GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 12:36
Communication
It is not unusual for a spoken sentence to be misunderstood, sometimes with untoward consequences. It happens more often with spoken words, but written words are equally vulnerable to misunderstanding. For example, in 1870, King Wilhelm I of Prussia issued a polite carefully worded message, edited by is Prime Minister, Bismarck, to the press describing his meeting with a French diplomat. The French interpreted the message as an insult and declared war, beginning the Franco-Prussian War. Or a husband asks his wife if there’s anything to eat, which she interprets as his claim that she failed to prepare food—and the war is on.
Communication is defined as (1) the meaning of something by (2) something else, to (3) someone else. Misunderstanding is possible at any one of these three points. A husband asks his wife, “Are you upset?” His wife replies, “I’m fine.” The husband hears, “Problem solved.” The wife means, “You should already know why I’m upset.” An hour later, the husband is bewildered by the “Cold War.”
As Jesus taught in the temple court at Jerusalem, he sought to address a historic miscommunication. The people to whom Jesus spoke had been taught that a descendant of David would arise as a conquering king who would overthrow Israel’s overlords and establish Israel as the center of a great empire. Jesus went straight to the heart of the misunderstanding when he said, “David himself said in the Holy Spirit, ‘The LORD said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet.”’” (Mark 12:36) Jesus was not denying that he was a descendant of David; he was saying that King David recognized that God said to the Christ, David’s lord, that He, God, would put Christ’s enemies under his (the Christ, the anointed of God) feet. Jesus’ point was that David himself recognized the sovereignty of the coming Messiah—a Messiah who would also be David’s own descendant. I know—suspect the people in Jesus’ audience were shaking their heads too, trying to put all of this in place.
How many times have speakers said, “Let us stand to our feet,” as if there were something else on which to stand with? Or, “Let us stand all over the auditorium,” as if the audience would climb to the top of the building. It is not polite to laugh until you have examined your own examples of miscommunication. In the same way, we should sympathize with Jesus’ audience as they tried to reformulate a lifetime of teaching in light of this new perspective.
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