context, see Part I of the previous chapter.
In this first part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Christ reveals that the Jews’ fundamental error lay in failing to recognise His divine Person united in two natures.
That their blindness to both His humiliation and exaltation blocked their conversion, despite Scripture’s witness and His miracles.
Why His choice of Psalm 109 was deliberate: it pointed to His triumph over enemies and divine enthronement.
He shows us that the mystery of the Incarnation is the key to understanding both His earthly abasement and His eternal kingship.
The Son of David
Passiontide, Part I
Chapter X
St. Matt. xxii. 34-40; St. Mark xii. 28-34
Story of the Gospels, § 140
Burns and Oates, London, 1887
Why did Our Lord ask, ‘What think you of Christ, whose Son is he?’
How Christ used David’s Psalm to expose the misconceptions of his enemies
The point insisted upon
An inadequate conception of what Christ was to be and of what our Lord the true Christ was, lay at the bottom of all the errors of the Jews. They could not understand the humiliation of the Son of God nor the exaltation of the Son of Man. The truth which they could not fathom was the Unity of the Divine Person in two natures. And yet all their Scriptures bore witness to the truth that Christ was to be both God and Man, Man that He might suffer, God that He might redeem.
Although the Psalm which our Lord here quotes is so full of the highest doctrine, and although the more thoughtful minds among those who heard Him on this occasion may have taken in the whole, or at least some part, of the great range of truth which it set before His own mind, the words which He cited in particular did not go beyond one point, out of many which belong to the context.
But it is significant that that point suggested immediately by the words should have been just what it was. It spoke of the enemies of our Lord being made His footstool, that is, put under His feet, by the action of the Father, while He himself was sitting in majesty at the Father’s right hand. It might have been possible to choose some other text of Sacred Scripture as speaking of the exaltation of the Incarnate Son without any distinct reference to this triumph over His enemies. But that would not have placed that triumph and victory so pointedly before the minds of the audience, and we may therefore suppose that the selection of the passage had also some designed reference to the rejection of the Son of David by some who would afterwards be forced, against their will, to acknowledge His power.
This is the point which our Blessed Lord chooses to set before the minds of the Chief Priests and Pharisees on this occasion, while in His own Sacred Heart He was counting over all the numberless issues and fruits of His great Sacrifice in time and in eternity. Thus this question seems to carry on that contemplation of His Sacrifice, which had been uppermost in His mind all through the days which were now wearing on to the final consummation of the great counsel of the redemption of the world, at the same time that it held out, to the better disposed among the hearers, a solution of the chief difficulties which prevented their conversion.
True, it seemed to suggest, your Messias is the Son of David, but He is much more, and if He were no more than a Son of David in the sense which you attach to the words, it would be of little use to your souls. He is the Son of David, but He is also David’s Lord, and to be exalted to the throne of power at the right hand of God, and when He comes men will certainly fail to understand Him if they do not begin by recognizing in Him a Divine Person as well as a Human Teacher.
The Jews, to whom our Lord spoke, had abundant evidence, as He had over and over again told them, that His words were to be received as the words of a Divine Messenger, for His Mission was accredited by the most undoubted miracles as well as by the witness of prophecy and the contemporaneous testimony of the Baptist, and in other ways His appearance as a Man was nothing against the truth which He proclaimed of Himself that He was the Son of God.
That is, He was such as the Messias was foretold to be.
What follows is Coleridge’s harmonisation of the different Gospel accounts, with a particular view to the timing in Holy Week.
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