The Overton Salon

By Austin

In the last three posts (here, here, and here) I’ve argued that in order to understand why God seems to partisan for the oppressed – the orphan, the widow, the alien – we need to understand that we are fully what we are when we are dependent (God as sole creator of all things), and that God’s authority relativizes all political, earthly authority (God as sole ruler of all things).

These two doctrines meet in the one place most people would not have expected to find them – in a man from the redneck hillside of Galilee. The confession that “Jesus is Lord” melds these views together, so that the identity of God and the identity of Jesus are the same. If Jesus is Lord, the highest good, our greatest desire, our real hope, tends toward what he reveils in his life, death, and resurrection. Today, we’ll think about his life.

His life shows us two things: what true power is, and what type of soceity is desireable.

a. True power: the text most relevant for this is Luke 22.24-27 (also in Matt 20.20-28 or Mark 10.35-52). The text explains how we typically see power – as a benefactor and a patron, which was the basic system of the Romans. This assumes a certain status relationship – the one with more status rules over the one with less. No matter how status is established, this is a pretty accurate representation of things. It’s certainly different now - we don’t have the same patronage/benefactor system. But clearly this is the way it works.

Jesus then asks a rhetorical question (they’re all at the last supper here): who’s greater? The server or the one being served? Clearly it’s the one being served, since they have the status. Then Jesus hits them – “I am among you as the one who serves.” In other words, if you think I am great and powerful, then you should know how my power works. It turns everything upside down…

b. A new soceity: The early Christians took this to heart, and there is perhaps no better way to see this than in that wonderful passage in Phil 2.1-11. The text is really of two parts: the first 5 verses show how our community life should be, and the second (more famous) 5 verses grounds this community life in the fact that Jesus came to us in the form a slave, and because of this condescension is exalted. The community that Jesus expected was enacted by Jesus himself, and when Paul tells us to “have this mind” – after he has told us concrete steps toward this – we recognize that Jesus, through upending our expectation of what power is, has established a new way of being a society, a whole new world.

Paul’s point is that the confession that Jesus is Lord  gives full weight to the type of community that Jesus formed around himself. John Howard Yoder gives probably the best description of what this community was:

When He called His society together Jesus gave its members a new way of life to live. He gave them a new way to deal with offenders – by forgiving them. He gave them a new way to deal with violence – by suffering. He gave them a new way to deal with money – by sharing it. He gave them a new way to deal with problems of leadership – by drawing upon the gifts of every member, even the most humble. He gave them a new way to deal with a corrupt society – by building a new order, not smashing the old. He gave them a new pattern of relationships between man and woman, between parent and child, between master and slave, in which was made concrete a radical new vision of what it means to be a human person. He gave them a new attitude toward the state and toward the “enemy nation.” (The Original Revolution, 29)

The type of society Yoder points to is a society in the form of Jesus’ life: forgiving, sharing, suffering, building, re-defining. This is a society we should be desiring because this was the mind of Christ.

In summary: the confession Jesus is Lord, bringning together two sides of Christian belief, means that true power happens in the form of Jesus – in the form of a “slave” – and true society happens in the way Jesus constituted it.

But this is not all. Jesus’ life certainly affirms this new way of power and society, but the capstone of his life was not a triumphant march to the halls of power in Jerusalem or Rome, but rather a march of shame to a death that fit his life in Rome’s eyes, a death fit only for slaves – crucifixion. More of that in the next installment.