Robert Barron - He Will Rule Forever
Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the fourth and final Sunday of Advent, falling this year on the very day before Christmas, and the Church invites us to think a lot today about David. Now, as I've said many times to you, you can't understand Jesus apart from the Old Testament. When you try, you get a distortion. The Church recognized that very early on, it was back in the second century. It fought against a man named Marcion, who said, "Let's get rid of the Old Testament. We have this new revelation". The Church said no to that. When you abstract Jesus from the Old Testament, you get Jesus as teacher of timeless truths, ethical exemplar, and all that. But when you ground him in the Old Testament, then you get this very rich picture of Jesus.
Look how often in the New Testament the reference to David is made. Beginning of Matthew's Gospel, the genealogy is divided into three sets of fourteen generations. In Hebrew, every number relates to a letter, every letter to a number. Fourteen was the number that corresponds to "Dawid," or to David. What's Matthew saying through this long genealogy? David, David, David. The definitive David has come. How often Jesus is referred to as the "mashiach," the Messiah. Paul calls him that all the time: "christos" in his Greek, "the anointed one". Well that was just a way of saying David.
Now we see why in our first reading for today, which is taken from one of the most important and influential texts in the Old Testament. It's 2 Samuel chapter 7. Get out of your Bibles at some point today and look up 2 Samuel, one of the most adventurous books of the Bible, by the way. Go to chapter 7, and you find this marvelous prophecy. Remember David had said, "I'm going to build a house for the Lord. I'm living in a palace of cedar, and the Lord is in a tent of skins, and I am going to build him a great house". And Nathan, the prophet, comes back and says, "No, no. That's not what God wants". David's son will eventually build that great temple, but God makes David a promise that turns David's idea on its head. He says, "You want to build me a house, but I'm going to build you a house".
And he means the house of David. he means this great line of kings that will come from David. And he says this extraordinary thing that "someone who springs from your loins will reign forever". Extraordinary prophecy, and it haunted Israel, listen, even after the Babylonian captivity when the line of David was severed, when the Davidic kings ended. Still, somehow they knew and they believed in this prophecy that a son of David would reign forever. This is why, look in the prophet Micah, not one of the better-known prophets but a very important one, because he says this: "You, Bethlehem of Ephrathah, too small to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me the one who is to be ruler in Israel". But why is Micah drawing attention to Bethlehem of Ephrathah, this little town? Because it was David's city.
And see, Micah believes in the 2 Samuel 7 prophecy: "From you will come one who will rule forever". And then listen to what he says, indicating that we're not talking just about some earthly, worldly, human figure. This is Micah again: "He," this new king, "shall stand firm and shepherd his flock by the strength of the Lord... For now his greatness shall reach to the ends of the earth, and he shall be peace". Do you see, we're not talking about just some king of Judea, some worldly, earthly, merely human king. No, no. This mystical figure, this new David. David was a king, yes, but he was also a priest. Remember that evocative scene when David goes to get the ark of the covenant, which had been taken from Israel by the Philistines?
He goes to get it, and then he leads it back into his holy city of Jerusalem. He puts on the ephod, which was a vestment or garment of a priest, and then he does a liturgical dance in the presence of the ark of the covenant and leads the people into the city and places the ark there. He's king, but he's also a priest. David, David, David. The first Christians, having experienced Jesus, having seen his death and his Resurrection, understood him to be the fulfillment of this Nathan prophecy, understood him to be the definitive David who would come, this king and this priest. Now with all that in mind, everybody, we're meant to read from our magnificent Gospel for this Fourth Sunday of Advent. It's Luke's version of the Annunciation.
Now listen to these perhaps overly familiar words. See, we've heard them so often that we don't aver to their Old Testament reference. But see, people first hearing these words, they wouldn't have missed it. So the angel Gabriel comes from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth "to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David". Ah, there it is: the connection to David. "And the virgin's name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, 'Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.'" And then she's troubled and wonders what it means and so on. And the angel says, "Do not be afraid, for you have found favor with God". And then listen to this: "Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call him Jesus. He will be great and will be the Son of the Most High", now listen, "and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end".
Again, mind you, by this time, so we're talking about the first century AD, by this time, the Davidic line had been gone for over five hundred years. The Davidic line of kings had ended. And yet, yet, there were Israelites, there were Jews, who still believed in Nathan's prophecy, and they would've heard, they would've understood in this angelic message, this impossible truth, that Nathan's prophecy remains in place, that from the house of David indeed will come not just another earthly ruler. But listen again: "He will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end". This is Jesus, everybody. This is Jesus who, yes, is the fulfillment of the Torah, yes, is the fulfillment of the temple, yes, is the fulfillment of all the longings of the prophets and patriarchs of Israel, and perhaps above all, is the new and definitive David, the king, the king who has come.
How important now, go from the beginning of the Gospel all the way to the end and what do we find but, reigning anomalously, strangely, from the cross, which is erected there by the Romans in the city of David, and they put over the cross "Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum," Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. Well that's exactly what was prophesied by Nathan, and that this King of the Jews would be indeed the King of all the world. That's how the Gospel comes to its climax, is Jesus there reigning, crowned with thorns, the sign of his kingship over his head, reigning from the cross. Okay, that's some of the kingly themes going on here. Remember I mentioned, though, that David is not just king, he's also a priest. There's a really interesting link here now if we look just beyond this Gospel. So after the Annunciation, we hear that Mary goes in haste to visit her cousin, Elizabeth, who is pregnant.
Where does she live, Elizabeth? We hear "in the hill country of Judah". Go right back to that story from the Old Testament. Where was the ark of the covenant when David went to find it? It was in the hill country of Judah, and David went to search it out and bring it to Jerusalem. Who's Mary, but the true Ark of the Covenant? The ark of the covenant bore the remnants of the tablets upon which the Ten Commandments were written. It was the richest sign of the presence of God among his people. Mary, who carries in her very body the presence of the Son of God, is the Ark of the Covenant in the full sense, and so, of course, she goes to the hill country of Judah. And then, of course, how beautiful this is. Elizabeth says to her, "The moment your greeting sounded in my ears, the child in my womb leapt for joy".
So the infant John the Baptist in his mother's womb leaps for joy at the presence of the Lord. Who is he at that point? The infant, unborn John the Baptist is David. Remember David dancing with reckless abandon in the presence of the ark of the covenant. Now the infant John the Baptist, in the presence of the true Ark of the Covenant, Mary, does his own version of David's dance. You see what St. Luke is telling us here, and the Church is asking us to see it: David, David. David. The new and definitive king has come. He reigns from that cross. And the definitive priest has come. What do priests do, but they reconcile us to God. They make sacrifice that deals with the sin of the world. Jesus reigns as king from the cross. He also performs on that cross a sacrifice, making of the cross an altar.
Can I suggest, everyone, that all of this would be swimming around in the minds of a biblically formed person in the first century. As they experienced these things, as they read these texts, they knew that the God of Israel has done his great work. He's accomplished his great purpose. The prophecy of Nathan has come true. The king and the priest, the definitive David, have come. He reigns as king. He has performed a sacrifice that reconciles us to God. And now can I suggest to everyone listening, we should have all of this in our minds and hearts as we stand now on the very verge of Christmas, which celebrates the birth of the new and definitive David. And God bless you.