The greatest spiritual gift, if spiritual gifts may be graded in some way, is the confession that Jesus is Lord. It is the supreme gift inasmuch as what we know as this particular gift directly echoes who God is by nature. (My choice of “echo” is deliberate.) In ways we will only ever be able to trace out in wonder and never exhaust, our spiritual gift of a faithful confession has its roots in who the trinitarian Spirit is and what the trinitarian Spirit does. Adding to the marvel of it all, this gift the church enjoys becomes the gift the church gives in turn through her proclamation of Christ, a proclamation that breaks the silence the world confuses with God’s absence. These are reflections which, while impossibly wide in scope and depth, are prompted by meditation on a few (and perhaps curious) words of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians set alongside the church’s observation of the anniversary of the Council of Nicaea: “Now, concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led. Therefore, I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says, ‘Jesus is accursed!’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:1–3).
“Speaking Together With”
For many years now, scholars of New Testament and early Christian worship have argued persuasively that the most primitive of the church’s confessions is the deceptively simple affirmation “Lord Jesus Christ.” In these three titles joined as one sacred Name, the God of Israel, the man of Nazareth, and the Messiah of promise are confessed to be One, and particularly that One who was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven. But what is happening when the church faithfully confesses that she believes the truth of “Lord Jesus Christ” and uses particular words like those of Nicaea to do so?
Of course, many answers have been given to this question, most of them perfectly sensible. Often we are told, for example, that regularly confessing something like the Creed is an act of verbalizing the orthodox faith that protects us and generations to come from dangerous error. Or perhaps we do this in order to remember the core elements of our faith and avoid forgetting them. Or perhaps we do this to commend the faith to a watching world, or to express our own identity in fundamental agreement and continuity with our forefathers in the church who also heard Scripture’s witness to the truth along these very lines.
We can multiply such answers in many variations, and all of these answers are in fact accurate and true as far as they go. But they all carry a special vulnerability, too, for they suggest that confessing Christ is something that the church does for primarily catechetical or historical-traditional or evangelistic reasons—reasons that have something to do with defending and commending the true faith. Without question, these are valid, even urgently important facets of the church’s confessing life. But may we say more than this? Is it possible even to say that the Scriptures do not merely suggest such a practice but fully expect it as a way the church will in fact prove to be the church and not some counterfeit rival? And what exactly is happening, theologically, when the church confesses Jesus Christ? The very word ”confession” puts us on the right track. To break down the etymology of the word, we would have something like “speaking together with.” But with whom are we “speaking together” when we, the church, confess Lord Jesus Christ? The church of all ages, yes. But only the church?
The Gift of the Eloquent Spirit
It would seem that the opening words of 1 Corinthians 12 can help us here. The Corinthians desire the presence and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. They know, after all, against the background of the unmistakable message of the prophets, that having the promised Spirit means that they are folded into God’s saving work in his Messiah, Jesus Christ. This would show that they belong to the reconstituted Israel of God, the people on whom the promises of the covenant God of Israel fall as blessing rather than judgment. They want the Spirit, they want his gifts, and they want to be sure the Spirit is among them. And for his part, Paul does not discourage this desire but wants them to know first what it means to have the Spirit, since it is easy to mistake the signs of the Spirit’s presence: “I don’t want you to be uninformed.” To instruct them properly, he then starts with a curious reminder. “You remember, don’t you?” Paul asks. “You remember that time before you were a Christian, when you were outside of Christ, when you were pagans? You remember how you were led astray to mute idols?”
Mute idols? What does this have to do with the presence of the Spirit? To Paul, false gods are mute gods. His characterization of false gods as mute idols recalls those psalms (such as 115:5 and 135:16) which deride and mock the gods of wood and stone. Undoubtedly, he also has in mind the prophets who described a rebellious people in the same way, as those who tragically partake of the image of the false, mute gods. “Having eyes, they see not, having ears, they hear not, having mouths, they speak not” (cf. Isa. 6:9–10; Jer. 5:21; Ezek. 12:2). He’s pulling from that eminent, long-standing tradition of mocking false gods and saying, “remember those gods you used to follow, when you were led astray by them? They were mute idols.” False gods are mute.
Mute idols stand opposite the eloquent, verbose, the very wordy true and living God. The true God, who is the Word, speaks. The true God is effusive with his words, and having the Spirit of God means enjoying and—here is the key—participating in his eloquence. But this requires that we know what the Spirit “says,” so we know how the church’s speech can be regarded as speech joined to the Spirit’s speech in some way. Paul tells the Corinthians that you can recognize the absence or the presence of the Spirit of God in the church by what is being confessed concerning Lord Jesus Christ. “So I want you to understand,” he says in verse 3, immediately after his curious remark about mute idols, “no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says ‘Jesus is accursed’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit.”
Mute idols stand opposite the eloquent, verbose, the very wordy true and living God.
“Jesus is accursed,” say some. “Jesus is Lord,” say others. These brief lines solemnly pull us back to a scene, a scene that Paul and his audience know well. It is the darkest scene of the darkest moment in the history of everything. It is the scene, of course, of the cross of Jesus where many in the crowd peer at the crucified Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. They remember what he said, they remember what was said about him, and they watch him there suffering in agony, finally dying, and they conclude—some only in their hearts but others also with their mouths—“This one is accursed. This one is cursed by God. Jesus is accursed.”
The Authenticating Voice and the Sound of Silence
We would do well to pause here for a moment and reflect on the importance of that scene on Good Friday, because it may help us understand what Paul is saying to the Corinthians about confessing Lord Jesus Christ. Until that moment, that dark and most tragic of moments which began in earnest in the Garden of Gethsemane, God the Father had had a great deal to say to and about his Son, Jesus, about his identity, his ministry, and his intimate eternal relationship with the Father. And Jesus himself repeatedly affirmed that he spoke and acted for God his Father (John 5, John 10). He identified his own will (John 6:38), his own teaching (John 7:16), his own works (John 9:4), and his own words (John 14:24) with his Father, so that to reject Jesus is to reject God, as we read in Luke 10.
In this important but highly nuanced respect, Jesus’s claims are not self-authenticating inasmuch as God the Father bears public, verbal witness to God the Son
throughout his ministry. God the Father bears witness to Jesus that what Jesus says and does is true (“The Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me” [John 5:37]). Reading the gospels, we encounter the Father, over and over throughout Jesus’s ministry, bearing witness to the Son in various ways. Jesus’s miracles performed in John 5 and in John 10 are themselves the testimony of the Father that “this is my Son.” We remember, of course, the Father’s voice from heaven formally inaugurating the Son’s public ministry in the context of Jesus’s baptism with the words: “this is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.” At Jesus’s transfiguration, again the Father says the very same words and adds the command, “listen to him” (Matt. 17). As Jesus’s ministry reaches its climax, God the Father speaks yet once more in John 12 as he communes with his troubled Son. Jesus reflects on their conversation. “Now my soul is troubled and what should I say? Should I say, Father, save me from this hour? But it was for this that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then we read that a voice sounded from heaven: “I have glorified it and I will glorify it again.” We read that some of the crowd who were there and heard what was going on said, “This is thunder.” Others said, “an angel spoke to him,” but Jesus replies to them all, “It wasn’t for my sake, but for yours that this voice spoke.”
Did not the Father’s voice speak a lot in Jesus’s ministry? From the Jordan, saying “this is my beloved Son,” to now on the very verge of Gethsemane and Golgotha, over and over again, the Father has borne public and verbal witness to the Son. “This is my Son. This is the Messiah. This is the one I have sent. Listen to him.”
Now, on Good Friday, when Jesus approaches Jerusalem for the final time to be arrested, tried, and executed as a criminal, from bowing on his knees in Gethsemane
to hanging on the tree at Golgotha, we lean in and wait to read about the heavenly voice we fully expect to protest now, to declare the truth now, even to shake the ground and the people walking on it with that truth. But what do we hear? We hear nothing. When that dark “hour” of Jesus begins, the voice from heaven suddenly goes silent. When the Son is struggling faithfully with the destiny that lies before him, one that isolates him even from his nearest and dearest but weary and unsure disciples, the Father does not again fill and shatter the void with his assuring and affirming voice. The Son addresses his Father in prayer, yes, but the Father, in Matthew 26, does not answer.
Has the wordy God gone mute? Is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of this Jesus, like the false idols? Is this not the most important time for God the Father to speak? Surely he cannot remain silent, perhaps with a blank divine stare, saying nothing. The reader of the Gospels leans in and cries, “Say something! Now is the time!” Does not the validity of all of Jesus’s claims depend on the witness of the Father now, in connection with this horrific moment?
Yes, it does.
Would not God’s silence now, in this darkest of hours, suggest to some that maybe he had changed his mind about Jesus, that he had abandoned Jesus?
It might.
And for many that is precisely what it means. “Jesus is accursed,” they conclude. Initially, even his own disciples seemed to have interpreted these events that way,
according to Luke 24.
The phenomenon of silence can signal rest and peace, or owe itself to profound unrest and disturbance, especially when it is the silence of waiting for resolution, for
a redemptive breaking of a deathly silence. Silence itself can be ironically eloquent as a testimony that things are not well. Simon & Garfunkel’s famous song, “The Sound
of Silence,” tells us that “silence like a cancer grows.” Poet Alice Walker, encountering the horrors of events in Rwanda, the Eastern Congo, and the Middle East, titled
her dark essay wrestling with these atrocities Overcoming Speechlessness. The gifted but often troubled philosopher, Simone Weil, organized a collection of essays in which she wrestled with the relationship of human life to the Christian God, and called her collection Waiting for God. Tomáš Halík was a psychotherapist working under the twentieth-century communist regime in Czechoslovakia and was also secretly ordained as a priest in service of the underground church. In that context he wrote similarly of faith, hope, and love as the forms of “patience with God” in the face of his apparent silence, which the world confuses with his death. No wonder silence has long had a cherished place in Christian spirituality. In his work titled Silence: A Christian History, historian Diarmaid MacCulloch suggested that silence can serve as a lens through which we can appreciate many of the successes, failures, and challenges in the church’s story.
We should see the act of resurrection itself as an act of divine confession: the eloquence of the Father raising the Son in and by the witnessing and enlivening Spirit.
Silence of this sort begs for resolution. And yet, God is in fact not silent for long. But how does God now speak his affirming word regarding Jesus? “He raises him from the dead!” we reply. Yes, but we must not stop there. If Jesus’s death includes, as it were, the momentary “death” (as silence) of that affirming voice of the Father
that had been saying repeatedly, “This is my Son. Listen to him,” then we begin to understand the remarkable implications of what Paul says in Romans 1:4, that this same Jesus was confirmed as the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness in his resurrection from the dead. As the same apostle says elsewhere in 1 Timothy 3:15, in the act of the resurrection from the dead, Jesus is vindicated by the Spirit. The apostle is convinced that the resurrection of Jesus that follows the darkness of Golgotha and the continued silence of Holy Saturday, the silence in between the cross and the empty tomb, is the climactic event of the Father’s words first given at the Jordan: “See, this is my beloved Son,” and this is connected in some way to the Spirit. The resurrection is an act of divine identification and vindication of the Son by Father and Spirit.
We may ask our question this way. In the resurrection, the Father speaks afresh. But who is the “associated” speaker who by the resurrection of the Son says, with the Father, to all, “this is Lord Jesus Christ?” By whom does the Father speak confirmatively in resurrection? The Spirit. The Spirit, we may say, is the divine eloquence at work in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
The apostle’s central concern now emerges into view for the Corinthians and for us. The Spirit is the witness to the death-defying power of the love between the
Father and the Son. The Spirit serves as the ultimate guarantor and witness for both the divine unity of Father and Son and also of their fellowship, their harmonious
unity. In bearing witness to Jesus in his resurrection from the dead, which is the central content of the Spirit’s testimony, the things the Spirit says are the same as the
Father’s: “Jesus is Lord and there is no other God than the one proclaimed by and revealed through this One.”
The Self-Effacing Spirit
Hearing this, we remember things we might have forgotten, particularly that Jesus himself had told us about what the Spirit would do in these very terms. In fact, this is who the Spirit is and always has been: the One who, proceeding eternally from the Father and the Son, speaks not of himself but of the Father and the Son, always pointing, as it were, away from himself and to them. He is the clandestine Spirit who is discovered principally in his acts of disclosing the Father and the Son, going before and behind the Son in history, conforming the Bride to the glory of that Son through fellowship with him. To “find” and “hear” the Spirit, we attend to the works and words of the Father and the Son. He speaks of them, refers to them, glorifies them, is “all about” them, not himself.
He has been the self-effacing Spirit from the beginning. In the Gospels, we learn that the Holy Spirit is—long before the resurrection of Jesus—a kind of “advance
guard” for the mission of the Son. At every point the Spirit confirms that the course of Jesus’s ministry, even his being rejected by Israel, is not only consistent with
God’s will but a confirmation of who Jesus really is. It was the Spirit who was operative in Jesus long before the baptism event as the Son was “incarnate by the Holy Spirit,” as we confess in the Creed and read in Matthew 1 and Luke 1. That Spirit also comes upon Jesus at his baptism in Matthew 1, drives him immediately afterwards
into the wilderness to be tempted in Matthew 4 and Luke 4. It is the Spirit whose power Jesus claims for his mighty deeds in Matthew 12 and whom he promises will one day come to lead his disciples into all the truth after the ascension in John 16:13. And at the crucifixion, that scene that brought us into this question in the first place, when Jesus dies, yet again the Spirit goes on ahead of him, present in power on the far side of the cross to raise Jesus from the dead (1 Pet. 3).
The Spirit had been the one who went before the Son as he hovered over creation’s waters, spoke through the prophets, went before Israel in a pillar of fire and cloud, and inhabited tent and temple. He was in these various ways already going before Jesus. Now, after Good Friday, he has Jesus follow him as he goes before him, to raise him from the dead on Easter morning. Jesus, therefore, when he repeatedly confesses the Father throughout his earthly ministry, discloses the trinitarian bond that includes the Spirit “confessing” Jesus. If the mission of Jesus is to confess the Father even unto death, the Spirit’s ministry is to confess Jesus as the Father’s beloved Son even beyond that death. In fact, we should see the act of resurrection itself as an act of divine confession: the eloquence of the Father raising the Son in and by the witnessing and enlivening Spirit—a threefold act of unimpeachable testimony.
But we have not yet discovered what this has to do with the church’s confession of Lord Jesus Christ.
The Divine Duet: Confessing with the Spirit
The resurrection of Jesus Christ by and in the Spirit is at least a chief aspect of the affirming, confirming voice of God that we were all waiting for at the cross in the troubling silence. But now we recall that the risen Jesus promised to give that same Spirit to his disciples, the apostolic foundation of the church of which he is himself the cornerstone. To what end? For their own ongoing testimony to the world at large, as we read in Acts 1 and John 1, which has in view their “posterity,” the church to be built on their faithful testimony. Jesus confirms that the Spirit’s witness that has been inseparable from his own witness to the Father is going to be inseparable from the witness of his people as well, giving gracious rise to the church’s own eloquence in the divine proclamation: “This One is the Lord!”
These observations put us in position to appreciate the place of the church’s confessional life within the nexus of attesting planning Father, risen Son, and witnessing Spirit, constituting the church’s identity in the period between the resurrection of the Son and the resurrection of his Body. She is the Body blessed with the Spirit who gives voice, not in isolation but through the church, to the divine declaration: “Jesus is not accursed; he is the Lord.” Jesus was raised in the power of the Spirit whose work of witnessing to the Son continuously takes place through confessing human beings, the church, who are gathered by that Spirit from the ends of the earth to give voice to this sacred duet of creedal affirmation. At the very end of canonical Scripture, among the very last words we find in Revelation 22, what do we read? “The Spirit and the Bride say, come.” The Spirit, not the Father, not the Son. And yet not the Spirit alone, but “the Spirit and the Bride say”—a sacred duet in the act of confession and commendation of Lord Jesus Christ. In a duet of divine origin through a historical people, the voice rings out, “Come! Come to this One. This is the One. Living water is here. Life is here. Come now to the One who will himself come again.” And so John responds, “Even so, come Lord Jesus!”
In the wonder of God’s grace, an imperfect and sinful people spanning space and time are inhabited by the eloquent Spirit of God and brought, as it were, into his own eloquence in saying with him “Jesus is Lord,” vindicating Jesus before the world and commending him to one another. Such a confession does not come from below,
but only from above. Paul famously says elsewhere, in Romans 8:9, that this includes what we say of the Father, for it is only by virtue of the Spirit that human beings are able to call God “Abba.”
The Spirit’s work of gathering the church from near and far accounts for the biblical affirmations that this church is known by this and distinguished from counterfeits by this, namely, that she confesses “Jesus is Lord.” No one can say that, says Paul to the Corinthians, except by the Spirit, because this is what the Spirit says. Because this is who the Spirit is, because this is what the Spirit says, you can find the church by that confession. To be sure, there’s more to say, as in 2,000 years we have often needed to explain what we mean by “Jesus is Lord.” Nevertheless, for all of our theological development and sophistication, we will never outgrow the simplicity and profundity of that core confession: Lord Jesus Christ.
Nor is this an example of a disordered preoccupation with Paul alone. In 1 John 2, the apostle John similarly addresses a problem of Christological heresy and says to
the church in words that will now resonate with us, “But you,” he says, “have been anointed by the Holy One,” that is, the Holy Spirit. “You have been anointed by the Holy
One and you have all knowledge. Who is the liar, but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.” And then in verse 24, “Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you
heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. And this is the promise that he made to us—eternal life.” John confirms that Paul’s argument is not unique to him but is an apostolic conviction. He affirms that what the church “heard from the beginning,” which approximates our language of the authentic “tradition,” arises from the reality of trinitarian life and finds living, “abiding,” trinitarian expression within the voice of the church: in the Holy Spirit, who anoints unto a faithful confession, we confess rather than deny Jesus as the Christ, and thus affirm and possess both the Son and the Father.
The confession at the heart of the gospel and of the church’s identity and life—“Jesus is Lord!”—is a confession that only comes from the Spirit who proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son, and who thus bears glorious and eloquent witness to both. This eloquence consisted in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, breaking the silence that funded the doubts and rejections of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. And that eloquence continues now to powerfully bear witness to Jesus Christ as the Lord, as the Spirit fills the church, the glorious Body of the Son, with this same fulsome declaration, “Jesus is Lord.” To have this confession is to have far more than mere words, more than being traditional, more than getting your I’s dotted and your T’s crossed, more than having some apologetic or evangelistic tool. It is, says John, to have the “received words” abiding in us, which words originate in the Spirit himself. This is, in part, what having the Spirit looks like. It is nothing less than to be graciously woven into the trinitarian glory of the Father’s “wordy” love for his Son and the Son’s “wordy” love for his Father, who in the Spirit love each other perfectly and, yes, eloquently.
What an honor it is to be folded into such love by the confession the Spirit gives voice to within the Body, the church. This, ultimately, is what is happening when the church confesses Lord Jesus Christ. “I don’t want you to be uninformed,” Paul tells the Corinthians. “The true God is not mute. He’s in fact very wordy, and he is eloquent, and his eloquence is the Spirit of the resurrection and vindication of Christ at work in you who confess the creed ‘Lord Jesus Christ,’—not because you’re mere traditionalists, not because you can’t come up with something yourself, not because you like old-sounding words, but because the Spirit is at work in you, the Body, to join you with himself in the glorious declaration ‘Lord Jesus Christ.’”
In this light, we might find ourselves in a better position to understand why the church has always taken so very seriously the minutiae of Christological teaching,
and why she has believed the stakes to be so high in doing so. Ever since Easter morning, continuing through Nicaea and Constantinople and Chalcedon, and for many centuries since, the church has guarded and commended what is the greatest sacred honor conceivable: to add the voice of the Bride to the eloquence of the Spirit in glory of the Father and the Son, and thus to say, to the world and to another, “Come! Come to the Lord Jesus Christ! And, Jesus, do come quickly.” This gift we also recognize as a solemn and joyful summons to worship, ministry, evangelism, and confession, so that more and more might be added to the innumerable choir of faithful
confessors of Lord Jesus Christ until that day when, as Paul says to the Philippians (2:10–11), every knee will bow and every tongue will confess.
Confess what? “Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Isn’t that just like the Spirit to do?