to a Church he had never seen, to Rome, to Christians who he had never met. But they would recognize this; like him they had been brought up on this. If Paul learned these things when he first became a Christian only about three years after the crucifixion, they must go back to the very beginning of Christianity. This is what they thought, what they said, when they discovered that the crucified Jesus was alive. He is Lord—over sin and death. God has raised him from death. They knew it from the beginning and they repeated it in many situations. See them take the new converts down to the river for baptism. Do you confess Jesus as Lord? Yes. Do you believe that God raised him from death? Yes. Or you may see them in another context.
Here is the aged Polycarp, of whom we have something like contemporary evidence. The proconsul of Asia had no wish for his death but the crowd demanded it. “Why not,” he tries to persuade the old man, “why not swear by the fortune of Caesar?” And Polycarp replies, “Eighty-six years have I served him and he has done me no harm; how can I deny my King who saved me?”
In services, at baptisms, in courtrooms, in talks with neighbors, in the conduct of business, in family life—it is the same everywhere, “Jesus is Lord, God raised him from death.” Thin theology, you may say, poor liturgy; but we shall come back to that. And if you want to know what basic Christianity is, how to make it real to yourself, how to explain it to a friend, this is it. You cannot get anything more basic and provocative than this. So we begin Jesus is Lord.
JESUS IS LORD
What does it mean? Well of course it may mean nothing at all. “Not everyone,” said Jesus, “who says lord, lord shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” Anyone may mouth the words. Anyone may persuade himself that in doing so he is performing a religious act, which is pleasing to God. And it is worth nothing at all. At the other end of the scale, you may have seen Paul say elsewhere that no one can say Jesus is Lord except in the Holy Spirit. It is so hard a thing to say realistically, meaningfully, that it is beyond human power. It takes the power of the Spirit of God himself to say the words with the meaning they ought to bear. This did not mean spiritual excitement, a shouting of Hallelujah in a prayer meeting, though no doubt it sometimes expressed itself that way. Paul himself knows what it meant.
You will recall the story of the journey to Damascus. Struck down by the blinding light, confronted by an unknown person, he cries, “Who are you lord?” That is the “lord” of sheer bewilderment, fear, awe in the presence of the supernatural. But with the identification of the divine figure—“Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” the word gets a new meaning. “What shall I do, Lord?” This is the Lord who requires and is offered unqualified obedience. Say the word, and whatever you say, I will do. This is the “Lord” that costs something, that expresses a life of service. And it is only the Holy Spirit who can transform the staggered exclamation into the reality of day-to-day living. You will often see this two-stage development and many of us pass through it. And this is not a bad thing. There is nothing wrong with the beginning provided you are not willing to spend your life in it. But sometimes people do.
We have had Paul; here is another biblical picture. “Good master”—that is not quite up to the level of “lord,” but it is a good respectful way of beginning. Sometimes at least a teacher will tell you the right thing. But the man who was approaching Jesus knew that there was something missing—“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” You know the answer and you know he could not take it “sell off all you have, and follow me.” “Good teacher; yes you say such nice things, and you agree with Moses the Law-giver. I will address you with all respect. But no—I shall not do what you say.”
I paused there thinking of two examples, one positive, one negative, both biblical, both two thousand years old. A bit out of date aren’t they? And the thought came to me that I have spent some time this week writing an obituary for a boy who was at school with me. Always a good fellow, always a Christian, and an intelligent man, an accountant (and not the bad kind of whom we have heard too much in the news of late). So what will he do? The three children are off his hands, he’ll surely work a few years more, and then enjoy a pleasant, leisurely, retirement. No, at fifty, life really began when he entered the ministry (Church of England), and worked until he could do no more. I don’t think he ever said no to Christ, the challenge to act came late.
All three examples run the risk of confusing what I want to say. Yes, Paul quotes the words, “if you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord,” which are fine if they are truthful. Sometimes they are insincere. The record of the Church is full of both sorts. There have been the great and the little authorities of the Church who used the right words, but whose lives showed that there were other things they were more interested in. But there have been others who have stood before Councils, governors, Kings, confessed Christ, and were tortured to death. Others with the same confession who have gone out to spread and be spent in the service of the Gospel and their neighbors. Their lives have spoken louder, made a clear confession, more than words could do. If says Paul, you make that kind of confession . . . but there is another “if.” If you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead.
THAT GOD RAISED HIM FROM THE DEAD
You may well complain, “you are picking out the most difficult things this morning. The most difficult to do, and now the most difficult to believe.” Yes, it is difficult. It has always been difficult. It was difficult in New Testament times. There is no resurrection, says Aeschylus, dead people don’t rise. Eternal death awaits us, said Lucretius. Socrates went further; as he left the court that had condemned him to death he said “It is time to go, for you to life, for me to death, but which is going to the better thing, is known to none but God.” Even that is negative in comparison with Paul’s desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.
What is more, if you would like a plain account of what happened at the resurrection of Jesus, you will not get it from me. I was not there, and the New Testament doesn’t tell me. It is a matter on which people have been exercising their imaginations from the second century to the twentieth, and what they say, all of it, is imaginary. The absolute minimum of what is indisputably historically true is that the ignominious death of the leader of a small religious movement in a turbulent outlier of the Roman Empire was followed not by despondency and despair but by an explosion of spiritual moral energy which in less than twenty years (with no jets, no radio, no television to help) had carried the movement to the heart of the Empire, and in a hundred years had covered most of the known world.
That is impressive enough, but Paul has more to say. “Now is Christ risen, the first fruits of them that sleep.” As a Jew he had believed that at the end of time God would raise his people from death. He now knew that this had begun. Jesus had begun it. God had begun it with Jesus, and had done so in such a way that though the rest of us must still face death as Jesus did, there is already a sense in which we may share his risen life. We are mortal, and we still pray, day by day, “forgive us our trespasses.” We share the educative discipline of life with all the human race. But we do it with the confidence that he who has begun a good work in us will finish it at the day of Christ.
Accept Jesus as Lord, begin with him the life that will be victorious over sin and death. There is the salvation of which Paul speaks. There is one more thing to say: Christ and the law.
CHRIST AND THE LAW
Or, better, put it this way. Do you remember the Old Testament lesson? You can see at once the place where Paul found the picture that he uses in this chapter. Deuteronomy is talking about the Law and saying to the Jewish people, it is no good pleading that this is too hard for you and “you can’t expect us to do it.” “It is not too hard. It is not in heaven; you don’t have to climb up there to get it. It is not on the other side of the sea; you don’t have to get into a boat and sail the stormy ocean in order to reach it. It is immediately present; it is in your mouth, and in your heart. You can do it.”
With one small variation,
