June 2, 2024

I speak to you in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Who is Jesus? It’s a hard question to answer, because Scripture paints so many different pictures of him. Many of those pictures come from the Gospels. There’s Jesus the wise teacher. Jesus the miracle worker and healer. Jesus the truth-teller. Jesus who confronts those who use their power, authority, or wealth to oppress instead of liberate. They’re all accurate pictures, but they all have one thing in common. They show Jesus as powerful in some worldly way.

But there’s another picture of Jesus. One we often overlook. It’s a picture Paul paints of him in his letters – Jesus, the Crucified One who is resurrected with marks in his hands and his side. And so this morning I want us to be thinking about what it means for us to think of about Jesus as the Crucified One. And I want us to think about what it means to be “slaves of Christ”.

We read this morning from Paul’s Second Letter to the church in Corinth. Part of the reason he wrote that letter is because, at some point since Paul moved on, a group of people he sarcastically refers to as the “super-apostles” had arrived in Corinth. They claimed to be superior to Paul, and preached and taught a different Jesus than he did. And it appears from Paul’s letters that a lot of this difference – and their claimed superiority – comes from the fact that they seemed grander than Paul was. More eloquent. More commanding presences. Maybe an easy charm. Whatever it was, they obviously made a better impression than Paul did.

In response to all this, Paul writes “we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake”. Now I don’t know about you, but I have trouble with the word “slaves”. There’s no way to sugarcoat it. “Slaves” comes with mental pictures of people captured in Africa – torn from their families – to be bought and sold and forced into backbreaking labor. Maybe we think of modern-day sweatshops. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to square the idea of God as love with the idea of God as some kind of slaveowner. There’s little appeal to a slaveowning God.

This is one of those times where a little historical context goes a long way. Slavery was a fundamental reality for Paul’s first century Greco-Roman society. Some 10% to 20% of the Roman Empire’s population was enslaved. But there were many different kinds of slaves. And Paul’s readers would have understood that being the slave of a high official in this society often meant holding more power and controlling more wealth than the majority of free people did – because the slave acted on behalf of the master. So when Paul calls himself a “slave of Christ” – the highest official there could possibly be – it’s a title of honor, not one of shame.

This description gets at Paul’s picture of who Jesus is. Paul’s letters rarely reference Jesus’ miracles or his teachings or other parts of his ministry. Instead, Paul points time and again to the cross – to Jesus’ death and resurrection – as his critical work. Paul understands the fundamental meaning of leadership in the Kingdom of God – the paradoxical relationship between suffering and power. The super-apostles appear to be pointing to Paul’s sufferings and his physical limitations as a sign of his weakness. Their criticism is based on the idea that someone needs status in the eyes of the world to lead in God’s kingdom. Paul’s response is that his suffering and weakness lead him to identify with the crucified Jesus. His suffering and weakness show that he’s the authentic apostle, because they help him to imitate the Crucified Christ who laid down his life for his friends.

The contradictions don’t end there. For Paul, being a slave of Christ is what brings real freedom. Because for Paul, Christian freedom isn’t about the choices that come from having power and authority. Freedom is a gift that liberates us to be what God has created us to be – relational beings who are in relationships for the good of the world. True freedom, for Paul, is the freedom to serve others in imitation of the Master himself – the Christ who washed the feet of his disciples. Slavery to Christ offering the freedom to serve is the ultimate example of the Kingdom of God’s leadership paradox – that suffering leads to power.

And as we see ourselves as slaves – as we become more free to serve others – we more clearly grasp that other reality Paul writes about this morning. We stop thinking that we’re the gift we give others. Instead, we see ourselves as clay jars holding the treasure. It’s the difference between being a bronze jar and a clay jar. Offering the treasure in a bronze jar – beautiful jars made of the wealthy – draws attention to the jar itself. But when we offer so grand a treasure – the good news of Jesus Christ – in a clay jar – a menial, frail container – this society’s version of Tupperware – it makes the source and the identity of the gift unmistakable. Being slaves to Christ – putting God at the center – gives us the freedom to offer others the gift of God’s face, power and hope, and not ourselves.

So, who is Jesus? Paul calls us to identify not with the Christ who performed miracles – but instead the crucified Christ. The one who shows us that leadership in the Kingdom of God looks like suffering and slavery. Paul calls us to be slaves to Christ so that we can have the freedom to live a different way of life than our culture insists on – a way of life where we love and serve our neighbors. So that we can have the freedom step away from ourselves and follow in the steps of the one who, to show the extent of God’s love for the world, allowed himself to be humbled and made the journey of hope to the Cross and back.

My friends, we have a choice between the freedom that being a slave to Christ offers, or the slavery that the freedom of the world offers. Choose wisely.

Amen.