We all have something we hold on to a little too tightly. For some of us it's the thermostat, for others it's the remote, and for a few of you it's the way the dishwasher gets loaded. It's usually small and a little funny, but if we're honest, most of us have bigger things sitting in that same clenched fist.
I think a lot of us treat Jesus the same way. We treat him like a helper for the life we already have planned. He's the one we go to when things go sideways, when we're struggling or need help somewhere, but we've already got the plan figured out. We know where we're going and how we're going to get there, and sometimes Jesus is involved in that and sometimes he's not. We say "Jesus is Lord" so often that it's become secondhand, and I wonder if we realize what we're actually saying. So what does "Jesus is Lord" mean? And what if the people who saw him, experienced his resurrection, and wrote about him later were actually telling the truth about him?
Here is what I believe. When the first Christians said Jesus is Lord, they were answering a very old question about who's in charge, and answering it cost them something. If it's true, if all of this Bible stuff is true, it should change what we do on Monday.
In the modern west, freedom is the big thing. We value individualism and the ability to govern where we go and what we do, and we build whole communities around the promise of directing our own lives. But in the ancient world, the world of the people who wrote the texts we study and try to align our lives with, that was a foreign concept. They didn't even have categories for the way we think about individualism. For them, everybody had a lord, and the only real question was which one.
Which Lord Do You Eat With?
Corinth is a good place to watch this play out. When you open Paul's letters to the Corinthians, you're inserting yourself into a conversation that's already been happening. Imagine you've been on the phone with someone for 45 minutes or so, and somebody jumps in halfway through and starts trying to work out what you're talking about. That's us reading Corinthians. Paul wrote them, they wrote him back, he responded (that's our 1 Corinthians), they wrote again, and he responded again (that's 2 Corinthians). So by the time we get to 2 Corinthians we're actually reading the third letter Paul sent them, and we don't have the first one.
Paul came into Corinth and shared the gospel, which is basically the message of who Jesus is. In 1 Corinthians 15 he gives them a creed that most scholars consider the earliest statement we have of what Christians believed about Jesus:
"I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said. He was seen by Peter and then by the Twelve." (1 Corinthians 15:3-5, NLT)
Paul is handing them the thing that was handed to him. When he became a Christian and presented himself to the Jerusalem community, they taught him this creed, and then he carried it out on his missionary journeys, one of which brought him to Corinth. Which means you can date it to within about a decade of the resurrection of Jesus.
Lots of people came to faith there, and a lot of them were Gentiles (anyone who wasn't ethnically Jewish). Corinth had a lot of temples and a lot of gods, and festivals where people shared meals together in honor and worship of those gods. Into that city Paul writes this:
"But we know that there is only one God, the Father, who created everything, and we live for him. And there is only one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom God made everything and through whom we have been given life." (1 Corinthians 8:6, NLT)
That line gets lost on us in the west because we miss the implications. There is one Lord, he has a name, and his name is Jesus. In the Greco-Roman world, worshiping lots of different gods was easy and normal. If you told your neighbor Jesus was a god, they'd probably shrug and say okay, let's mix him into the pantheon, you worship that god and I'll worship this one, all good. They didn't care about that. What made the Christian message stand out was that it was exclusive, meaning you only get to worship Jesus, and people heard that and went, what do you mean?
And the church in Corinth was living in both camps. They were part of the Jesus community, and they were also showing up to the festivals and rituals for the other gods. In 1 Corinthians 10 Paul steps in:
"You cannot drink from the cup of the Lord and from the cup of demons, too. You cannot eat at the Lord's Table and at the table of demons, too." (1 Corinthians 10:21, NLT)
That seems a little harsh, but he's trying to help them see the distinction. He's fine with them eating meat from the marketplace with a clear conscience, and he says as much later in the same chapter. What got him was that they were sitting down at the tables of other gods and eating meals in their honor, and in that world, eating at a god's table meant you were taking part in worshiping that god. He isn't telling them to pull out of the city either, because Jesus ate with everybody. What mattered to Paul was who they were honoring at those tables, who they were setting above everything else. Who they were making Lord.
When Caesar Was Lord
So what did it actually mean to call someone Lord? We have to get in the weeds a little here. The Greek word for Lord is κύριος (kyrios), and it was a pretty common, everyday word that means owner, master, or the one in charge. We don't really use it, so it gets lost on us, but the idea of a king as lord was everywhere in the ancient world. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Persians all talked about their kings and masters this way. In Ezra 7, the Persian king Artaxerxes, who was supporting the rebuilding work in Jerusalem, is called "the king of kings" (Ezra 7:12, NLT). It's a title for the one on the throne. Someone who has control.
By the time the Romans became the new superpower of the ancient world, they leveraged that idea in their own way. Leading into the time of Jesus, the emperor was Caesar Augustus, and people called him the son of God and the savior of the world. They credited him with bringing peace and even had a name for it, the Pax Romana. When a ruler like that was born or took the throne, an announcement went out to the neighboring communities and villages. One of these, an inscription found at Priene in what is now Turkey, dates to 9 BC and celebrates Augustus's birthday. There's a line in it that says, more or less, that the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good news for the whole world.
The word there is εὐαγγέλιον (euangelion). It's the word we translate as good news, and it's where we get the word gospel. In other words, the inscription is announcing that a new lord has been born, he's now in charge, and that's good news for everybody. Are you seeing the connection yet? The gospel writers took language that was commonplace in their world for Augustus being born and put in charge, and they said, actually, let me tell you about another guy who was born, and now he's in charge.
That was provocative language. When the early Christians said Jesus is Lord, they were taking Caesar's own words and giving them to someone else, and within a few generations it became a dangerous thing to say, because to Rome it sounded a lot like treason.
Around 155 AD, Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna, was arrested at a farmhouse and taken to be put on trial. We have a writing called the Martyrdom of Polycarp that tells what happened, and you can look it up and read it yourself. On the road, the officer who arrested him pulled him up into his carriage and basically pleaded with him. What harm is there in saying "Lord Caesar," offering the incense, and saving yourself? Come on, just say it and we'll let you go. Polycarp refused. When he got to the stadium, the Roman governor pleaded with him again to swear by Caesar so he could release him, and Polycarp answered, "Eighty-six years I have served him, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?"
Then they burned him at the stake.
Today you can print Jesus is Lord on a t-shirt and nobody cares. It's become marketing, and we get to say Jesus is Lord without ever having to say what or who is not. If Jesus is Lord, and let's just say that he is, what in my life does that mean is not Lord, and what does it cost me to say it?
That question of who's in charge followed Jesus all the way to his death. When he stood before Pilate (a scene I've written more about in what Jesus' trial actually reveals), John tells us Pilate asked him if he was a king, and Jesus answered:
"My Kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. If it were, my followers would fight to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish leaders. But my Kingdom is not of this world." (John 18:36, NLT)
If he were a king the way Pilate understood kings, there'd be a war, because that's how empires work. They use the threat of violence and death to get you to submit. If a foreign army showed up at your door back then, you had two options, surrender or die. Jesus flips that on its head. He gets crucified, he dies, and then he rises from the dead, and in doing that he defeats the very thing empires used to manipulate and control people. I love how the writer of Hebrews puts it:
"Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying." (Hebrews 2:15, NLT)
His lordship doesn't run on fear or threats. And if the way you've experienced Jesus was built on fear, maybe from a church that used fear to keep people in line, that isn't the message Jesus has for you. Jesus himself said, "My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life" (John 10:10, NLT). His kingdom doesn't act like the kingdoms of this world (I've written about how the first Christians saw this in an ancient Christian poem about Jesus and power), and I can trust a Lord who doesn't need to threaten me.
Who Sets Up the Chairs?
But what does it look like to surrender? Luke 9 gives us a helpful picture, and Matthew and Mark tell the same story, each a little differently. There's a lot of buzz around Jesus because his disciples have been sent out doing miracles, and even Herod is asking who this guy is. Some say Elijah, some say a prophet, some say John the Baptist, and Herod's like, no, I killed John the Baptist, so it can't be him. Then Jesus asks his disciples who people say he is, and they give the same answers Herod heard. So he looks at Peter:
"Then he asked them, 'But who do you say I am?' Peter replied, 'You are the Messiah sent from God!'" (Luke 9:20, NLT)
Peter answers brilliantly. Then Jesus starts talking about his death, about being handed over and crucified. Luke moves on from there, but Matthew and Mark give us a little more detail. Peter pulls Jesus aside and basically says, dude, no, you're not going to die, we got you (that's the Joe translation, by the way). And Jesus says:
"Get away from me, Satan! You are a dangerous trap to me. You are seeing things merely from a human point of view, not from God's." (Matthew 16:23, NLT)
Satan just means accuser. Peter was quick to say Jesus is Lord and then immediately tried to control what that looked like. He had his own picture of what the Messiah was supposed to do, and he wasn't the only one who thought he was going to fix everything.
When I pastored a church years ago, we had our own building and would host events, and afterward we'd have to set the chairs back up for Sunday. People would come and help put them in rows, and I'd wander around behind them adjusting things here and there. I'm a bit of a control freak, a little neurotic over certain things (I've got my clenched fist stuff too). What I had no idea about until somebody told me later was that people stopped wanting to help, because they knew I'd just change it anyway. Not my finest moment as a pastor. I'll admit that. And I think that's what a lot of us do with Jesus. We say, Jesus, you are Lord, go ahead and set things up, and then we walk right behind him and move all the chairs back to where we wanted them.
Toward the end of Luke 9, Jesus says the thing you've probably heard if you've been around church for any length of time:
"Then he said to the crowd, 'If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross daily, and follow me.'" (Luke 9:23, NLT)
A lot of us grew up hearing "deny yourself" as a self deprecating thing, that you don't matter, that you have to become less of yourself so Christ can come out. I'm not entirely sure that's what Jesus is reaching for. I think you do matter. You're valuable the way you are, a good, very good creation (which is pretty much what TOV is all about), and you are more than you think. What I actually think he's inviting us into is that denying yourself means letting him arrange the chairs and then letting them be. It's saying, I'm going to trust you in how you set things up, and I'm going to resist the temptation to run behind you and do it the way I want to do it. You keep your worth and value. You're just stepping off the throne of your own life and letting Jesus into it, trusting that the way he sets up the chairs is actually the best way to set up the chairs, and trusting him with how it turns out.
Surrender is more than just believing. We sometimes think faith is about having the right beliefs, but the Greek word πίστις (pistis) is more an invitation to learn to trust. And honestly, for most of my life I've held my future with clenched fists, especially around work and money, and I'm still learning how to trust God with those parts of my life.
Jesus isn't the kind of Lord who takes your life. He's the kind of Lord who gives you life.
So, back to the thermostat, and the remote, and whatever came to mind when you read the first line of this. What are you holding on to with clenched fists? Maybe Jesus really is the kind of Lord you can trust with it, with your marriage, your kids, your finances. He is in charge, and he is a good Lord who gives life. How would that change what you do on Monday?
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