“Branch of Jesse’s Tree”

Advent Hour – December 19, 2011

Revelation 22:10-16/Psalm 89:19-21; 26-29; 35-37/Matthew 22:41-46

Fr. Gary W. Thurman

In Revelation 22:16, Jesus was capsulizing and summarizing the great revelation He had given the apostle John and said, “I am the root and the offspring of David.” Actually, what He meant was very clear.  It is a common thread throughout the Scriptures stated in different ways.    This is what He says in another place in Revelation, in more than one place in the Bible. In Isaiah 44, Jesus says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega.”  Alpha is the beginning letter of the Greek alphabet; Omega is the last.  He says, “I am the beginning and the end.”

What it says sometimes in the Scripture, from Isaiah and from other places, is that Jesus is the Cornerstone. The cornerstone is the first stone that you lay in certain types of construction.  In the New Testament, He is the Capstone. The capstone is the final stone you lay when you are building an arch. You start on either side of the arch and you work your way up through the scaffolding and the bridgework and other things.  You get to the upper part, but the last stone is the one in the very middle.  This is the capstone; sometimes called the keystone.  The capstone is the final stone in that type of construction; the cornerstone is the beginning stone.

Scriptures says, “Jesus is the Cornerstone and the Capstone.”  Today, Jesus says to John, “I am the root and the offspring of David.” This talks about the first part of the life cycle and the end.  When the seed goes into the ground and germinates, the first thing that sprouts is the root.  The last part of the life cycle after it comes up with the stems, the leaves, and the other things is it bears an offspring – a fruit.

Jesus is saying in another way, in another metaphor for the same message: “I am the first and I am the last.”   He says something to us that we need to hear today, “I started this thing, and I am going to finished it.  I don’t need any help from Mohammed.  I don’t need any help from Buddha.  I don’t need any help from the World Bank.  I don’t need any help from any nation of the world.  I don’t need any help from the United Nations.  I started it, I will finish it!”   It is that clear; it is that easy.

This was already shared to us, perhaps in slightly different words but the same principle, by our Primate and Fr. Leo for the first two days of Advent.  I am just reinforcing the message that the Lord must want us to hear.  The world today looks at the Church and they say that the Church has had her day.  Jesus Christ did something good two thousand years ago.  The Church followed it up for a while, but today there is a new plan.  Today, there is something new, different, better.  Jesus says, “I started it, I will finish it.  Nobody else but me!”   This is the message that is very clear and very simple.

There are principles that are important in today’s Scriptures about the third Antiphon about the root and offspring of Jesse.   First thing that we can see is:  who we are from is important.  Who is our root?  What is our heritage? What is our lineage?  It came from God.  God provided it for us.  He could have made life happen any kind of way, but He made it with lineage, with heritage.

Part of our lives is the heritage that we have going way before us either biologically, from our biological parents, or even from an ecclesial point of view, church-wise.  The church fathers and the church mothers before us, in every age, those who are in the Old Testament Church before – all these are part of our lineage and our heritage.  It is important because none of us started with us.  Not a single one of us began the day we were born.

If you go to the library and read all the biographies that are there, I would venture to guess that none of those biographies start with the birthday of the person they are writing about.  They start with their parents, their grandparents because their biography starts there.  The biography that is  being written about the Primate doesn’t start with him.  It starts with Mama Edna, and probably before that.

We don’t begin the day we showed up on earth.  There is a heritage that is there.  Isaiah 51:1-2 says, “Look to the rock from which you were cut; look to the quarry from which you were hewn.  Look to your father Abraham.” That is a long way from where they were even in Isaiah’s day.  Isaiah says, “Look back that far.”  As time went on, men begin not to look just at Abraham but also to David as their father.

When you deal with Abraham, God’s promise to Abraham was, “Okay Abraham, your seed is going to inherit this land. Your seed is going to inherit the promise.”  For Abraham, the problem was what seed.   Abraham had a lot of seeds.  God said, “I am going to make you a father of many nations,” and God kept that promise.  It was not only the Israelites, but the Ishmaelites, the Edomites, which came from Isaac as well. After Sarah died, Abraham did not just stop with the two children but married another woman and had six more children.   He birthed the Midianites and a lot of other nations.

Which seed of Abraham are the children, the heirs?  This is why the nation of Israel began to look to David.  They said, “We are the heirs; we, who have the seed of David, the promise of David.”  In 2Samuel 7, the Lord says to David, “You are the heir.  Your seed is going to sit at the throne forever.”  Isaiah 55:3 says, “Look to the sure and faithful mercies given to David.”  They began to look at David as their father, as it should be, because they understood that lineage is important.  None of us started from ourselves.  God gave us that lineage.

The question comes to us:  why was it in the gospel when Jesus asked the question, “Who is the father of Christ?”  The Pharisees said, “David is the father.”  Jesus began to try saying things like, “No, David is not the father.”  That is not really what He was saying. What He was saying was, “Christ is in the lineage of David, but I go beyond that lineage which God gave.”  God gave us that physical lineage; and we don’t just have to say that it is a physical lineage, but a spiritual lineage because it is from God.  What Jesus was saying was, “I not only have a spiritual lineage from God.  I have a divine lineage from God.”

It is just like angel Gabriel who told Mary in Luke 1:32, “He will be called the Son of the Most High;   And the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David.”  Gabriel called David as Jesus’ father, and God, His father as well.  Jesus says, “I have a spiritual lineage, a physical lineage through My DNA, through My genes, and that is an important gift from God. It is an important part of who I am, but I also know how to move beyond that to a divine lineage.”

Verse 35 says, “The holy offspring shall be called the Son of God.”  Jesus was saying, “As the Christ and the Messiah, yes, I am from the offspring of David, but I am also more. I am from the offspring of God.”  Even when Jesus was sharing in Revelation, “I am the root and offspring of David,” He was quoting from Isaiah 11.

As we read Isaiah 11, verse 1 and verse 10, we will see that this is what Jesus was quoting but with a tiny, little difference.  In Verse 1, “Then a shoot will spring forth from the stem of Jesse, and a branch from his roots will bear fruit.”  In verse 10, “The nations will resort to the root of Jesse.   Isaiah’s prophecy was, “The Messiah will be the root and the offspring of Jesse.”  Jesus stood there and said, “I am the root and the offspring of David.”

Did Jesus make a mistake when He was preaching?  Did He say the wrong thing?  I do that sometimes because I get things mix-up.  I sometimes get Noah and Jonah mixed-up.  I talk about Jonah’s Ark and Noah and the whale.  I get Corinthians and Romans mixed up.  I will talk about the great power story of the Resurrection in Romans 15, but it is actually 1Corinthians 15.

One time, I was listening to a sermon where the Pastor was teaching about the unity of the Body of Christ; from the unity to the Eucharist. He said, “It goes back when Jesus fed the five thousand.  He took those two loaves, two represents unity; He took the bread of unity and distributed it to everybody; and those two loaves, along with the five fish, show us a powerful message.”   It may be true, but it was five loaves and two fish, not two loaves and five fish. It kind of blew the whole sermon.  Later on, somebody told me, “You don’t understand prophetic preaching.”  I understand now.

At the same place, there was a Youth Pastor preaching on zeal.  He was preaching on exuberance; he was preaching on fire that these should be in young people’s hearts.  He was going to Gideon’s three hundred.  He said, “You know, God told Gideon, ‘Take these ten thousand men down to the water. Pick the best soldiers for you.  Take all those who go down into the water, and just stick their heads in the water and drink it up.’   Those are the one who are zealous.  Those are the ones who are on fire. Those are the ones you want.”  He added, “Three hundred men stuck their heads in the water and drank all they wanted. All the rest did carefully like little gentlemen that didn’t want to get water on their suit and lapped like a dog.”  It was great too and I agree with what he was preaching, except that the Scriptures said that it was the three hundred who lapped like a dog and all the rest stuck their heads in the water.  It was a good point but a bad example.

Sometimes, we misquote.  Was Jesus misquoting?  I think that not only did He write the words, but He is the Word and probably He knew what He was saying.  He was making the same point that He was making to the Pharisees.  His spiritual lineage, His physical lineage from His DNA was through Jesse.  But He said, “I also go beyond that to a divine lineage, through David, because Jesse’s bloodline had a few problems.

Jesse’s father, Obed, was only one-fourth Israelite. His father, Boaz, was the product of a man named Salmon and Rahab.  Rahab was the Canaanite harlot from Jericho.  Boaz was half-Israelite and half-Canaanite.  Boaz married Ruth who was one hundred percent Moabite.  That means their child, Obed, is three-fourths pagan.  This was Jesse’s father – three-fourth’s Israelite.  There were some problems in the DNA, in the bloodline.

We know about the Moabites who originally came from the Moab who came from Lot, Abraham’s nephew.  It was hardly a spiritually success story. The mother was Lot’s daughter. There is also a spiritual, biological, scientific and all kinds of reasons why that is not a good idea to have children from your daughter. There was a problem with the DNA, with the physical heritage and even the spiritual heritage.

Jesus says, “I claim that; I accept that, but I go beyond that.  I don’t stop with Jesse.  I go on.”  Jesse was also greatly influenced by King Saul up to the point where Jesse, although he was a great man by the time Saul was at the end of his reign, had lost everything.  The Bible says that the Philistines had occupied Bethlehem.  That was Jesse’s land and the Philistines were there, which means that Jesse was an exile.  Jesse had to go somewhere else.  David took him to the king of Moab and said, “Could you please take care of my Dad until I am able to get the kingdom back and defeat the Philistines?”  The king says, “Oh sure.  I am with Grandma Ruth. She is one of us. Come on, join us.”

Jesse lost everything – his land and his property. Only through David could he get it back later.   There was a problem in the bloodline, in the physical circumstances.  Even David shows this in Psalm 27 where he said, “Lord, though my father and my mother betray me, yet I will trust in You.”   Why did he pick his father and his mother?  There were a lot of wrong people in David’s life.  He could have said, “Though my cousin, Joab, betray me; though King Solomon betray me (because they did a lot).”  He did not pick them.  He said, “My father and my mother.  Though they betray me, I will trust in You.”  Chances are he had experienced that.

Another clue we get is in Psalm 37, “I have never seen the righteous forsaken or his seed begging bread.”  David begged bread of Ahimelech to feed his army.  David was begging bread.  The seed was begging bread that means that Ruth probably wasn’t so righteous.  The point is that in our spiritual lineage, in our heritage that comes to our physical being, and as a spiritual being as a Church, there are some problems in it.  It is not perfect.  We accept it, we embrace it, we don’t reject it, but we don’t stay there.  We move on to a divine lineage. We move from Jesse to David to a perfect divine lineage.

Jesse means “God-exists.”   It is good to believe that God exists.  Hebrews 11:6 says that those who come to God must believe that He exists.  You’ve got to have Jesse to be a Christian.  You have to have the knowledge that God exists.  Embrace it; accept it. This is who you are, but it is not perfect, it is not enough because James says, “Even the devil believes that God exists and trembles.”

David means “well-beloved.”  It is great to know that God exists; it is better to know that He loves us.  It is better to know that you are beloved by Him.  It is the same with us – in our natural and spiritual heritage from God; even in Church, our ecclesial heritage.

There are problems sometimes in the Church. The Nicene Fathers made some mistakes. The post-Nicene Fathers made some mistakes; the Dark Ages, the Middle-Ages Fathers made mistakes; the Reformation Fathers made lots of mistakes. The mid-twentieth century fathers, the late twentieth century fathers made tons of mistakes.  It is still part of our heritage.  We don’t deny it. We don’t reject it.  But like Jesus, we move on.  We go beyond.  We accept it; we don’t reject; but we also claim that divine heritage from God.  Jesus says, “Yes, I am the root of Jesse, but I am also accepting the fact that I move on and I am also the root of David. Yes, David is My father, but God is also My Father.”

This is what we need to see. Even to the young people, I would say that everything that is going on in the life of the Cathedral of the King, this is part of your heritage.  You have grown up with that.  Things have been pretty much the same in your whole life.  We have gone on; move forward, but things are basically that.  But if at the end your life, Cathedral of the King is exactly like it is right now, you would have failed and we have failed in training you.  It is up to you to accept this heritage and build up; to accept this spiritual heritage; and to also take your divine heritage and move on.  Move upward towards the call of God.

I believe this is what the passages show us.  What Jesus said is not an accident. It is to point and show us to something.  We have a spiritual heritage from God, a natural heritage. There are flaws, but we have to know that we accept that and hold on and move up to our divine heritage from Him, which is His perfect divine will for us.