(Ben Chidester)
Matthew 22:41-46 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, 42saying, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” 43He 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”’?
45If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?” 46And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.
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If there was anything admirable about the Pharisees, it was their very serious concern for keeping the Law. That in itself would be good and right, but in their zeal, they had lost sight of the true teaching and intention of the Law – you could say they were so concerned with the letter of the Law, they had lost sight of the spirit. To keep themselves from transgressing the “letter,” they had set up many of their own additional rules and traditions around the Law. The problem was that they had become more concerned about their own rules than the Law itself.
This error was also manifested in their extensive reflection upon specific ethical dilemmas. For example, the Law did not specifically address the morality of paying taxes to the Romans. Was paying taxes to a foreign government in keeping with the Law? Again, such reflection was in itself admirable, but the Pharisees had become so focused on being “right” about these specific dilemmas, that they had lost sight of the underlying spirit of the Law and that which it clearly taught. It is easy to get tangled in the weeds of such dilemmas and questions that you lose the forest for the trees.
It is this error that Jesus challenged them on in his question about Psalm 110. The Pharisees had asked Jesus several challenging questions about the Law, hoping to “entangle him in his words,” as we were told in verse 15 from earlier in the chapter. Probably, they thought that Jesus had not reflected upon these dilemmas as much as they had and would not be able to answer as carefully as was needed. He met their challenge and silenced them with his wisdom and authority. Now it was his turn to question them.
If they cared so much about the Law and the Scriptures, if they examined it as earnestly and closely as they would have others believe, then surely they would have reflected on this perplexing psalm. The psalm is prophetic about the Messiah, the Christ, which was generally understood. The Christ “sits at the right hand” of God, indicating his power and rule, which the psalm goes on to describe. What makes the psalm perplexing is that David, its author, the great King of Israel, addresses the Christ as his Lord, signifying that this figure would be of a higher rank even than him, despite being his descendant. How could that be?
Surely, the Pharisees, if they had studied the Scriptures earnestly, would have known of this seeming difficulty and would have reflected upon it, just as they had these other moral dilemmas, but they have no answer. They claimed that they were students of the Law, but the important, weighty matters of Scripture they had not cared to study. If they had, they would have known that the Christ was to be someone greater than a mere man – even God himself – and they would have recognized that that one was Jesus.
A lesson for us from this interaction between Jesus and the Pharisees is that we should not get distracted from searching and studying the Scriptures earnestly, and seeking to see Jesus in them. It is tempting, just like it was to the Pharisees, to get caught up in curious questions of theology or ethics. Reflection upon such things is not bad in itself – it is, in fact, good and right. But let them not distract us from earnestly seeking Jesus himself. We will never come to the right answers to such profound questions if we seek them apart from him. And let us keep seeking to know the Scriptures sincerely and to see Jesus in them – in the Psalms, like Psalm 110, in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets – everywhere. Let us not get distracted, as the Pharisees did, by vain speculation or content ourselves with a surface-level knowledge. Let us dig into the Scriptures earnestly, that we might see Jesus there, which is their true and ultimate meaning.
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An audio version of each devotion will be posted on our church podcast “Life Together at CRPC,” which is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.