מַפְתֵּ֥חַ בֵּית־דָּוִ֖ד
From the overshadowing of the Most High at His conception[1] to the shrouding of the sun at His death,[2] our Lord’s earthly sojourn was shrouded in mystery. Young Mary’s astonished, “How can this be?”[3] is book-ended by “but some doubted”[4] on the Mount of Ascension. Jesus was, in a word, misunderstood. We did not understand His identity.[5] We did not understand His parentage.[6] We did not understand His work.[7] We did not understand His Word.[8] We did not understand the food He ate.[9] We did not understand the food He offered.[10] We did not understand where He came from, where He was going, or the way to get there.[11] His teachings were twisted.[12] His miracles were maligned.[13] Even His silence was slandered.[14] Depending on who you asked, He was either the Prophet of Moses[15] or a glutenous drunk,[16] a good man[17] or a sinner,[18] the Messiah[19] or an imposter,[20] John the Baptist resurrected[21] or Elijah returned,[22] the King of Israel[23] or the prince of demons,[24] the Son of David,[25] the Son of the Most High,[26] or just the son of a carpenter from Nazareth.[27] There was nothing about Jesus and His ministry that wasn’t steeped in controversy.
Moreover, Jesus did not seem concerned about providing clarification. When asked public questions about Himself, His authority, and His intentions, His answers were worded in a way that only created more ambiguity. For instance, “If you are the Christ, tell us” was not answered with, “Yes, I am,” but instead with, “If I tell you, you will not believe.”[28]
“Who is this Son of Man?” was not answered with “It’s me,” but with, “The light is among you for a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you.”[29]
“Where is your Father?” was not answered with, “He’s God in Heaven,” but instead, “You know neither me nor my Father.”[30]
“How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly!” was not answered with “Yes, I’m the Christ,” but with, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me.”[31]
In fact, not only did Jesus refuse to publicly identify Himself during His ministry, He also forbade others from doing so. He wouldn’t permit exorcised demons to speak because “they knew Him.”[32] When Peter confessed among the Twelve, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God,” Jesus “strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that He was the Christ.”[33] As Peter and the Sons of Zebedee descended the Mount of Transfiguration, “Jesus commanded them to tell no one” of the glory they had witnessed.[34]
This cloak of secrecy often covered many of Jesus’ miracles as well. The healed leper in Galilee was told, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest.”[35] The healed blind man in Bethsaida was sent home and told, “Do not even enter the village.”[36] The deaf and mute man in Decapolis was “taken aside from the crowd” to be healed, then “charged to tell no one.”[37] Even the act of speaking life into a dead girl was performed sub-rosa in the house of Jarius, her “amazed” parents “strictly charged” by their daughter’s Healer to keep his identity a secret.[38]
Indeed, these covert tactics seem counter-intuitive, even detrimental, when considering that Jesus had inaugurated his public ministry with the proclamation, “the Kingdom of God is at hand.”[39] Why not validate his Messianic bona fides? What is the purpose of an inconspicuous miracle? The advice of Jesus’ brothers would seem like wisdom to us: “No one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world!”[40] But according to John’s narration, their exhortation did not spring from a root of faith, but from a lack of it. They didn’t yet truly believe. Without hesitation, Jesus replied to them, “My time has not yet come.” What even the flesh-and-blood brothers of the Lord did not understand, and what even “none of the rulers of this age understood,”[41] is that the Messiah had a time. The Chosen and Beloved Servant had an hour.
My Hour Has Not Yet Come
The Lord’s impending “hour” is a common thread throughout the gospels; a fixed point towards which he calibrated both word and deed. Sometimes it was a safeguard against the allure of temporal power. To His mother’s subtle prompting at the wedding in Cana, “They have no wine,” he replied, “What does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”[42] When Jesus caught wind that the size of his crowds along the Jordan had grown larger than the following of his cousin John, “He left Judea and departed again for Galilee.”[43] And after multiplying the fish and loaves for the thousands near Bethsaida, Jesus perceived “that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king,” so He “withdrew again to the mountain by Himself.”[44] If there was ever a time for the Messiah to ride the wave of popular support right into the center of Jerusalem, it was that moment. Instead, Jesus stood up in the synagogue of Capernaum the next day, ground zero for the launch of his ministry, and declared, “Whoever feeds on My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the Last Day.”[45] At the brink of worldly success, the coming “hour” of body and blood once again proved to be True North on the compass of his ministry, and afterwards, “many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.”[46]
However, the Lord’s appointed “hour” also meant sovereign protection from a premature death. When the hometown crowd in Nazareth attempted to throw Him from a nearby cliff, He somehow “slipped through the crowd and went on his way.”[47] In Jerusalem during the feast, the authorities “were seeking to arrest him” as He taught openly in the temple courts, “but no one laid a hand on Him, because His hour had not yet come.”[48] Then again, while teaching in the temple courts, “no one arrested him, because His hour had not yet come.”[49] Then the Pharisees “conspired against him, how to destroy him,” Jesus “withdrew from there, and many followed Him, and He healed them all and ordered them not to make Him known.”[50] It is here that the Spirit-inspired apostle interrupts the flow of his narrative to show us the prophetic undercurrent:
“This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, My Beloved with whom My soul is well pleased. I will put My Spirit upon Him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. He will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear His voice in the streets; a bruised reed He will not break, and a smoldering wick He will not quench, until He brings justice to victory; and in His name the Gentiles will hope.”[51]
A Song of the Servant’s Hour
In the preceding passage, Matthew is quoting the opening stanza in what are called Isaiah’s “Servant Songs;” a collection of prophecies that span between chapter 42 and 53. In this song, a Servant is described who is first of all “chosen,” “beloved” and “pleasing” to God the Father, and who is empowered by God the Spirit.[52] He is not a public debater or rabble-rouser. He acts discretely and carefully, as a clandestine agent in a hostile country, seeking to stay out of the limelight that could expose him and scuttle His mission.
This same Servant is later told in Isaiah that it is “too light a thing” for Him to bring back the “remnant of Israel” only, but that He would also be “a light to the nations” bringing salvation that “reaches to the ends of the earth.”[53] The prophet’s tone begins to shift, and the Servant is described as One who willingly “gave His back to those who strike” and his “cheek to those who pull the beard,” refusing to shrink back from “disgrace and spitting,” but “set [his] face like flint.”[54] The motif of suffering continues into the last song, when the Servant who “acts wisely” is “marred beyond human semblance,” “despised and rejected,” “stricken,” “smitten,” “afflicted,” “pierced for our transgressions,” and “crushed for our iniquities.” He is the Chastised One who gives peace, the Wounded One who heals us, the Iniquity-Bearer of us all. The Servant is oppressed, afflicted, and yet silent. He’s slaughtered by “oppression and judgement” for no “violence or deceit” of his own. He is “cut off from the land of the living,” as he “pours out his soul to death” to “bear the sins of many.” He is the “Righteous One” who is “numbered with the transgressors” and yet intercedes for them. Yet somehow, “out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied” by the foreknowledge that he will “make many to be accounted righteous,” “prolonging his days” and “dividing the spoil with the strong.”[55] This is the culmination of the Servant’s song. This is the Servant’s “hour.” An hour of suffering, injustice and death. An hour of atonement, satisfaction and righteousness. An hour of victory by “the power of an indestructible life.”[56]
Therefore, there is a direct prophetic line between the Servant who acts stealthily around reeds and wicks and the Servant who stands in full view of unjust powers with a flint-like forehead, bearing the rejection, suffering and unjust death of a criminal. He “acts wisely” in part by acting surreptitiously, so He might be unpredictable to those with whom He “did not entrust himself.” They could not anticipate his endgame, else they “would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”[57]
Ironically, the religious elite could have perceived these things. The highest caste of scribes and priests, many of whom had memorized the scroll of Isaiah, could have connected the furtive Servant of chapter 42 to His prophetically-appointed hour in chapter 53. But with veiled eyes and hearts of stone, they missed it.[58] Therefore, when the Servant finally quit His stealthy game of cat-and-mouse and rode straight into their clutches on a donkey’s back, they didn’t bother to question it.[59] And when He stood in the Temple, driving out their profits with a whip and proclaiming a five-fold woe on their hypocrisies, they didn’t hesitate to plot against Him.[60] And when He willingly gave Himself over to them in the dead of night, though He could have appealed to his father to “send twelve legions of angels,” they didn’t pause to consider why He didn’t.[61] And last of all, when they brought Him before them, bound in chains, and charged Him under oath, “tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God,” their hearts leapt under torn robes when they finally heard Him answer, definitively and irrevocably, “Yes, I am, and you shall see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”[62] The hour had come. The trap was sprung. They took the bait, and the Servant did not shrink back. “And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your Name.”[63]
The Servant’s Purpose
Herein lies the Servant’s mission: “Father, glorify your Name.” In this ultimate purpose lies our hope, just as he prayed in the garden,
“Father, the hour has come, glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all you have given him.”[64]
The Father’s glory in the Son’s hour is our life. He came as a Servant to the Father, which means He was also a servant to all whom “God had given him.” Put simply, the Servant “came not to be served, but to serve,”[65] and in giving His life as a ransom for rebels, he revealed the greatest heights of his Father’s glorious grace. What was a mystery and enigma to us was a providential course set “from the foundation of the world”[66] in the secret purpose of the Godhead. We did not understand, but our ignorance did not deter the steadfast love of the Son for His Father, or for His Bride. For when the Servant “knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.”[67]
Gabe Caligiuri is a regular contributor to the FAI Wire publication and podcast, as well as an occasional contributor to other FAI digital content on the subjects of history and geopolitics as they relate to the Great Commission. Gabe and his family live in California.
[1] Luke 1:35
[2] Matthew 27:45
[3] Luke 1:34
[4] Matthew 28:17
[5] Matthew 16:13-14; John 8:56-59; John 10:33
[6] Luke 2:49; John 5:18; John 8:19, 54-55
[7] John 5:17, 19-20
[8] John 6:60-66; John 8:37
[9] Matthew 4:4, John 4:34
[10] Luke 22:19; John 6:26-60
[11] John 6:62; John 8:14, 21; John 13:36; John 14:5
[12] Mark 14:58
[13] Mark 3:22
[14] Luke 23:6-12
[15] John 6:14
[16] Matthew 11:19
[17] Luke 18:18, John 7:12
[18] John 9:24
[19] Matthew 16:14, John 4:29
[20] Matthew 27:62-63
[21] Matthew 14:1-2
[22] Matthew 16:14
[23] John 1:49
[24] Matthew 12:24
[25] Matthew 15:22; Luke 18:38
[26] Luke 1:32
[27] Mark 6:2-3, John 6:42
[28] Luke 22:67
[29] John 12:34-35
[30] John 8:19
[31] John 10:24-25
[32] Mark 1:34
[33] Matthew 16:16-20
[34] Matthew 17:9
[35] Mark 1:44
[36] Mark 8:26
[37] Mark 7:36
[38] Mark 5:43
[39] Mark 1:15
[40] John 7:4
[41] 1 Corinthians 2:8
[42] John 2:4
[43] John 4:1-2
[44] John 6:15
[45] John 6:54
[46] John 6:66
[47] Luke 4:30
[48] John 7:30
[49] John 8:20
[50] Matthew 12:13-17
[51] Matthew 12:18-21
[52] Cf Matthew 4:16-17
[53] Isaiah 49:5-6
[54] Isaiah 50:6-7
[55] Isaiah 52:13, 53:12
[56] Hebrews 7:16
[57] 1 Corinthians 2:8
[58] 2 Corinthians 3:14
[59] Matthew 21:7-9
[60] Matthew 21:12-13, Matthew 23:1-36
[61] Matthew 26:53
[62] Matthew 26:63-64
[63] John 12:27-28a
[64] John 17:1-2
[65] Mark 10:45
[66] Revelation 13:8
[67] John 13:1