Homily for Friday, Week 9 of Ordinary Time

Homily for Friday
9th Week in Ordinary Time

June 4, 2021
Mark 12: 35-37
Provincial House, New Rochelle, N.Y.

“How do the scribes claim that the Christ is the son of David?” (Mark 12:35).

The gospel readings this week have placed Jesus in contentious dialog with the religious leaders.  Only yesterday’s interaction with an unnamed scribe could be considered friendly.

Today he’s addressing a crowd, a friendly crowd it seems, in the temple.  But the subject is still the scribes, the theologians of the day.  Jesus takes up one of their teachings, a teaching generally accepted:  the Messiah will be descended from King David, will be a son of David.  In fact, on his way up to Jerusalem, Jesus answered to blind Bartimaeus’s appeal to him as the Son of David.

It’s not the title as such that Jesus takes apart in his question today, “How can the Christ be David’s son?”  He uses Ps 110, which we’re all familiar with, to pose a conundrum that he doesn’t resolve directly.  The scribes and everyone in his audience understood that David was the composer of the Psalms (that was their understanding, even if scholars today would refine that opinion considerably), and they all agreed that the Psalms were divinely inspired.  Further, they interpreted Ps 110 as referring to the Messiah.

Given all that, Jesus asks how David, speaking in this psalm, can refer to the Messiah as his lord:  “The Lord God said to my lord,” i.e., to the Messiah, who is thus David’s lord as well as everyone else’s.  How can the Messiah be both David’s son and his lord, his ruler?  Sons are subject to their fathers, not the other way around.

The issue isn’t Jesus’ genealogy—no one disputes his physical descent from the house of David.  The issue is the meaning of his status as David’s son, as Messiah.  He’s not the Christ whom the scribes and the people and his own disciples are expecting.  We saw what they were expecting when Jesus entered Jerusalem.  All this teaching, all these dialogs are taking place in Jesus’ last week, after Palm Sunday.

What will be the relationship between David’s son and the Lord God?  King David, speaking in the psalm, submits to “my lord,” to the Messiah, because the Messiah is God’s agent for inaugurating the kingdom of God, not a new kingdom of David.  The expectations of the scribes, and everyone else, aren’t in sync with Jesus’ role as Messiah, lord not of an earthly kingdom but one in which all human beings submit to God’s rule, until all earthy powers and demonic ones as well are placed under the Messiah’s feet, and he in turn gives all over to the Lord God.

So Jesus is inviting people to reconsider their expectations of the son of David.  How often we have to reconsider our expectations!  Those of us of a certain age remember when there was talk in the province of creating a New England Province and maybe a Southern Province because we had so many Salesians.  Our expectations about new vocations and the perseverance of old vocations weren’t realistic, we can see now.  What should we expect from the realities of today as regards our ministry, as regards the life of the Church?  Actually, we ask those sorts of questions repeatedly when we’re asked to describe, then evaluate a present situation, and then choose some action steps to address it.

All aimed, as Don Bosco used to say, at the glory of God and the salvation of souls.  Or at bringing humanity under the lordship of Christ.