Thy Kingdom Come, Part 2

We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.

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The punning triple promise that 1) God will build David a “house” (i.e. a dynasty); 2) that David’s son “shall build a house for my name”; and, 3) “I will establish the throne of his Kingdom forever” is the source of the entire messianic concept. The worldly failure of the House of David and its destruction by the Babylonian Conquest serves, paradoxically, only to sharpen the expectation that the promise to David cannot fail. Even though, politically, the Davidic line loses the political throne and as the First Temple is destroyed, Judah’s hope in the promise to David only grows.

This hope would seem to be hugely delusional by the first century AD. After all, the Jews are, by the time of Christ, ruled not by a Jewish king but by an Idumaean named Herod and then (worse still) by a Roman named Pontius Pilate, In a similar vein of apparently mocking failure by the muse of History, Ezekiel had prophesied a rebuilt temple as a sign of a restored covenant, yet Herod’s temple was no more the work of a Son of David than the Nashville, Tennessee Parthenon was the work of ancient Greeks. None of the prophetic promises seemed to be panning out at all. Prophecy appeared to be a joke.

All this led popular Judaism to get some things right and some things disastrously wrong. In the “getting it right” department is pre-Christian Judaism’s valiant will to retain the Messianic idea at all. There’s a reason you haven’t met any Amorites, Perrizites, Sumerians, or Hittites. They’re gone. They had no vision and they perished. But the Jews, by divine Providence and an iron will, stuck to their hope in the words of the prophets and believed that Messiah would come. For this, we are forever in their debt.

The problem is that when he came, the Kingdom he proclaimed was not what they expected. No conquering king to beat up the Gentiles and kick them out of the Holy Land. Not much in the way of hamstrung horses or collections of large numbers of foreskins from dead opponents as David had done (1 Samuel 18:25-27). The brave band of followers turned out to be fishermen, tax collectors and whores, not David’s Mighty Men. Quite un-Davidic—or so it seemed. To be sure, he claimed, both explicitly and implicitly, to be the King of Israel. He even rode into Jerusalem on a donkey (Matthew 21:1-10) as Solomon had done a thousand years before (1 Kings 1:43-44) when he laid claim to the Davidic throne (a gesture not lost on any of his countrymen), which is why, hopes high, they shouted “Hosanna!” They thought the Revolution and the New Davidic Kingdom would be any minute now. They were absolutely right—and horribly wrong.

Just how right and wrong was soon apparent. The Son of David started doing weird stuff: identifying himself with a mysterious “Bridegroom” (Matthew 25:1-13) as well as with some King who would come at the end of time to judge us on our treatment of “the least of these” (Matthew 25:31-46). He asked unsettling questions about Psalm 110 (universally regarded by his contemporaries as both Davidic in origin and Messianic in nature) and pointed out that David called the Son of David “Lord” (Matthew 22:41-45). He ticked off the power elites who had gotten pretty cozy with the Army of the Occupation (Matthew 23) and who didn’t want to rock the boat with miracle stories about his raising the dead (John 11:45-53). And when it came to the temple? Talk about disrespect for religious decorum! Would David have ever cleared out the moneychangers and treated such a venerable national institution with such rabble-rousing fury (Matthew 21:12)?

Clearly, said Top People, the man was a pretender to the throne and clearly he had said and done enough to hang himself. His claims to kingship were well known enough by the time he was brought to trial that both Pilate and the Sanhedrin could make them the basis for the prosecution. Yes, mixed in with the Son of David stuff was other weird business about destroying the temple and raising it in three days (John 2:19). (They weren’t sure what that meant but they tossed it into the indictment and brought forward a few massaged witnesses ready to spin his words in the hope that some sort of terrorism charge would stick (Mark 14:57-59)). And he did exude a disquieting uncanniness when he warned of returning on clouds of glory and took the Name “I AM” to himself (Mark 14:61-62) (which was the real crime as far as the Sanhedrin was concerned). But with practiced calm, his accusers stuck with the claim of kingship since that’s what Rome would care about.

Of course, that eerie “I AM” claim almost torpedoed the whole project when the superstitious Pilate, spooked by his wife’s dream (Matthew 27:19), remembered old myths of gods who came to earth in disguise and vented their wrath on the puny mortals who mistreated them. He asked, “Where are you from?” and blustered, “Don’t you realize I have the power to release you or have you crucified?” (John 19:9-10). But the man with the crown of thorns seemed in no danger of erupting in Olympian fury and eventually, with a bit of pressure from the Sanhedrin warning that if Pilate freed this man claiming to be “Christ, a king”, he was “no friend of Caesar’s” (John 19:12), Pilate plucked up the courage to have his horse-whipped prisoner traded off for some two-bit hood named Barabbas and disposed of with two other pieces of trash awaiting execution in the Tower of Antonia.

The rest we know, except that we don’t know it, because we don’t think of what happened as the apostles and Jesus did.

Of which more next time.