Jesus is…
Jesus is…Lord
Philippians 2: 5 – 11
One of the favorite movies around the Malone household is The Princess Bride. The film is a fairy tale as told to an ailing grandson by the visiting grandfather, and the story is filled with heroes and villains, damsels in distress and perils unnumbered. The primary hero is the poor farm boy Westley, who serves and falls in love with the beautiful princess, Buttercup. I won’t bore you with all the details. I’ll trust you to watch it for yourself. One of the villains in the film is a short, rotund kidnapper named Vinzzini, who is hired by the villain prince Humperdink to kidnap his betrothed Buttercup in order to incite a war with the rival nation Guilder. Vinzzini hires a swashbuckler named Inigo Montoya and his side-kick giant Fezzi to assist with the kidnapping. They are successful in their enterprise, but once they begin their escape, the Dread Pirate Roberts pursues them. Throughout the pursuit, there is a continuing series of unexpected turns, and at each occurrence Vinzzini exclaims, “Inconceivable!” Finally, in exasperation, Inigo Montoya looks at Vinzzini and says, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Like Vinzzini’s use of “inconceivable,” I think we 21st century disciples struggle to understand who Jesus is, especially when we use the phrase “Jesus is Lord.” Just what do we mean when we say “Jesus is Lord,” or more particularly, “Jesus is Lord of my life”? We say it, and like Inigo Montoya, I’m not sure it means what we think it means. The phrase has become almost a cliché for 21st century Christians. We print it on T-shirts and bumper stickers, paint it on overpasses and we may even see a sign at the Super Bowl tonight that someone has erected proclaiming that “Jesus is Lord!” It’s just a nice name we use for Jesus, but in reality, it has little impact on our lives.
That wasn’t the case for the early disciples of Jesus. The Apostle Paul writes to the Philippian church to encourage them to maintain the faith he found in them when he was with them. The passage we read this morning is one of Paul’s most moving paragraphs, and he concludes it with what has been called the “first creed of the Church.” We say the Apostle’s Creed, and the Nicene Creed, but scholars have termed the phrase “Jesus Christ is Lord” as the statement early followers of Jesus proclaimed when they greeted one another. What did it mean for them?
The word “Lord” comes from the Greek “kurios,” and it meant “master or owner.” The Lord was one who owned or had possession of a thing—like one who owned property or a slave. The word was also used as the official title of the Roman Emperor, and Roman citizens would greet each other with the words “Caesar is Lord!” In that sense, it was a subversive statement for the 1st century believers to utter the words “Jesus is Lord!” For the first century believer, to say Jesus is Lord meant that he was the owner of their life. Their life was not their own, but it had been surrendered to another—the person of Jesus Christ. Their proclamation was also a death sentence, for the one thing the Roman authorities could never tolerate was subversion or rebellion. There could only be one Lord—Caesar. To assert otherwise meant certain death to the proclaimer.
There is one other note to be made: The title “Lord” is the most used title in the New Testament for Jesus. 618 times, the authors refer to Jesus as Lord, and the term ties back to the Old Testament word which the Jews dare not utter—Jehovah. Every time in the Greek translation of the Old Testament that Jehovah appears, it is translated “Lord,” with a capital L. For the first century believer, and for the Apostle Paul, it was an acknowledgment of the divine nature of Jesus himself. It was to say, Jesus is God in human flesh. That is a profound theological statement on Paul’s part, and it carries theological implications for us today, but for Paul and for us, it needed more practicality. It had to be lived out in life, not simply rooted in the mind. It was the living out of the implications of their theology that made the difference. So it is for us, too.
I’m afraid we’ve come to see Jesus as Lord much like people in England see the Queen. It used to be the monarch was supreme. Laws were passed by the King/Queen, whomever occupied the throne and they were immediately enforced. The Empire was subservient to his/her whims and vices. The monarch spoke. People responded, or it was “Off with their head.” But, times have changed. The Queen of England is simply a figurehead. Oh, a much loved one, no doubt, but one without real authority. The masses still fawn and feign allegiance, and will line the streets to wave as she motors from one castle to another, but after the parade passes, the “subjects” go back to their lives as normal. That’s what we do to Jesus! We pay lip service to him. We’ll answer polls that say we acknowledge him as Lord, and call ourselves disciples, but when the parade passes, we return to our lives as though nothing is different.
To call Jesus Lord is to acknowledge his ownership of our lives. It is to say he owns us, and that’s where it gets problematic. We are educated in America on the value of ownership. We pass laws as a government to incentivize home ownership. Like the convict Delmar in the film O Brother Where Art Thou? we are taught, “You ain’t nothing if you don’t own land.” It’s all about ownership—even if it’s just a cemetery plot! Yet, for disciples, we are simply stewards. To say Jesus is Lord means we see the resources we hold as belonging to him.
Jesus is Lord also means that we live our lives in submission to his will. We seem to keep coming back to this issue of surrender, don’t we? My life is no longer my own. It is his. The only will I have is his will. We come to the end of our lives and it is said of us what was said on the tombstone of an old Cavalier soldier who lost his life and property in battle for the royalist cause: “He served King Charles with a constant, dangerous and expensive loyalty.” The cause of our lives is surrendered to the cause of Christ.
Jesus is Lord means that Jesus is the priority of our lives. I said “priority,” not “priorities.” We say, “We must have our priorities in order,” but that is an incorrect statement. We must have our priority in order. There can ever only be one priority. To have many priorities is to have no priority, for whatever demands our attention at the moment will become the priority to the detriment of everything else. When Jesus is the priority, we order our lives around that principle. We order our family life around the priority of Jesus. We order our business life, not on the principle of profit, but on the principle of purpose for the Kingdom of God. We order our social life, not on status, but on surrender and sacrifice. When Jesus is Lord everything changes. It reorders our lives. As missionary and evangelist Hudson Taylor so adequately said, “Wither Christ is Lord of all, or he is not lord at all.”
I had a seminary professor characterize the disciple’s life this way. You know what it’s like when a house guest comes over to stay a few days. We try to be the gracious host, and we say to our guest, “Make yourself at home.” Imagine our surprise if our guest was to actually do it! Suppose we walked in and saw our guest going through our medicine cabinet. We’d be offended. Or, the refrigerator? Suppose our guest started throwing some of our favorite treats out of the refrigerator because they made themselves at home? We’d balk at their audacity! Or, suppose our guest went to the pantry, or the linen closet and started rearranging our food or our linens. We’d never expect it, and we likely wouldn’t tolerate it. Yet, that’s exactly what we do when we invite Jesus to be Lord of our lives. We invite him into our home…our heart…and we invite him to survey the refrigerator, to reorder our pantries, to paint the walls, to put down new flooring, not because he’s our guest and we want to show hospitality, but because we’ve given him the house! It’s his house—his refrigerator—his pantry—his medicine cabinet—it’s all his, and when he begins reordering things, all we can say is “Yes, Lord,” because we’ve surrendered it all to him.
