AT THE BAPTISM of Christ in the first three gospels there is
an epiphany regarding the unique relationship between Jesus and the one he
called Father. “You” (in Luke and Mark) or “This” (in Matthew) are (is) my Son,
the Beloved”, are the authenticating words spoken by God. The language is at least partially borrowed
from Psalm 2:7, where God addresses the Israelite king and says, “You are my
Son; this day have I begotten you.” It seems evident that the gospels were
eager to establish a connection between the idealized notion of Jewish kingship
expressed in the psalm and the life and ministry of Jesus. The same parallel
exists in gospel accounts of the Transfiguration.
It is understandable that the exalted claims made for the
monarchs who ruled in Jerusalem would get projected onto some kind of messianic
hopefulness for the future, because (in my limited knowledge) there is little or
no historical evidence to support the extremely monarchist version of reality described
in Psalm 2, where the author imagines the “nations” and “kings of the earth”
daring to plot against the “Lord and against his Anointed”, that is, the Israelite
king. What nations would those have been? I could see “nomadic tribes” or “bands
of camel-herders”, but “nations?” According to this psalmist, God “will give
[this Jewish king] the nations for your inheritance, and the ends of the earth
for your possession.” Such ambitions might seem plausible to an Egyptian or
Babylonian ruler, but scarcely to the king of a minor vassal-state such as Judea.
In another royalist psalm, 110:6-7, the psalmist goes to
extremes in describing the violence to be perpetrated by the one who sits “at
the right hand” of God, i.e. the king, saying “he will heap high the corpses;
he will smash heads over the wide earth.” Then, in what may be a particularly difficult-to-translate
Hebrew verse 7, the psalmist writes: “he will drink from the brook beside the
road.” What, he was thirsty after all that killing of heathens? I wouldn’t be
surprised to learn that some ancient copyist, distracted by the unlikeliness of
what he was recording, wrote down a line from some different liturgical text.
That Jesus could be identified with the arrogant and
ruthless protagonists of such psalmody is a stretch, but maybe the original
authors were not deaf to the irony in their compositions. Certainly the
gospel-writers must have been aware of it, and also the author of Isaiah 42:1,
quoted in Matthew 12:18 as saying, “Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my
beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased…he will not wrangle or cry aloud,
nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.” Yet it is this non-violent
servant of God who “brings justice to victory. And in his name the Gentiles
will hope.”So much for smashing heads and heaping corpses.
In the gospels, it is not political dominance and military
success that authenticate the divine “son-ship” of Jesus, but the “beloved-ness”
that proceeds from him and the community around him. The one “whose throne is
in heaven” (Psalm 2:4) does not laugh at human rebelliousness or have “them in
derision,” nor “speak to them in …wrath,” but raises up from death the one who
prays, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke
23:34)
In these gospel passages there is a pronounced
irony in play, an outrageous assertion that beloved-ness is more significant
than power, and a failed Galilean rabbi is “begotten…in the beauty of holiness,
like dew from the womb of the morning.” (Psalm 110:3) It is this one who, like
any other human being, “drinks from the brook by the side of the road,” and
bids us drink also.
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