Whose Son?

Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost, Year A – Matthew 22:34–46

The expert in the Law who tests Jesus with a question about the greatest commandment, and is asked a question he cannot answer.

My father handed me to a teacher
when I was seven.
I rose when that man entered a room for forty years,
and for his teacher,
and I would have risen for his teacher’s teacher
had anyone been able to produce him.

Everything I know has a name on it.
This is the ruling of so-and-so,
who had it from so-and-so,
who had it from those before.
A man who cannot say whom he learned from
says nothing, however well he says it.

The Galilean could not say.
No school. No teacher.
A carpenter’s son
from a village no one quotes.

So they sent me,
the one whose training no one could doubt.
I meant to test him.
I will not pretend otherwise.
I meant it the way you ask a newcomer
who his teacher was.

“Which commandment is the great one?”
We have argued it for generations,
the heavy against the light,
and not one of us has settled it.

He gave me two.
Heart and soul and mind.
Then the neighbor, which is like the first.
On these, he said, hang the whole Law and the Prophets,
the way a coat hangs from a peg.

I knew every word.
Children know it.
I had nothing to say,
which is the worst a man can be handed
at the end of a test he set.

Then he asked us one.
“Whose son is the Messiah?”
“David’s,” we said, together,
the way you say your own name.

“Then how does David, in the Spirit,
call him Lord?
The Lord said to my Lord,
‘Sit at my right hand.'”

I reached for the names.
This is the reading of so-and-so,
who had it from—

and there was no one.
The line of them ran out
and I was standing at the end of it.

David was a king.
I have risen all my life for men who were not,
and he said “my lord”
to one not yet born.

No one answered him.
I looked at the men beside me
and they were looking at the ground.
No one asked him anything else.

I knew how to honor. I did not know whom.

When the crowd began to thin
I found I was still on my feet,
as I am when a teacher enters the room.
I could not have told you
for whom.