First, if
David’s anointing (1 Samuel 16) was a symbolic moment that looked forward to
the shepherd boy’s ascension as king-priest, Jesus must have interpreted his own
baptism as playing an analogous role in his own ministry. As the anointed Son
of Psalm 2, Jesus saw himself as the rightfully installed Davidic Son, even as
he was also the final Isaac, charged with restoring worship in Jerusalem.
Second, in reciting the Lord’s prayer, which called for – among other things –
the coming of the kingdom, Jesus’ disciples must have seen the praying of this
prayer as a way of moving towards the realization of Yahweh’s promise to David:
‘I will establish [your] kingdom’. For Jesus, the coming of the kingdom meant
the coming not just of any kingdom but specifically of the Davidic kingdom,
which included (per Psalm 110) the installation of a new priesthood designed to
supplant the priesthood instituted by Moses. Third, the strategy by which Jesus
sought to accomplish this goal also followed on the model of David. If David
summoned a new caste of priests and Levites from throughout the land for the purpose
of establishing centralized worship (1 Chronicles 13). Jesus’ itinerant preaching
tour through the Judean countryside was probably, in part- a re-enactment of
this very same nationwide gathering process. . . . Jesus spoke his parables in
order to separate out the holy from the unholy, the clean from the unclean. Now
it also becomes clear that those who responded positively to Jesus’ teaching would,
on the model of the Davidic reordination, distinguish themselves as candidate
for the newly emerging priesthood. Through his preaching tours, the restoration
of the tribes was already underway. Likewise, Jesus’ recurring emphasis on
suffering and peirasmos also finds a suitable match in the life of
David. While an earlier generation of biblical scholarship posited the
construct of the ‘righteous sufferer’ was a way of explaining Jesus’ own calling
of suffering, it must be pointed out that the staple texts supporting this
construct are the psalms of lament associated with David. Because David’s life
was fraught with suffering and opposition, Jesus seems to have surmised, he too
was destined to inherit the same lot. This narrative is not unrelated to the narrative
of the Son of Man. (Nicholas Perrin, Jesus the Priest [Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Baker Academic, 2018], 164)
