Jesus as Lord
Series: Meeting Jesus Again - Part 4
2023 - A Lenten Journey
Luke 6:46-49; Matthew 7:21-23; John 13:12-17
(based on the book Freeing Jesus, by Diana Butler Bass)
Not everybody who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will get into the kingdom of heaven. Only those who do the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter.
Matthew 7:21-23 (CEB)
Listen to this week’s sermon here:
___________________
We don’t use words like “Lord” very often today, but the truth is that lords were pretty common in Jesus’ day and throughout much of history. A lord is simply a master or ruler over a kingdom or even over a household. In some contexts, lord was simply a title for a landowner. Generally such a title implied having slaves or servants in some form. Diana Butler Bass puts it this way:
In a world where millions were held in slavery and millions of others lived in poverty and powerlessness at the bottom of a rigid social hierarchy, claiming Jesus as “Lord” announced one’s liberation from oppression. “Jesus is Lord” made sense in an empire of slaves, as submitting to his lordship amounted to spiritual freedom, especially in the new community called the church where, apparently, female slaves held leadership positions and Roman social status was upended
Freeing Jesus, 120
Rome would have been perfectly fine with Christians claiming Jesus as “a” lord, as one among many. There was always room for a new god or two in the roman pantheon. The problem was that all other lords or gods must submit to “the” lord, “the son of god” who was Caesar himself. Such titles were common in Jesus’ world, but they refereed only to the emperor who held absolute power and divine authority. Any challenge to that fact was considered high treason. This is why Jesus’ supposed title, “King of the Jews,” was written above the cross as a statement of his crime; threatening the sovereignty of Caesar.
The point was that people could worship or serve whomever they wanted, so long as they maintained their place in the Roman hierarchy. Paul’s declaration to the Galatians that there is no more slave nor free (Gal. 3:23), does not sit well in such a system. Empires built on the backs of the poor, the oppressed and the enslaved cannot stand when those on the bottom begin to see themselves as free and worthy of equal treatment or justice.
Whether we want to admit it or not, we still have many “lords” in our lives today. We do not live as free people who live into the divine image in which we were created. Consider the things we spend most of our lives obsessing over: money, politics, health, appearance, social status, possessions, comfort, etc. We are all “lords” of our own lives, “masters” of our own destinies, and we fight each other to get to or to remain near the top of the social pyramid. In the absence of a single “Caesar” at the top, we spend our lives fighting for that coveted position of absolute power and prestige.
What would it mean today to truly say that Jesus is Lord?
At the very least it should mean that all of those things which consume our time, our energy and our resources have no control over us. We shout that our “freedom” is threatened, for example, when the opposing party takes control of the government, but if Jesus is Lord, our freedom is found in Christ, not in the capital. If Jesus is Lord, nothing except Christ has power over us, and we have no right to lord power over others.