Jesus is the healing of David and David’s story. To see the depth of wisdom in the David story we have to see David in Christ and Christ in David. A deep union. A marriage.
The way Jesus heals David’s life and the life of the whole world is precisely by becoming flesh, becoming David’s son.
We need to think of David the way we should think of Mary: both carry Jesus in their bodies. Think not only of the deep intimacy he has with them but also his reliance on them. That's precisely how he saves them.
Jesus heals by the incarnation; filling up all things with the very life of God. He fills up the life of David with himself. Heals David–and all creation–from the inside out.
James B. Torrance writes:
“Christ does not heal us by standing over against us, diagnosing our sickness, prescribing medicine for us to take, and then going away, to leave us to get better by obeying his instructions—as an ordinary doctor might. No, He becomes the patient! He assumes that very humanity which is in need of redemption, and by being anointed by the Spirit in our humanity, by a life of perfect obedience for us, by dying and rising again, our humanity is healed in him.”
The witness of the prophets and the New Testament show us that Jesus is both the root of David and the branch of David. He comes before David, but he also comes after David. He is prior, and yet he is later. Jesus is David’s Lord, but he is also his son (Matt. 22:41—46).
It’s no different with Jesus’ mother, Mary. Maximus the Confessor puts it like this:
“Just as the Word, who, as God, is by nature creator of His mother who gave birth to Him according to the flesh, and made her His mother out of love for mankind, and accepted to be born from her as man, so too the Word first creates faith within us, and then becomes the son of that faith, from which He is embodied through the practice of the virtues.”
He takes all of us into himself as our “root” and yet he is also the fruit born from the branch. His life gives us life so that the life we now live—the fruit that we now produce—is nothing other than himself.
The alpha and the omega. The first and the last. Our root and our branch. He’s bracketed us in himself!
David is in Christ and Christ is in David. David’s Lord heals him by becoming his son. And he is doing the same for us.
I relied on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s lecture notes, “King David” in The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works volume 14.
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