Matt 22:41–46 — Whose Son Is the Christ?

Whose Son Is the Christ?

The context of this passage in Matthew 22 is that Jesus has been challenged by representatives of various theological groups or sects within Judaism of this time. These different sects would be the Jewish Nationalists, that is the discussion over paying taxes to Caesar, the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection, and then thirdly, the Pharisees. And so we are now in the third group.

Jesus is being challenged by the Pharisees. One of the Pharisees, a lawyer, an expert in the law, had asked Jesus, which is the great commandment? And he gave his teaching on the great commandment to love the Lord with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. But then, in our text, in verse 41, Jesus turns the tables, and Jesus lays down a challenge for these various groups, especially the Pharisees, but also the other groups within Judaism.

This is the ultimate challenge. What do you think about the Christ? What do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he? It is very interesting that we have these almost we would consider to be like seminary level debates that are happening in this whole passage here. Seminary level theological discussions over how to interpret the Bible, how to interpret the scriptures. Is the Bible all about Jewish nationalism and about getting rid of the Romans and setting up a Jewish state? Is that what the Bible’s all about?

Jesus says, no, my kingdom is not of this world. My kingdom is a heavenly kingdom. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Render to God the things that are God’s. Is the Bible just a code of civil law as the Sadducees thought? without any deeper sense of union and communion with God that could even persist after death? Is there an afterlife? The Sadducees said no. They just viewed the Old Testament as just being the Mosaic law, as just being a civil code, an eye for an eye, and all of the laws of the Mosaic law concerning who should be punished for what crimes. But they had no sense that God was revealing his law to his people for the purpose of advancing the covenant of grace And so Jesus reminds them of this wonderful truth that God is the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.

And that covenant formula, that he is the God of his people, is something that implies a covenant relationship and a union and communion that goes beyond this life. It goes beyond the civil code of the Jewish law. It goes beyond how to implement the law within society. It goes beyond that to a higher reality that even goes beyond death and into the resurrection itself. Is the Bible then simply a civil code? No, it is a covenant communion between God and his people that lasts forever.

But now we come to this most fundamental question of all. Jesus says these are all very important hermeneutical issues, that is how to interpret, hermeneutics has to do with how to interpret the Bible. These are very important theological and hermeneutical issues. But the ultimate question, the ultimate question of theology, the ultimate question of hermeneutics, the ultimate question of seminary level theological discussion is Who is Christ?

Who is Jesus? Whose son is he? Is he merely the son of David according to the flesh, or is he the eternal son of God? Jesus here lays down the gauntlet. He says these are all important discussions, very important theological debates, but the most important thing is how do you interpret the Bible and its teaching about Christ? Who is the Christ?

And what is so amazing to me about this is that in doing this, in turning the tables, Jesus presents himself as A theologian, in a sense, right? I mean, it seems a little bit odd to think in those terms. We do not think of Jesus as being a theologian or a biblical scholar.

But that is what he is doing. He is presenting himself as the ultimate prophet, the ultimate biblical interpreter and theologian. And he is teaching theology from the Bible. And he is teaching the ultimate important core issue of theology, which is Christology, that is, who is Christ. A lot of people think that theology, that is just for the seminarians. Theology puffs up. It is just for pride. It is just head knowledge. It has nothing to do with personal relationship with God. It is not practical. The early church and the teaching of Jesus himself is not about theology. Jesus himself was just a teacher of how to live a good life. He taught morality, taught good values. He taught to love your neighbor. He basically taught to just be nice.

And that is what people think. They think of Jesus as this non-theological teacher of how to live a good life. And they think of theology as something completely separate. That is a later development after the church, you know, when Constantine was converted and then the church began to get all theological and develop creeds and confessions and systematic theology. And so this is a later thing and it is completely separate from what it really means to be a follower and a disciple of Jesus.

But Jesus did not think of it that way. Jesus thought that theology was important, that biblical interpretation is important. He not only teaches theology, and specifically Christology, who he is, but he also teaches it from the Bible. He exegetes this passage from Psalm 110. where he quotes the Old Testament, he quotes the Bible itself in order to make an argument concerning a theological point. Jesus did not think that theology is simply head knowledge that has nothing to do with our relationship with God, that it is simply this later development after things got all off track and lost that living relationship with Christ. No, he thinks that theology is absolutely important.

He says, for example, in John 17, verse three, this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. He says, this is eternal life that you may know. This knowledge of God, to know God and to know who Christ is in relation to God. This is not just some side thing. It is not just for the seminary students. It is not just some, you know, intellectual game that people play over here. This is eternal life itself. to know God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.

This knowledge of God, that is what theology is, it is simply the knowledge of God. This knowledge of God as the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is eternal life itself. We should not be surprised by this because just in the preceding paragraph, the one we looked at last week, in which we read for the call to confession earlier in the service, Jesus said that the first and greatest commandment is what?

It is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. That is theology, loving God with all your mind. How can you love God with your mind unless you know who he is? And how can you know who he is unless you study the revelation of who he is in his word? That is exegesis or biblical interpretation. And that is what theology is. We have all these big words for it, hermeneutics, theology, but these are all just ways of saying knowing God as he has revealed himself in the scripture. To love the Lord with all your mind means that you must study scripture and you must study how God has revealed himself in scripture. And so Jesus here goes toe to toe with the greatest Bible scholars and theologians of his day.

The Divine Son of David

And he brings up an issue, he brings up a text, Psalm 110 verse one. And he brings it up, and he asks the theologians and the scholars of rabbinic Judaism, he asks them, how do you interpret this verse? How do you interpret it? If the Messiah is simply a man, if he is simply the son of David, then why is it that David inspired by the Spirit as he is writing this psalm, calls the Messiah his Lord. The Lord said to my Lord, and the my there is David. David is speaking. The Lord said, Yahweh, God, said to my Lord. David then is referring to the Messiah as his Lord.

And so Jesus goes toe to toe with the Bible scholars and theologians of his day, and raises up this key hermeneutical question of how do you interpret this passage? And interestingly, in verse 46, it says, so compelling, so authoritative is the theological teaching of Jesus that no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions. This was the final response. He did not even say anything. He just simply asked a question, but he raised the text. He brought up this passage, raised the question, and by implication is affirming his own deity. And so what do we see from this passage about Jesus the theologian?

We see two things. We see the high Christology of Jesus, and we also see the Christocentric hermeneutic of Jesus. The high Christology of Jesus means his understanding of who the Messiah is. Christology means the study of the Christ. The Christ is the Messiah. And so even though he is talking about himself, he is doing Christology. He is making theological pronouncements that we would call Christology. And then we will look in a second on the second major point, which is that Jesus not only has a Christology, he also has a hermeneutic. He has a way of interpreting the Bible, a lens through which he reads the scriptures. And his hermeneutic is Christocentric.

Let us look first at the high Christology of Jesus, as opposed to the low Christology of The Pharisees, low Christology means that they simply thought that the Messiah was the son of David, just a mere man. Yes, David had a son named Solomon, Solomon had a son, and there is this line of Davidic kings that come down and eventually God will bring in the Messiah, who will be one of the descendants of David, as God had promised to David. Remember in the Davidic Covenant, it is recorded in 2 Samuel 7, God promised David that he would never lack a man to sit upon his throne. that there would come a day when David would have a great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson who would come and who would sit upon the throne of Israel and restore the kingdom to Israel. But the Sadducees and the Pharisees especially, the Sadducees of course because they denied the resurrection, but the Pharisees too, even though they believed in the resurrection, had a very low Christology.

They viewed the Messiah who is to come as merely the son of David. That is what we see in our text. When Jesus asked them, what do you think about the Messiah? Whose son is he? They said to him, the son of David. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows that when the Messiah comes, he will be the literal offspring of King David, as prophesied in the Davidic covenant.

But Jesus then says, if that is true, if he is merely the son of David, if he is merely a human being, then how is it that David could say that he is his Lord? You would expect that David, if he is received this wonderful promise from God that he is going to have a descendant one day who would sit upon his throne, who would be the Messiah, but then how is it that this very David, who received that promise, would refer to him, not as my son or a great, great, great, great grandson, but as my Lord.

That is the fundamental issue that Jesus brings out from this text. The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet. Clearly this is a messianic prophecy because it is referring to the day when the Davidic king, the Messiah, is going to sit at the right hand of God and all of his enemies will be put under his feet. That is a kingly office that is being described there. And David is clearly referring to that hope that one day his offspring would sit at God’s right hand and would have this glorious kingdom where all of his enemies are under his feet.

But the question is, if he is the son of David only, if he is only a man, how is it that he can call him Lord? And so the response to Jesus’s question, whose son is he, clearly demands the answer, he is not just the son of David, Because of this text in Psalm 110, he is not just the son of David, yes he is that, but he is much more than that. He is also the son of God. The son of God is the implied answer to Jesus’ question.

And this fits in with the whole context of the Gospel of Matthew, right? From the very beginning. When Jesus was in the womb of the Virgin Mary, the angel said that he will be called Emmanuel, which means God with us. And then at the baptism of Jesus, the voice of God the Father from heaven said, this is my beloved son. And that same statement was repeated at the transfiguration of Jesus in Matthew 17. And Jesus himself takes up this term that he is the son of God onto his own lips in Matthew chapter 21, in the parable of the wicked tenants, where he says that the owner of the vineyard is going to send various messengers to get the fruit, but they mistreated them. And then finally, this is Matthew 21, 37, And remember, this is Jesus himself speaking this parable.

Finally, he sent his son to them, saying, they will respect my son. So Jesus here, although he is speaking in terms of the parable, not the application, is clearly applying this concept to himself that he is the son of God. And here then is a climactic statement where Jesus affirms that he is the son of God. Now, what does this title, Son of God, mean? What does that mean to say that he is God’s son? Well, the key issue here is it has to do with ontology. Now, ontology is another one of those big words like theology and hermeneutics, but it simply means the concept of being. Ontology has to do with what is the essence of something? What is it?

Saying that Jesus is the Son of God is a way of affirming his deity. Just as saying he is the son of man affirms his humanity, saying that he is the son of God affirms his deity. And the key concept here is that there is this idea in not only the Bible, but just in everyday experience, that like begets like, right? The son of a lion is a lion. Not a cow or a pig, right? The son of a lion is a lion. The essence of the offspring of something is to have that same essence, right? Like begets like. And so also we could say that just as the son of a lion is a lion, the son of God is God.

And that is exactly what Jesus is affirming here. He is teaching this high Christology as opposed to the low Christology of the Sadducees and the Pharisees and the Jewish leaders of the day who thought that the Messiah would just be a man, a mere man like David, who will come, raise an army, throughout the Romans and restored the kingdom to Israel. And Jesus says, no, the Messiah is far more than a man. Yes, he is a man, he is the Son of Man, but he is also the Son of God. This, of course, fits in with the broader theme throughout the Gospel of Matthew that we have seen before, where Jesus will refer to various institutions in the Old Testament, and he’ll say, something greater is here. Remember when he said that something greater than the temple is here? That was back in Matthew 12. Or something greater than Solomon is here. He is referring to himself. He is the greater temple. He is the greater Solomon.

So also here, by implication, he is not denying his Davidic identity, that he is the son of David. In fact, the Gospel of Matthew makes that very clear as well, just on the human level, that he is the son of David. We saw that back before the triumphal entry with the two blind men calling out to Jesus as Jesus is leaving the city of Jericho, and they called out to him and called him the son of David. Son of David, have mercy upon us. We also see it at the very beginning of the Gospel of Matthew in the genealogy of Jesus, that he is the son of David. But he is not just the son of David, he is far greater, something greater than David is here. He is not only a true man, he is also true God. Like begets like, the son of God is God.

You know, it is funny that a lot of people, they tend to think of the Gospel of Matthew by looking at the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7 is one of the most famous passages in the Gospel of Matthew. It is unique because the other three Gospels do not quite have that same sermon on the mount the way Matthew does. Some of the teaching of Jesus is repeated in the Gospel of Luke, but it is really Matthew that sets out this clear three-chapter long presentation of the teaching of Jesus. But it is very easy And it is very common for people to think of that in a very limited sense, to think of the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount in a very limited sense, as I mentioned a moment ago, as just being a good moral teacher.

Reading Scripture through Christ

You should love your neighbor as yourself. You should do to others as you would have them do to you, Matthew 7, verse 12. You should not worry about your life, and you should not be anxious about what you are going to wear and what you are going to eat, because God will provide for you just as he provides for the birds of the heavens. And so it is very easy to reduce the teaching of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew down to just simply good moral precepts, maybe something similar to the meditations of Marcus Aurelius.

Just some good nuggets of wisdom and truth that could be applied to anyone. without seeing the context in which the Sermon on the Mount is placed. It is placed in the context of this high Christology. This high Christology, this high view of Jesus is more than just a man. He is not just a prophet who is simply giving us good moral teaching. He is the Son of God.

In fact, you can even see that in the Sermon on the Mount itself, because do you remember how he ends the Sermon on the Mount? He ends the Sermon on the Mount, the very last section, the very last paragraph in Matthew 7, by saying, whoever hears these words of mine and does them will be like a man who built his house on the rock. And when the winds of the day of judgment came, his house stood firm. But whoever rejects these teachings of mine will be like the foolish man who built his house in the sand, and in the day of judgment, his house was wiped away. What moral teacher, Marcus Aurelius, Confucius, whoever you could think of in the world, what moral teacher would say that your eternal destiny hangs on how you respond to my teaching? Clearly, he is making a claim that is far more than any philosopher or moralist teacher out there. He is making the claim to be the divine son of God. He is a supernatural being. He is not simply a mere man.

Some people also have the impression, mistakenly, that of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that John, the Gospel of John, the fourth Gospel, is the one that really has this high, exalted view of Christ as the eternal Son of God. as the divine Christ, whereas the other three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they are more focused on the human side, and they do not really get into this high Christology of Jesus being the divine Son of God. But that is not true.

The Gospel of Matthew presents a Jesus who is just as supernatural and just as divine as the Gospel of John does. In fact, if you recall a few chapters back, back in Matthew chapter 11. Verse 27, there is this one verse in the Gospel of Matthew that is called by scholars the Johannine Bolt. It is a bolt from the Johannine sky. It is as if, it sounds like something from the Gospel of John. Right, Johannine means the Gospel of John. It sounds like something that Jesus and John would say. But here it is in Matthew, Matthew 11, 27.

All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father. And no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him. That is a pretty astounding claim. What human could ever say that? What rabbi, if he was just a mere man, could ever say that? That I know the Father. And the Father knows me in this unique way, this unique intimacy of love and fellowship that is completely exclusive that no one else shares. And if you want to know the Father, the only way you can know the Father is if the Son chooses to reveal Him to you. That is an astounding thing for Jesus to say. The Jesus of Matthew is just as supernatural and divine as the Jesus of the Gospel of John.

So that is the first thing about Jesus the theologian, that is he is teaching us a high Christology. It is an ontological Christology as opposed to a functional Christology. Functional Christology means a view of Christ that is simply looking at him as a mere man, and he is simply a functional agent that God uses to teach truth or to accomplish something. That Jesus is just simply a human being who is an agent of God, just like the prophets of the Old Testament were agents of God. No, this is a high ontological Christology.

That is a Christology that has to do with being. He is the Son of God. Like begets like. He is the Son of God and therefore he is God. But the second thing we see in our text is that Jesus not only has a Christology, he not only as a theologian teaches about the nature and person of the Messiah, he also has a hermeneutic, that is a way of interpreting the Old Testament. And the hermeneutic of Jesus is that it is Christocentric. According to Jesus, this Psalm that he is quoting from, Psalm 110, was spoken by David not simply as a king, but it was spoken by David as a prophet. David himself was also a prophet. How do we know that? Well, there is a couple of things that teach us that. One is that Jesus there directly says it.

How is it then that David in the Spirit calls him Lord. So that phrase, in the Spirit, means that he is inspired by the Spirit to make this, to write this psalm. But there is a second thing as well, which is that in the original Hebrew of Psalm 110, verse 1, when it says, to my Lord, that word for said is a unique word. Hebrew has several different words for speaking, but this one word that is used here is the word that is used in the prophetic literature. Whenever it says, for example, in Jeremiah, thus saith the Lord, right? When the prophets come and say, this is what the Lord says.

It is a very specific Hebrew word. That is the word that is used here. It is not the ordinary word for speaking. It is this prophetic word. It is a prophetic oracle. And so David is speaking in the Spirit, inspired by the Spirit. It is as if David himself is being caught up into the heavenly throne room, and he is overhearing a conversation between the first and the second person of the Trinity.

He heard this conversation that the Lord, that is the Father, said to my Lord, that is to the Messiah to come, to the Son, here is what is going to happen one day. Looking down the corridors of time, one day you will accomplish the work of redemption. And as your reward for your obedience to me, I will cause you to sit at my right hand and I will put all of your enemies under your feet. Jesus then gives us a Christocentric hermeneutic, a way of interpreting the Old Testament, a way of interpreting the Scriptures, especially the Psalms, as seeing them as prophetic, as seeing them as more than just simply referring to events at that time and to meanings and communication that is taking place within the earthly human horizon of that time.

There are a lot of biblical scholars who do not believe in the inspiration of scripture, who think that this psalm that Jesus is quoting here, Psalm 110, was not really written by David, and it was not really written under the inspiration of the Spirit.

It was simply a liturgical psalm that was used at the time of the coronation of the king. And so, it is not really David here. He is not really speaking in the Spirit, even though it says at the superscription at the top that it is a psalm of David. They would say, well, those were added later, and so later on they thought that it was by David. It really was not. Jesus says, no, this psalm is by David. He clearly, his whole argument rests on the assumption that David is indeed the author of Psalm 110.

And on the basis of that then, and also understanding that David was a prophet, not just a king, that he was inspired by the Spirit, that he was able to make this oracle. recording the words between the Father and the Son before the foundation of the world and looking ahead to the coming of Christ and His exaltation.

The Gospel Invitation

Of course, we have not yet gotten there in the story. We are still somewhere in the middle of Passion Week, maybe Tuesday, maybe Wednesday. On Thursday night will be the Last Supper. On Friday will be the Crucifixion. And then on Sunday, he will rise from the dead.

And then after that, he will ascend into heaven. But already, Jesus is looking ahead to that point, which is still quite a ways away. But he is on the cusp of going to the cross. And Jesus here is quoting from this psalm that looks ahead to that moment when Jesus is raised from the dead and then he ascends into heaven and sits down at the right hand of God. Jesus has a Christocentric hermeneutic. He is interpreting the Old Testament in light of himself. We already saw this in the previous chapter, in Matthew chapter 21.

Again, that same parable that I mentioned before, the parable of the wicked tenants, he quotes from another psalm, Psalm 118. And he says, this is Matthew 21, verse 42, Jesus said to them, have you never read in the scriptures the stone that the builders rejected? The builders are the leadership of Israel. who do not believe in Jesus, they do not accept his claim to be the Messiah. The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous. in our eyes.

So here we have in the scope of two chapters, two key places where Jesus quotes from the Psalms, Psalm 118 and Psalm 110, and says that these Psalms are prophecies that are speaking of the future work of the Messiah, of his death, his resurrection, his vindication, his exaltation to the right hand of God.

Jesus has a Christocentric hermeneutic. And these two things, Jesus’s Christology and Jesus’s hermeneutic, so his view of who he is as the Messiah and his way of interpreting the Bible, these two things are so closely connected together, are not they? They are not separate from one another. The reason why he has a Christocentric hermeneutic, the reason why he can view and read the Old Testament as pointing to himself, is because he believes and affirms his preexistence in deity. Psalm 110 implies the preexistence of Christ, does it not? Because David calls Christ my Lord as if Christ exists already. Right? But this is what? 1,000 years before the incarnation. 1,000 years before the human Jesus actually showed up on earth. And so this implies the preexistence of Christ, the preexistence of the second person of the Trinity.

David has been caught up by the Spirit into heaven where he overhears the Father and the Son speaking in divine counsel in this covenant of redemption that we have talked about many times between the Father and the Son. and looking down the quarters of time to the day when it will be fulfilled in history, when the second person becomes a man and fulfills the obedience that was committed to him in that covenant.

Here, this particular statement, sit at my right hand, is looking at the reward for the obedience. In the covenant of redemption, the father has a commission that he gives to the son, and an obedience that he demands of him, which is not only to perfectly keep God’s law, but to keep it to the end, to keep it to the point of death on the cross, and to voluntarily offer himself as the ultimate sacrifice for sin, which is coming up in the narrative, right? It is just a few chapters away in Matthew 26 and 27. But because of that obedience, he is going to receive the reward. And the reward is, sit at my right hand. Because you have kept my law, because you have obeyed me to the point of death, because you have offered the ultimate sacrifice to save your people from their sins, now enter into your reward. Sit at my right hand and receive the gospel reward.

So, Jesus asked the Pharisees, what do you think about the Christ? That is the greatest question. There is no greater question than that. Philosophers ask all kinds of questions. They ask questions like, how do we know that we know? It is called epistemology. Physicists ask, what are the laws of nature? What are the fundamental building blocks of matter? What is energy? What is motion? Astronomers ask, is there intelligent life out there? Jesus asked the greatest question of all time.

Who do you say that I am? And by implication, he is calling us to respond to that. Of course, here in this context, the Pharisees, because of their unbelief, because they do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, they are simply silent. They do not say anything. But we know that earlier in the narrative, in Matthew 16, the disciples, and Peter was their spokesman, he said, we believe that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. There is no greater question than that.

All these other questions, philosophical questions, scientific questions, they are important, they are interesting, they are valid in their own place and time. But the greatest question of all is, who do you say that Jesus is? And we must not say, we must not say that he is simply a good moral teacher. because his claims absolutely refute that. I am sure some of you have heard of this famous argument by C.S. Lewis called the trilemma, right? I think that helps to really get at what Jesus is getting at here. He is confronting the Pharisees with this fundamental question. Who do you say that I am?

You cannot wiggle out of it. and just say, well, we respect you as a teacher. C.S. Lewis says, I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him. Quote, I am ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I do not accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.

He would be either a lunatic, on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the son of God or he was a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool. You can spit at him and kill him as a demon. That is what the Pharisees did. They said he is a demon. It is by the prince of demons that he casts out demons. Or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God.

But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. Now, it seems to me obvious that he was neither a lunatic nor a fiend, and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that he was and is God.

David knew him as that, he called him my Lord. Doubting Thomas called him my Lord and my God when he appeared to him after his resurrection. A Pharisee named Saul fought against him, but he too eventually bowed the knee and said, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord. Amen,