I have always pondered what it meant to say, "Jesus is Lord." We modern people do not relate to or even like terms like Lord or King. I think of such terms as old-fashioned and authoritarian, and clearly, for a Christian, our relationship to Jesus is not one of master-slave. I can accept and understand terms like Lord and King, in the sense of loyalty and devotion. But today, people tend to stress Jesus as friend, which seems to imply an entirely different kind of relationship.
Think of the spiritual oppositeness of Christianity as compared to the world (blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God). Crucifixion was intended as the utmost shame that the Roman government could impose on a person. And yet we have people in the 1st century claiming that this humble person from a remote corner of one of the backwaters of the world, who happened to have been crucified, is King, Lord, and Messiah. It is this inside-outness of worldly wisdom and prudence, this ironical, paradoxical sense of the meaning of terms like Lord and King that I ponder.
David Williams:
"The fact that Jesus, the Messiah, took the form of a servant, proclaimed forgiveness and welcome to sinners and outcasts, and, ultimately, was crucified all serve to transform our understanding of what his Lordship means. God will set the world to rights not through violence and political power-plays but through the meek, the humble, the peacemakers, the poor in spirit. The death and resurrection of Jesus places a large question mark over most of our geo-political projects."
Think of the spiritual oppositeness of Christianity as compared to the world (blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God). Crucifixion was intended as the utmost shame that the Roman government could impose on a person. And yet we have people in the 1st century claiming that this humble person from a remote corner of one of the backwaters of the world, who happened to have been crucified, is King, Lord, and Messiah. It is this inside-outness of worldly wisdom and prudence, this ironical, paradoxical sense of the meaning of terms like Lord and King that I ponder.
David Williams:
"The fact that Jesus, the Messiah, took the form of a servant, proclaimed forgiveness and welcome to sinners and outcasts, and, ultimately, was crucified all serve to transform our understanding of what his Lordship means. God will set the world to rights not through violence and political power-plays but through the meek, the humble, the peacemakers, the poor in spirit. The death and resurrection of Jesus places a large question mark over most of our geo-political projects."
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