Unsettling Advent 2024, Day 3
“Because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9-10)
The Christian proclamation that “Jesus is Lord” is a radical statement. Scholars have highlighted how this confession conflicted with the expected acknowledgement in biblical times that “Caesar is Lord.” Only one of them — Jesus or Caesar — is actually in charge. Only one gets to have our ultimate allegiance.
I like to imagine the first Christians as being a bit subversive due to their experience with Jesus. Because of their encounters with him and their understanding of who he was, they knew the emperor had no clothes. Jesus IS Lord, regardless of how Caesar feels about it.
There’s other language used by the early Christians that operated in similar ways. For example, the label “Son of God” also had political overtones. We rightly apply the term to Jesus, naming his status and agency in relation to God. Yet, many are unaware — or forget — that Augustus Caesar, the adopted son of Julius, who ruled the empire in the time of Jesus also claimed that title.
Again, those early followers of Jesus were making both theological and political claims about their messiah. There’s a true ruler of the world. There’s a true Son of God. It’s not Caesar.
Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian and ethicist known for both a sharp mind and a sharp tongue, described the message of the gospel as “Jesus is Lord, and everything else is bullshit.”
To put it bluntly, Christians today have added a lot of manure to the gospel. Christian Nationalism, prosperity “gospels,” self-styled prophets promoting political extremism, there’s a lot that passes under the mantle of “Christian” that is far from the gospel. There’s a lot of bullshit out there.
All of it is meant to take our eyes off the ball. It’s intended to compromise our witness that Jesus is Lord. It seeks to co-opt us to participate in the work of empire, to become complicit in Caesar’s reign.
Social scientists have described how much of our religious confessions are wrapped up in our social identities. Rather than having the courage of our convictions, we use the language of faith to signal our belonging to a political party or our allegiance to a particular movement (and the leader atop of it). In other words, we may proclaim that “Jesus is Lord” but we’re actually more invested in the cow poop.
Advent is a time for us to recalibrate our spiritual lives. It’s a season when we realize that the Lord we’re waiting for doesn’t arrive in the way that we expect. That’s good news for us and bad news for Caesar.
Beau Underwood is a contributing editor of Word&Way and a Disciples of Christ pastor in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is also co-author of Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism.