Genitive Implications
by Mark Douglas
Texts: Psalm 24; Romans 10:1-13

As many of you are aware, the highest governing body of the Presbyterian Church is meeting right now to discuss matters of theological and political import for our denomination. Chief among this year's matters are several proposals asking that the Presbyterian Church (USA) clarify its position on Jesus' Lordship and his salvific ability.

As with many of our current debates, this one is something of a tempest in a teapot; somebody heard someone he didn't trust say something he didn't like, and then gathered a bunch of other somebodies who took what was said as a dominant position among a bunch of people they didn't trust. Sides were taken and what began as one person making a questionable rhetorical move suddenly threatened to ignite schism in the church.

From there, we started making sure candidates for ministry used the proper buzz-words--like "unique" but not like "singular"; like "Jesus is the Lord and Savior," not "Jesus is my Lord and Savior" -- therein turning ordination into a game of theological three-card monte.

The irony of the whole thing is that both sides have expressed agreement on Jesus' Lordship; they've just been less willing to admit agreement with the other side. Sigh. Aren't all you Presbyterians glad you're here and not at General assembly right now? And aren't the rest of you glad you're not Presbyterians?

Of course, we Presbyterians aren't the only ones interested in Jesus' Lordship. Two years ago, the Roman Catholic Church received "Dominus Iesus" from the Vatican, a document intended to clarify the relationships between the church and its Lord and the church and the rest of us errant brothers and sisters by better defining Jesus' Lordship.

Instead, of clarity, the document only added to the confusion. Add to that the writings of theologians either defending or criticizing the language of Lordship and its monarchical origins, the inter-religious dialogues caught up on the word, and the way many of us in the church cast it about willy-nilly when we're looking for an adjective to say before "Jesus" or a synonym to say instead of "God," and you might draw the conclusion that we're "Lord" obsessed; Messiah-manic; fixated on fealty--and that somehow getting our Christology right--or at least on making sure everybody is using the right wordsÑwill resolve all of our problems.

By modern standards, I'm not sure the apostle Paul would pass muster. The thing is, when Paul was tossing around his Lord-language, he wasn't especially concerned with advancing an orthodox Christology. There are no heresy charges in his letter to the Romans; no challenges to alternative theological visions, claims about the value of monarchical models, or frustrations at adoptionist claims. The words "homoousias" and "homoiousias" just don't pop up in his conversation.

What there are, instead, are concerns about the way we live in light of a very basic, but very high Christology. That is, the first century church's confession "Jesus is Lord" was a Christological claim in which they equated Jesus with Yahweh, but for that very reason, it was a political claim as well.

Romans, chapters 9 through 11 is Paul's protracted argument about the single most complex and preoccupying ethical question of the early church: Do Christians also have to be Jews, with all the ritual obligations that being Jewish entails? On the one hand, we cannot simply ignore the promises God made to Israel, arguing instead for a new dispensation, for to do so not only makes God a promise-breaker, but leaves Christians vulnerable to the possibility that God will find someone other than the church to be the chosen people just as God found the Christians to replace the Jews. So, since we can't say the church replaces Israel, we have to attend to the possibility that the church ought to behave like Israel.

On the other hand, Jesus does make claims about how to relate to Yahweh that don't seem especially congruent with Jewish law. So, since we can't say the church is the same as Israel, we have to attend to the possibility that the church doesn't have to behave like Israel.

The dilemma has ignited conflict after conflict between Christians and Jews in the early church, and Romans 10:12, which sits right in the middle of these three complex chapters, is the basis for Paul's answer to the tensions between Israel and the new church: "For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him."

Paul's solution, in other words, is to tell his audience that the starting point for the way out of this messy situation is to use the same adjective to describe Jesus that they use to describe Yahweh, and therein to ascribe to the risen Jesus the same power that they ascribe to Yahweh.

But that power wasn't thought of as just about salvation, though salvation certainly is a part of it. Instead, Yahweh's Lordship -- which is to say, Jesus' Lordship -- was understood to extend to matters social and political as well.

As the Psalmist reminds us, "The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world and those who live in it." So rather than putting a period after the word "Lord," we ought to begin a genitive clause; that is, we ought to follow the word "Lord" with the word "of" and continue the sentence: "Jesus is Lord of..." Said differently, for first Century Christians -- and for us -- there are implications to confessing Jesus is Lord that are built into the structure of our confession, and ignoring those implications is tantamount to missing the whole point of the confession.

All of which suggests that the current debates about Jesus' Lordship aren't so much bad debates as misplaced ones; it's not that the debates go in the wrong direction, but that they don't go far enough in the right ones. For it's not a matter of getting the words right, but of living into all the implications of those words for our lives. It's not a matter of accepting or rejecting monarchical language, but of exploring the way that language actually functions to describe Jesus and his relation to the world.

The mistake on all sides is that we've been content to place a period where there ought to be an "of." We've been so busy with the indicative propriety of our confession that we've missed the genitive implications of what we confess -- which are what give the confession meaning in the first place.

These implications have to do with whose world we believe this is -- not whose world this initially was but isn't now, or whose world this ought to be, or whose world we wish it were, or even whose world it will be, but whose world this actually is; Jesus is Lord of the earth.

These implications have to do with how we understand ourselves and our neighbors -- not as resident aliens in a foreign land, but as citizens of God's country surrounded by people who, whether they know it or not, are also citizens; Jesus is Lord of the earth and all that are in it.

These implications have to do with the way we think about language -- not as the basic cause for confusion in the world or as evidence of our inability to engage and understand others, and certainly not as weapon, but as one of the ways through which our Lord continues to make himself known to us, using even the words of those with whom we disagree to teach us something we need to know; Jesus is the Lord of language.

They have to do with the way we think about mission and evangelism -- not as the attempt to wrestle Jesus into a conveniently sized and attractively decorated box suitable for export, but as a recognition that the Lord is already there, working in that place and desiring that we participate in the divinely-initiated process of making his work more clearly visible.

And they have to do with the way we think about the table before us right now -- not as the object of our control or even just the occasional center of our worship, but, because it is the Lord's table, as the very sign that points to the rest of the universe, reminding us that Jesus' Lordship extends to all materiality and through the very stuff of existence itself.

Amen.