Son of David, Have Mercy

When he urges us to keep at prayer and to be in earnest about it, he sets before us the parable of the judge who was forced to listen to the widow because her requests were so persistent and so hard to shake off. He is showing us that the God we are to press with our prayers is God the judge — and not himself, if he is not himself the judge. But he went on to say that “God will avenge his own chosen ones.” Now if the one who judges is also himself the avenger, then he has proved that on that very account the Creator is the better God, since it is the Creator he presented as the avenger of his own chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night. [a]

And then he brings the Creator’s temple into view. He describes two men praying in it in two different spirits — the Pharisee in pride, the tax collector in humility — and shows how each of them went home, the one rejected, the other counted righteous. By teaching us the right discipline of prayer in this way, he has settled which God is to be prayed to: the one from whom people were to receive that discipline of prayer, whether it rejects pride or counts humility righteous. I do not find in Christ any temple, any petitioners, any verdict of approval or condemnation belonging to any god but the Creator. It is the Creator he tells us to worship, and to worship in humility, because he lifts up the humble — not in pride, because he destroys the proud.

What other god has he shown me, to receive my prayers? With what form of worship, with what hope am I to come to him? None at all, I think. The prayer he taught us fits nobody but the Creator, as we have already proved. Of course it is a different matter if he does not want to be prayed to at all, on the ground that he is supremely good, and good of his own accord! But who is this good God? “There is none good,” he says, “but one.” He did not show us that one out of two gods was the supremely good one. He said outright that there is only one good God, who is the only good because he is the only God. And beyond question the good God is the one who “sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous, and makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good” — keeping alive and feeding and helping even the Marcionites themselves.

Later on, when “a certain man asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’” Jesus asked whether he knew the commandments of the Creator — that is, whether he kept them — so as to bear witness that eternal life is gained by the Creator’s own commands. Then, when the man said that from his youth up he had kept all the chief commandments, Jesus told him: “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”

Well then, Marcion — and all of you who share that heretic’s misery and his hatred — what will you dare say to this? Did Christ cancel the commandments just named: do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and your mother? Or did he keep them, and add what they still lacked? This very rule about giving to the poor was spread everywhere through the law and the prophets. So this boastful keeper of the commandments was shown up for a man who valued his money a great deal more highly. The truth of the gospel therefore stands untouched: “I have not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them.”

He cleared away other doubts as well, when he declared that the name God and the name Good belong to one and the same being — the one who has eternal life and the treasure in heaven and himself too at his own disposal, and whose commandments Christ both upheld and enlarged with rules of his own. You can find him in this passage of Micah as well: “He has shown you, man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do what is just, and to love mercy, and to be ready to walk with the Lord your God?” Now Christ is the man who tells us what is good, which is knowledge of the law. “You know,” he says, “the commandments.” “To do what is just” — “sell everything you have.” “To love mercy” — “give to the poor.” “And to be ready to walk with God” — “and come,” he says, “follow me.”

From the beginning the Jewish nation was so carefully divided into tribes and clans and families and households that hardly a man could be ignorant of his own descent — quite apart from the recent registers of Augustus’s census, which were probably still on file at the time. But Marcion’s Jesus was unborn — though there could be no doubt that someone seen to be a man had been born. Being unborn, he could of course hold no public record of his descent, and would have to be reckoned among that obscure sort of people about whom nothing whatever is known.

Then why did the blind man, hearing that he was going by, call out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me”? It can only be that he was taken — and not on flimsy grounds — to be the Son of David, that is, to belong to David’s family, through his mother and his brothers, who had at some point become publicly known to him. “But those in front rebuked the blind man and told him to keep quiet.” Fair enough — because he was making a great deal of noise, not because he was wrong about the son of David. Otherwise you must show me that the people who rebuked him knew Jesus was not David’s son, so that we may suppose this was their reason for silencing him. And even if you could show me that, the blind man would sooner have assumed they were ignorant than that the Lord could have let an untrue claim about himself stand.

“But the Lord stood still and waited.” Yes — not to confirm an error, but on the contrary to display the Creator. He could hardly have taken this man’s blindness away in order that afterward he should stop regarding him as the son of David. On the contrary: so that you cannot blacken his patience, or pin any charge of pretending on him, or deny that he is David’s son, he confirmed the blind man’s cry in the plainest way — both by the healing itself and by testifying to the man’s faith. “Your faith,” Christ says, “has made you well.”

What would you have the blind man’s faith been? That Jesus came down from that other god of yours, to overturn the Creator and pull down the law and the prophets? That he was not the promised shoot from the root of Jesse and the fruit of David’s body, and the rewarder of the blind as well? But I take it there were no men as stone-blind as Marcion in those days, so that a notion like that could have been the blind man’s faith and could have made him trust in a bare name — Jesus, the Son of David. Christ knew all this about himself, and wanted others to know it too; and so he gave this man’s faith, which already had the better sight and already held the true light, the outward sight as well, so that we too might learn the rule of faith and see at the same time what it is repaid with.

Anyone who wants to see Jesus the Son of David must believe in him by way of the virgin’s line of descent. Whoever will not believe that will never hear him say, “Your faith has saved you.” He will stay blind, crashing into one Antithesis after another, which crash and destroy each other, just as “the blind man leads the blind into the ditch.”

Here is one of Marcion’s Antitheses. Long ago, at the capture of Zion, David was offended by the blind who blocked his way into the stronghold — in which respect I should rather say that they stood for a people just as blind, who in later times would not admit that Christ was the son of David. Christ, on the contrary, helped a blind man; and by doing so, Marcion says, he showed that he was not David’s son, and that his temper was altogether different, since he was kind to the blind while David gave orders that they be killed. If all that were so, why did Marcion claim that the blind man’s faith was so crooked a thing? The fact is that David’s son acted in such a way that the Antithesis is blunted by its own material. The men who offended David were blind; the man who now presents himself as a suppliant to David’s son is afflicted in the same flesh. So David’s son was won over, after a fashion, by the blind man, when he gave him back his sight and added his approval of a faith that had brought him to believe the very truth — that he had to win the Son of David to his help by hard begging. Though after all, I suspect that it was the old Jebusites’ nerve that offended David, and not their affliction.

“Salvation has come to the house” — of Zacchaeus, of all people. For what reason? Was it because he too believed that Christ came from Marcion? But the blind man’s cry was still ringing in everyone’s ears: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” And “all the people gave praise to God” — not Marcion’s God, but David’s. [ac]

Now Zacchaeus was probably a foreigner, but from mixing with Jews he had picked up some knowledge of their Scriptures; and, more than that, without knowing it he had carried out Isaiah’s commands. “Share your bread with the hungry,” the prophet said, “and bring the homeless poor into your house.” He did this in the best way there is, by receiving the Lord and entertaining him in his house. “When you see the naked, cover him.” He promised to do that just as satisfactorily when he offered half of his goods for every kind of merciful work. And he “loosed the bonds of wickedness, undid the heavy loads, let the oppressed go free and broke every yoke” when he said, “If I have taken anything from anyone by false accusation, I pay him back four times over.” That is why the Lord said, “Today salvation has come to this house.” In this way he testified that the Creator’s commands, spoken through the prophet, lead to salvation.

But when he adds, “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost,” my argument at the moment is not about whether he came to save what was lost, and whose it had once been, and from whom the thing he came to save had fallen away. I am coming at a different question. Plainly it is a human being that is under discussion here. Now since a human being is made of two things, body and soul, the point to ask about is which of the two the man was lost in. If he was lost in his body, then it is his body that is lost, not his soul. And what is lost, the Son of Man saves. So the flesh has salvation. If, on the other hand, it is in his soul that a man is lost, then salvation is meant for the lost soul, and the body, which was not lost, is already safe. If — to take the only remaining possibility — the whole man is lost, in both his natures, then it follows of necessity that salvation is appointed for the whole man; and the position of the heretics who say that there is no salvation for the flesh is smashed to pieces. And this is one more confirmation that Christ belongs to the Creator, since he followed the Creator in promising salvation to the whole man.

The parable of the servants points the same way. They were paid according to how each had increased his master’s money by trading, and that proves him a God of judgment — a God who, on the strict side of the account, not only bestows honor but also takes away what a man seems to have. And if it really is the Creator whom he has drawn here as the “harsh man” who “picks up what he did not lay down and reaps what he did not sow,” then even here the one who is instructing me is the one whose money he is teaching me to put out at interest.