Jesus Is Lord

Mariam Kamell Kovalishyn

September 15, 2015

What does it mean to be a Christian in this world?

Introduction: Jesus is Lord as Golden Thread

The Meaning of ‘Kyrios’ – Jesus is Lord, Kyrios Iesous

Greek meaning of kyrios

Jewish content of God’s Lordship

Larry Hurtado (Lord Jesus Christ): “the Christological designation of Jesus as ‘Lord’ goes back
to the very earliest circles of Jewish Christians”

Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”

Monotheism’s twofold critique

Tom Wright (Climax of the Covenant): Monotheism “was not a matter of theoretical belief, of
speculative investigation of the being of God for its own sake. . . . Israel’s God was the God
of all the earth, (and it) committed Judaism to a radical anti-pagan stance.”

Christian adaptation of the Shema

1 Corinthians 8:6: “yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all
things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ,
through whom all things came and through whom we live”

Richard Bauckham (God Crucified): “Paul is not adding to the one God of the Shema a ‘Lord’
the Shema does not mention. He is identifying Jesus as the Lord whom the Shema affirms to
be one. Thus in Paul’s quite unprecedented reformulation of the Shema the unique identity of
the one God consists of the one God, the Father and the one Lord, his messiah.’

Tom Wright (Paul and the Faithfulness of God): “A small step for the language; a giant leap for
theology. Jesus is not a ‘second God’: that would abrogate monotheism entirely. He is not a
semi-divine intermediate figure. He is the one in whom the identity of Israel’s God is
revealed, so that one cannot now speak of this God without thinking of Jesus, or of Jesus
without thinking of the One God, the creator, Israel’s God.”

C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity): “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman
or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill Him as a
demon; or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and god. But let us not come with any
 patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to
us. He did not intend to.”
Christological Monotheism

Philippians 2:9-11: “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place

and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.”

A New Understanding of the Unity of God

Richard Hays (Reading Backwards): “Mark never quite dares to articulate this claim explicitly; it is too
scandalous for direct speech. For Mark, the character of God’s presence in Jesus is a mystery that can
be approached only by indirection, through riddle-like allusions to the OT.”

A New Understanding of Lordship

The Crucified Lord

Philippians 2:7-9a: “rather, he made himself nothing

by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place”

Richard Bauckham (God Crucified): “We must consider Jesus as the revelation of God… The
exaltation of Christ to participation in the unique divine sovereignty shows him to be
included in the unique divine identity. But since the exalted Christ is first the humiliated
Christ, since, indeed it is because of his self-abnegation that he is exalted, his humiliation
belongs to the identity of God as truly as his exaltation does. The identity of God – who
God is – is revealed as much in self-abasement and service as it is in exaltation and rule.”

Lordship and Power

The Public Nature of our Confession

Col. 2:13-15 When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your
flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, 14 having canceled
the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he
 has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. 15 And having disarmed the powers and
authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross
The Missiological Nature of this Confession

Indigenizing Principle

Pilgrim Principle

Andrew Walls (The Missionary Movement): “As Paul and his fellow missionaries explain and translate the
significance of the Christ in a world that is Gentile and Hellenistic, that significance is seen to be greater than anyone
had realised before. It is as though Christ himself actually grows through the work of mission – and indeed there is
more than a hint of this in one New Testament image (Eph 4:13).”

Jesus is Lord Today?

Catherine and Justo Gonzales (Revelation): “Injustice and idolatry are still rampant both in our society
and throughout the world.”

Tom Wright (Paul and the Faithfulness): “this does not mean that one can or should therefore sit light
to ordinary social life . . . or civic obligations . . . [Rather,] it behooves followers of Jesus to live by,
and in accordance with, that love and justice in the present, so as to be ready for the day when it
comes”

Newbigin (The Open Secret): “The confession ‘Jesus is Lord’ implies a commitment to make good that
confession in relation to the whole life of the world — its philosophy, its culture and its politics no
less than the personal lives of its people. The Christian mission is thus to act out in the whole life of
the whole world the confession that Jesus is Lord of all.”