What is the purpose of the Church in the world?
There are any number of answers that people might give to that question in modern America. Here are just a few:
- To bring people to Christ
- To do the work of God’s Kingdom
- To help the needy
- To encourage Christians
- To worship
- To be the Body of Christ
- To witness against injustice
- To tell the world of God’s Love
All of those answers are solidly biblical and reveal something of the work to which the Church is called. No one should have any problem with any of them; and I certainly do not want to give the impression in what follows that I am critical of any of them.
But what I want to suggest in this edition of “Millennium Thoughts” is that the Church’s purpose is something even more radical and more fundamental and more dangerous. The Church’s calling is to declare to the World — to the peoples of the World, to the corporations of the World, to the governments and rulers of the World — that there is One who is the Only True Ruler of all of Creation — Jesus Christ.
This claim provoked the rulers of the Roman Empire and challenged the social structure, as those first and second generation followers of Jesus declared boldly, “Jesus is Lord.” To our ears such a statement translates into a confession of religious piety. But to the first and second century world of the Roman Empire it was a rejection of the claims of the State and the claims of the economic structure. Every good citizen of the Empire was expected to recite the phrase “Caesar is Lord,” as a sign of their loyalty to the Empire and a formal recognition of the Emperor’s divine right to rule. In the economic realm, as part of a person’s membership in the particular craftsman guild to which he belonged, he was expected to pay homage to that guild’s particular god or goddess. This was to insure the blessings of divine providence in business of the guild.
Because these practices were so pervasive and simply expected, Christian leaders and teachers regularly reminded the Church that Jesus — and only Jesus — is Lord. Just think of St. Paul’s admonition in Roman 10: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you shall be saved.” Or again from Philippians 2, where the Apostle quotes an ancient Christian hymn: “God has given him a name, that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue shall confess ‘Jesus Christ is Lord.”
Living out this conviction, Christians in the first and second centuries AD were often called “atheists,” because they would not recognize the legitimacy of any other “gods,” insisting that only the God of Israel and of Jesus Christ was truly the One God. As well, Christian faith proved a tremendous threat to Caesar and the Empire, since the followers of Jesus would not name an earthly ruler “Lord.”
That refusal by our spiritual fathers and mothers and their proclamation– only Jesus is Lord — was not a matter of Christian triumphalism (the attitude that promotes Christianity’s superiority over and above all other religions and ideologies.) Because Jesus has been made to be Lord of all Creation through his death and resurrection — and because Christians knew this truth, they saw their most basic task to be that of proclaiming his Lordship, not to proclaim the Church or even the Christian religion.
The claim that there is only one who is King and Lord was and is a challenge even to our Christian practices, for even Christianity itself stands under the judgment of the One who is Lord of all. Much of the New Testament is a call to the Church to live this reality faithfully, because apart from this truth there is only falsehood, no matter how sincere our motives. We would do well today to remember this. So often modern Christians get so busy trying to offer Jesus to people as a solution to their problems — their loneliness, their addictions, their sinfulness, their emptiness — that we run the risk of making him sound like some kind of spiritual commodity. Of course Jesus is the answer to all our sins and brokenness, but he is first of all Lord.
When we understand that our first task is to announce to the world “Jesus is Lord,” the Church’s witness becomes an important intellectual gift to the world. If Jesus is Lord of all, such a claim is a reminder to all who will hear that no government, no new technology, no scientific discovery, no single leader can fix the ills of the world. Such a witness is not dreary and negative, however. Instead, it is an announcement full of grace and truth; and it implies some important considerations.
First of all, the Lordship of Jesus means that the power and influence of any government is limited; politics and public policy must never become totalizing in human life. When that happens, however subtly, idolatry rules, as we place our ultimate trust in something other than God. C. S. Lewis once observed that so long as the power of the State or the society was considered to be the final hope for helping people then the power of the State or of society could be exercised over a person’s life without limits. But, when we know that the State stands under the Lordship of Christ, then we have a reason to limit the power and role of government in all people’s lives. The State cannot redeem people, hence its authority stops at a certain point.
Similarly, Jesus’ sovereignty over all the “powers and principalities” means that Christians must testify that not even Wall Street or “the market” is unaccountable to anything but itself. Remember that Jesus said we cannot serve God and Mammon (Matthew 6). As those who declare Christ is Lord over all of life, we have a witness even to the so-called financial sector. Life is not ultimately about profit, it is about worship and service to the will of him who alone is Lord. We have something to say to those who have bowed their knees to the “Baal” of greed and materialism and who have become enslaved to these things.
In this moment of world history, we find two forces converging to produce a challenge to people of faith. One is the financial crisis. The other, related to the first, is the tendency of many, many people to put their faith in the power of the State to “save us.” Politics aside, the commitment to the reality that Jesus Christ is Lord is a claim upon Christians’ lives and minds that forces us to say NO! even to the slightest attempt to make financial crises or government power the dominant claim upon our lives. Also, it is a call to repentance for any ways that we have focused upon the immediate cares of the moment and allowed them to overwhelm us. Remember, it was Jesus Christ — King of kings and Lord of lords — who taught us,
“Do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For unbelievers run after these things and your heavenly Father knows you need them. But seek first his Kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you, as well” [Matthew 6:31-33].
As we live in a day when people question the truth of Christian faith and discuss how one can claim Jesus is the Lord and the Way when there are so many other religions, we must, along the way, make a defense of the faith and discuss the intellectual credibility of Christian faith. That, however, will only be needed if we are always living as though we really believe that Jesus is Lord. Apart from that, our best theological words ring hollow. Not putting our trust or making our allegiance to anything less, let your life be a witness to all that there is only One Lord in whom you trust.