Building on the evidence from the preceding chapter, in this chapter we bring together a number of affirmations, both intentional and incidental, in which Paul speaks of Jesus as Lord in a variety of roles that in the Old Testament were the unique province of Israel’s God, Yahweh. Our concern is to examine how Paul perceives the risen Christ to function as the eternal, exalted Lord in every kind of matter on earth and in heaven.
As we have seen repeatedly throughout this study, so here Paul is presupposing rather than arguing for an understanding of Christ as acting on behalf of the Godhead. In the majority of cases these affirmations exist as something Paul argues from rather than for, since they frequently serve as the basis for what Paul will urge on these various communities of believers in their own settings, most often regarding some matter of Christian behavior.
The Eschatological Judge
We begin with a group of affirmations related to an aspect of Christ the Lord as the coming one, where he is assumed to be the end-time agent of divine justice, including both final salvation and judgment. Several moments in Paul’s letters fit this category, many of them reflecting offhanded echoes of the Septuagint. Together they make it plain that the role of judge consistently assigned to Yahweh in Israel’s worldview has now been assumed altogether by Christ as the Kyrios (= Yahweh). First we examine several instances where Paul uses the basic designation for the eschatological event, “the Day of the Lord”—passages listed in their assumed chronological order over about a ten-year span.
The Day of the Lord
1 THESSALONIANS 5:2
For you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.
2 THESSALONIANS 2:1–2
We ask you, brothers and sisters, not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching . . . that the day of the Lord has already come.
1 CORINTHIANS 1:8
He will also keep you firm to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
1 CORINTHIANS 5:5
Hand this man over to Satan . . . so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.
PHILIPPIANS 1:6, 9–10
He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. . . . And this is my prayer: . . . that you . . . may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.
One of the ways the prophets spoke of the eschatological future for God’s people was with the phrase “the day of the LORD,” a “day” that included both divine salvation and judgment. Indeed, in this tradition a coming day that had once held promise for a bright future was often portrayed first as a day of impending doom. Thus in one of the earlier prophetic oracles, Amos asks Israel, “Will not the day of the LORD be darkness, not light—pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness?” (Amos 5:20; cf. Isa. 2:6–22; Joel 1:15; 2:1–11).
In the early Christian community, the exaltation of the risen Christ carried with it an eager expectation of his return, the parousia (lit. “appearing”) of Christ in glory. And it was to his anticipated coming that the community attached this biblical terminology of the “day.” The language itself appears six times in Paul’s letters, all with reference to Christ’s second coming. In three of these moments Paul uses the precise language of the prophets, “the day of the Lord”; in another, “the Lord” is further identified as “Jesus Christ”; and in the two later passages the phrase is simply “the day of Christ [Jesus].” This is a certain instance where Paul appropriates language that had belonged exclusively to Yahweh and applies it to the expected eschatological return of the risen Lord, Jesus Christ. The Apostle again expresses this affirmation as a reality assumed to be held in common with his readers. As before, this language transfer is the result of Christ’s having “the name” bestowed on him, so that the day of Yahweh is now the day of the return of the Lord, Jesus Christ, expressed frequently in terms of his appearing or coming again.
The primary reason for this shift of language was not intentionally christological. Rather, it was simply the logical outcome of the church’s expectation that Christ the Lord, who had ascended and thus had assumed the ultimate place of authority at God’s “right hand,” is going to return again in power and glory. The parousia of the Lord would therefore be the chief event in the new understanding of the day of the Lord, and as in the Old Testament this parousia would be an event of both salvation and judgment. For Paul everything about this appearing, or coming, expressed previously as the exclusive prerogative of God, is now focused on Christ as the Lord (= Yahweh) of the Septuagint texts. We turn now to an examination of passages where Paul describes the parousia of the Lord.
The Parousia of the Lord
1 THESSALONIANS 3:13
May [God the Father] strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord, Jesus, comes with all his holy ones.
Then the LORD my God will come, and all the holy ones with him.
1 THESSALONIANS 4:16
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God.
PSALM 47:5
God has ascended amid shouts of joy, the LORD amid the sounding of trumpets.
In keeping with one of the predominant concerns in both of his letters to the believers in Thessalonica—the earliest letters in the Pauline corpus—Paul concludes an early prayer for them by expressing concern for their need to be blameless before God the Father at the parousia of the Lord (1 Thess. 3:11–13). He describes this coming with language taken directly from the prophet Zechariah (Zech. 14:5): the coming, or appearing, of “our Lord,” who is now identified as “Jesus,” will be accompanied by “all his holy ones.” Some have suggested that hoi hagioi (“the holy ones”) in this case refers to Christian “saints” who will accompany Jesus (based on 1 Thess. 4:14), but this reading not only imports foreign matter into this text (the word hagioi does not appear in 1 Thess. 4) but also misses the christological import of the Zechariah text for the Apostle. As Paul will spell it out in greater detail in his follow-up letter to this same community of believers (2 Thess. 1:7), the “holy ones” in this context refers to angels, not humans. The christological import of Paul’s weaving together of language from the prophets is that Zechariah refers to the parousia of Yahweh to the Mount of Olives when God’s eschatological victory over the nations would be carried out. Thus the future coming of Yahweh, Paul implies, is now to be understood in terms of the future parousia of the present reigning Christ, who for the Apostle is singularly and always “the Lord.”
In an equally striking instance of intertextuality in this same letter, Paul borrows language from the “ascent” of Yahweh in one of the enthronement psalms and applies it to the “descent” of Christ: “The Lord himself will come down from heaven,” accompanied “with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God.” The italicized words in this case are a direct echo of language from the Psalter (Ps. 47:5). Again, with this bold stroke Paul applies to the risen Lord (= Jesus) language from the Psalter that refers to Yahweh. To be sure, Christ is not to be identified with Yahweh as such; rather, Paul understands Christ as the exalted Lord to assume the role that in the Old Testament was uniquely that of Israel’s God, Yahweh (i.e., the LORD).
2 THESSALONIANS 1:7–8
This will happen when the Lord, Jesus, is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord, Jesus.
ISAIAH 66:15
See, the LORD [Yahweh] is coming with fire, and his chariots are like a whirlwind; he will bring down his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire.
JEREMIAH 9:13 (CF. 32:23)
The LORD [Yahweh] said, “. . . they have not obeyed me, or followed my law.”
In another remarkable moment of borrowed language, Paul uses the opening thanksgiving in his second letter to the Thessalonian believers as a way to encourage those who are suffering among them. In so doing he reassures them that at Christ’s coming not only will they be “glorified” (2 Thess. 1:12) but their present enemies will be duly brought to justice. In the case of the Thessalonian believers, their suffering was very likely related to their acknowledgment of the risen Jesus as Kyrios (Lord) in the context of a free city with deep loyalties to the Roman emperor as Kyrios. This would explain why the Apostle would at this point highlight the role that their heavenly Kyrios will play in the final judgment. Thus with a series of intertextual moments, all taken from prophetic announcements of divine judgment, Paul reassures these nascent believers that the future is theirs—and thus neither Caesar’s nor pagan Thessalonica’s.
We will examine a number of these intertextual moments in the next two sections, but we begin with the initial depiction of Christ’s coming in the introductory clauses of this very early letter (written toward the end of the second decade of the Christian faith). With a combination of language from the concluding oracles in Isaiah—where the prophet’s words of judgment and hope for Jerusalem are placed in a kind of summary fashion—Paul deliberately places the risen Lord in the role Yahweh was to play. This begins with his description of the parousia itself. Along with echoes of his own language from the first letter (“from heaven . . . with his powerful angels”), Paul describes the revelation of the Lord, Jesus, as “in blazing fire,” resulting in punishment on “those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord, Jesus” (2 Thess. 1:7–8).
The italicized words in the first part of Paul’s sentence are taken directly from a moment in Isaiah where the “LORD” is Yahweh (Isa. 66:15). But for Paul the Lord who will come with blazing fire to mete out justice is none other than “our Lord, Jesus.” Similarly, his description of the Lord punishing those who “do not obey the gospel of our Lord, Jesus,” seems to echo a poignant moment in Jeremiah where some present judgments of Yahweh against Israel are expressed in terms of their not having “obeyed [Yahweh] or followed [his] law” (Jer. 9:13). In Paul’s case, however, this language is applied to outsiders—namely, people who “do not obey the gospel of our Lord, Jesus.” As before, Paul’s identification of the risen Lord is not as Yahweh per se. Rather, by his having had “the name” (Kyrios = Yahweh) bestowed on him, the risen Christ will assume Yahweh’s divine roles when he comes as judge. Picking up on this usage, we now turn to an examination of further passages where Paul clearly understands that the Lord, Jesus, will assume the role of judge for his own people as well as his enemies.
The Present and Eschatological Judge of His People
One of the more noteworthy instances where Paul describes Jesus as sharing in divine prerogatives is when Paul describes Jesus as the “Lord” who assumes Yahweh’s divine role as the one who serves as judge of both his own people and the whole world. We begin by examining passages where Paul describes Christ judging his own people. Such passages occur several times in Paul’s earlier letters, and in every instance he is echoing passages from the Septuagint that refer to Kyrios (= Yahweh), which Paul then applies to Christ as the risen Lord.
The Lord will punish all those who commit such sins, as we told you and warned you before.
PSALM 94:1
The LORD [Yahweh] is a God who avenges. O God who avenges, shine forth.
In his warning to the Thessalonian believers (1 Thess. 4:6), Paul’s wording is just unusual enough to suggest that he is echoing language from the opening words of Psalm 94, where the LORD (= Yahweh) is identified as “a God who avenges” (v. 1). Although contemporary English versions do not use similar verbs in these two cases, Paul’s Greek word, which is used adjectivally (lit. “the avenger Lord”), seems very likely to be an echo of the language with which this Psalm begins, as suggested in the Greek text.1 In a context where a brother has abused another brother in a matter of sexual immorality, Paul assures the offender that “the Lord [Christ] is an avenger in all these things” (1 Thess. 4:6 NRSV). Here is a case where Paul seems very easily to have transferred to Christ (as “Lord”) biblical language that belongs to Yahweh alone.
1 CORINTHIANS 4:4–5
It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart. At that time each will receive their praise from God.
DANIEL 2:22
[God] reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him.
Toward the end of the first major issue he takes up with the believers in Corinth (1 Cor. 1:10–4:21), after taking exception to some of them sitting in judgment of him, Paul makes it plain that the only one with the right to judge him is “the Lord,” whose servant he is (1 Cor. 4:4). Thus even though he knows of nothing that would be the cause for such judgment on their part, he goes on to acknowledge that this in itself does not mean final justification for him since ultimately the Lord judges, or examines,2 him, which here clearly indicates the eschatological judgment to come.
In this instance, as in others, the Apostle concludes by including the Corinthians themselves in this final examination by the Lord. So they must be careful not to judge anything “before the appointed time,” when the Lord (Christ) himself comes and (literally) “will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and will lay bare the plans of people’s hearts” (1 Cor. 4:5, my trans.). In this apparent echoing of language from Daniel (whether intended to be so or not), Paul reminds the Corinthians that at the time when Christ will exercise his judgment of “light,” the role of God the Father will be to “praise” those found worthy by the Lord’s judgment (v. 5). This combination makes it quite clear that Paul understands the final judgment of believers to be a uniquely divine prerogative—now assumed to be that of the risen Lord, Jesus Christ.
2 CORINTHIANS 5:9–11
So we make it our goal to please [the Lord], whether we are at home in the body or away from it. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad. Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others.
Along with the preceding moments where Paul echoes the language of the Old Testament in the matter of Christ the Lord serving as judge at the end times, in his second letter to the Corinthian believers Paul describes Christ as Lord assuming the prerogative of God as judge at the final assize (2 Cor. 5:9–11), though he does so in this case without using language from any specific moment in the Septuagint. Toward the end of a considerable narrative and appeal, concluding his reflection on the future of the present body that is destined to decay but then to be once again “clothed” in the eschaton (vv. 2–4), Paul uses himself as an example that serves as a couched appeal to the Corinthians. He does this in three ways.
First, Paul expresses his desire to live so as “to please” the Lord (2 Cor. 5:9), an Old Testament idea that in Paul is expressed ordinarily in terms of pleasing “God” (e.g., 1 Thess. 4:1; 2 Cor. 5:9; Rom. 8:8). But here, as in his earlier letter to these believers (1 Cor. 7:32), “the Lord,” Christ, is the one he seeks to please.
Second, the reason for this is that “we must all appear before the judgment seat [bēma] of Christ” (2 Cor. 5:10). The word bēma refers to the chair that would be placed on a structure of some sort above the people in the Greek agora (public market), where a magistrate would sit and listen to accusations or complaints and then mete out various kinds of judgments. In this remarkable sentence Paul asserts that Christ the Lord will assume God’s role in issuing final judgment on his own people, “so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad” (v. 10).
Here is a case where Paul places Christ, the risen Lord, in the role that everyone in his native Jewish community considered to be the absolute prerogative of God alone. One thing that was certain in Jewish understanding was Yahweh’s own justice and role as the absolute ruler of the universe. This in turn meant that Yahweh, and Yahweh alone, would mete out eschatological judgment on all people at the end. So here again, without argument or an attempt to make a christological statement per se, Paul offhandedly attributes such judgment to Christ, the Lord whom he strives to please for that very reason.
Third, the ultimate appeal for the Corinthian believers to follow the Apostle’s own example comes at the end of the passage, where Paul speaks of (literally) “knowing therefore the fear of the Lord” (v. 11, my trans.). This is a clear case where a distinctive Old Testament phrase regarding Yahweh is applied directly (here only, as it turns out) to Christ, the exalted Lord before whom both Paul and the Corinthians must appear at the end.3
What is perhaps most striking about all of these various moments in Paul’s letters is how easily and apparently unselfconsciously he attributes to the risen Lord what are absolute prerogatives of Yahweh, the God of Israel. Indeed, this feature makes a singular moment in Paul’s letter to the believers in Rome difficult for interpreters to handle since in that case he writes, “For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat,” where “each of us will give an account of ourselves to God” (Rom. 14:10, 12). But in this case, the very fact that scholars have regularly found this issue so difficult to resolve is precisely because Paul can so easily make this kind of interchange between the exalted Lord and God the Father. Here, then, is what appears to be certain evidence that Christ’s full equality with God the Father is something Paul simply takes for granted and expresses in these various ways as a matter of course. Significantly, he does all of this without trying to place Christ and the Father on equal ground. By the time these letters had been written, such an interchange had for him now become something normal. Paul has simply presupposed this high Christology as a reality held equally by himself and his readers—and this within two decades of the cross and resurrection.
The Eschatological Judge of the Wicked
Perhaps one of the most telling moments in which Paul describes Christ assuming the various roles that belong exclusively to Yahweh in the Old Testament is when Paul describes Christ with the ultimate divine prerogative of executing judgment (= justice) on the wicked. It is one thing for the believers’ Lord to be judge in matters pertaining to them. But from Paul’s perspective, Christ the Lord is also the final judge of those who have rejected him, many of whom have caused grief for the Lord’s people. Here Paul is especially matter-of-fact in attributing to Jesus the prerogatives of Yahweh, as he does twice in one of his earliest letters, 2 Thessalonians, written a little less than two decades after Christ’s death and resurrection.
2 THESSALONIANS 1:9–10
They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed.
PSALM 68:35
You, God, are awesome in your sanctuary.
PSALM 89:7
In the council of his holy ones God is greatly feared; he is more awesome than all who surround him.
ISAIAH 2:10
Go into the rocks, hide in the ground from the fearful presence of the LORD and the splendor of his majesty!
After a description of Christ’s coming as eschatological judge that echoes language from Isaiah 66 (2 Thess. 1:7–8), Paul turns next to focus on the judgment of the wicked he has just mentioned. Paul declares that these people “will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (v. 9). The apparent awkwardness of this clause results from the fact that the italicized words are taken directly from the Septuagint’s rendering of Isaiah 2:10, a “day of the Lord” oracle of judgment against Judah. Just as in the Isaiah passage, the result of God’s judgment means to be cut off from the divine presence (the face of the Lord), who is now assumed to be the risen Lord, Christ Jesus. Paul’s attribution of the Isaianic oracle to Christ is made the more remarkable by the (in this case seemingly unnecessary) inclusion of the final phrase, “from the glory of his might.” Here again, Paul adapts language from Isaiah that refers to Yahweh and appropriates it in his description of Christ’s judgment on the Thessalonians’ present enemies.
Paul’s characteristically long sentence concludes on a note about the Lord’s own people when the wicked are being judged. Again the Apostle appears to be reflecting the Septuagint for this description, this time echoing a passage in the Psalter where the referent is Elohim (God) rather than Yahweh (“the LORD”). Nonetheless, in Paul’s sentence “the Lord” is still the subject of the verb “comes” (2 Thess. 1:10). Thus, using language from two moments in the Psalter (Ps. 68:35; 89:7), Paul contrasts the preceding judgment of their enemies with the greater reality that Christ the Lord will be “glorified in his holy people [saints]” and “marveled at among all who have believed” (2 Thess. 1:10). Thus this entire long sentence (vv. 6–10) is one of the more significant moments in Paul’s letters where several Old Testament Kyrios moments are all attributed to the Lord, Christ. For Paul, it is now Christ the risen Lord who is the coming one; it is Christ the risen Lord who assumes the role of divine judge of the wicked; and it is Christ the risen Lord who will be glorified in his people at his coming. So even though Paul stops short of calling Christ either Yahweh or Theos (God)—which in Pauline usage is always a referent not to the Son but to the Father of the Son, and thus to those who belong to the Son—his intertextual use of the Septuagint’s Kyrios (= Adonai/Yahweh) allows Paul to predicate his conviction of Christ’s full deity.
2 THESSALONIANS 2:8
And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord, Jesus, will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming.
ISAIAH 11:4
He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.
Finally, in 2 Thessalonians 2:8 Paul again places Christ, the risen Lord, in the role of eschatological judge, but this is the only time Paul describes Christ fulfilling an actual messianic passage from the prophetic tradition. In keeping with the expected Messiah’s role of meting out God’s justice on earth when he comes, Paul uses a combined form of the language of the prophet Isaiah (Isa. 11:4). Here the prophet’s line “with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked” is condensed into Paul’s phrase “will overthrow with the breath of his mouth.” But the Apostle does so by putting this into the eschatological future, when “the Lord, Jesus, will overthrow [the wicked] with the breath of his mouth,” to which Paul adds, “and destroy [them] by the splendor of his coming.” Here Paul has it both ways. The exalted Lord is also the Messiah, but now the crucified one as the risen Lord fulfills the role of Isaiah’s messianic figure in executing God’s (now final) judgment against the wicked. And what is once again so striking is the absolute ease with which Paul does this in one of his earliest letters.
Jesus the Lord: Invoked in Prayer
In chapter 1 we noted that Paul’s Christ devotion included both worship and prayer directed toward Christ as deity. We now spell out in more detail the christological implications that lie behind the several passages noted there. Indeed, nowhere in the Pauline corpus is Paul’s understanding of the Son’s “equality with God” (Phil. 2:6) more telling than in his prayers offered to the risen Lord as one would ordinarily offer them to God alone. Here we note the various ways this happens, concentrating on the reality that such prayer is in every case addressed to the “Lord,” who received that “name” at his exaltation and vindication.
Prayer to “the Lord” in the Thessalonian Correspondence
1 THESSALONIANS 3:11–13
Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord, Jesus, clear the way for us to come to you. May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord, Jesus, comes with all his holy ones.
2 THESSALONIANS 2:16–17
May our Lord, Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope, encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word.
2 THESSALONIANS 3:5
May the Lord direct your hearts into God’s love and Christ’s perseverance.
Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times and in every way. The Lord be with all of you.
On four occasions in Paul’s two earliest letters to his churches, most likely written toward the end of the second decade of the Christian faith (ca. 49–50 CE), Paul reports to the believers in Thessalonica how he is praying for them. In each case he uses the optative mood—what grammarians in such cases refer to as a “prayer-wish,” meaning simply a form of indirection—to express prayer to God with the recipients in view and for their sake. The most remarkable thing about these four prayers is how the deity is addressed in each case.
In the first instance (1 Thess. 3:11), God the Father is mentioned first and intensified by means of the reflexive pronoun “himself,” with “our Lord, Jesus,” in the second position. Significantly, this in turn is followed by a verb not in the plural but in the singular, indicating that both are being addressed together as one. This otherwise grammatical “glitch” is then followed (vv. 12–13) by additional petitions addressed to the Lord alone, asking him for divine favors that only God could bestow: that their love increase and abound for one another and for all with the goal that their hearts be strengthened in holiness so that they will be blameless before God the Father at Christ’s coming. The remainder of Paul’s prayer thus reinforces the natural implications of the two divine persons being addressed with a verb in the singular. As a teacher in an earlier day aptly put it, “Let me listen to you pray, and I will write your theology.”
In the second prayer (2 Thess. 2:16–17), the pattern from the first prayer is reversed. The prayer is still addressed to both Father and Son, but it begins in this case as prayer addressed to “the Lord, Jesus Christ,” while the elaboration that follows has to do with the Father. Nonetheless, the two actual verbs that form the content of the prayer are used elsewhere in these letters with regard to the work of both the Father (“encourage your hearts”) and of the Son (“strengthen you”). So the prayer in each case seems intentionally addressed to both God the Father and the Lord, Jesus.
More remarkable still are the two final prayers, which are both addressed to “the Lord” alone (2 Thess. 3:5, 16). The first instance appears to be a deliberate echo of the prayer in his first letter to these relatively new believers (1 Thess. 3:11), in this case as a parting prayer for them. Now using language from one of the prayers of David recorded in 1 Chronicles 29:18, Paul addresses the one who has been given the “name,” that he, “the Lord” (= Jesus), direct the believers’ hearts into God’s love and Christ’s patience.
In the second instance, the formal conclusion to his letter, Paul requests Christ, “the Lord of peace,” to grant them his shalom, or “peace” in the sense of a well-arranged heart that provides restfulness before God. Everything about this remarkable moment echoes a singularly divine appellation and prerogative, now addressed to the risen Lord.
Some have argued that these latter two moments are not actually prayers directed to Christ since they only mention “the Lord.” However, as we have seen repeatedly, Paul consistently uses Kyrios as a referent to Christ alone, and not once to God the Father. Paul’s own identification markers should thus dictate our understanding of the word in moments like these. This is especially so in the present case, since in his correspondence with the Thessalonian believers Paul himself consistently identifies Christ as Kyrios. And in this passage in particular, he is repeating the identification from the immediately preceding prayer (2 Thess. 2:16–17).
Thus, in his letter to believers in Thessalonica, Paul consistently addresses prayer to the present reigning Lord, Jesus Christ—a prerogative the Jewish community reserved for God alone. That he does this in such a straightforward way, apparently assuming his readers will take no notice of it, suggests that this had long been a part of his life of devotion, which he has shared in common with his churches. Rather than presenting something novel to these believers, Paul simply reminds them of what they have already been taught and urges them to live accordingly.
Other Prayers Addressed to “the Lord”
2 CORINTHIANS 13:14
May the grace of the Lord, Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
1 CORINTHIANS 16:22
Come, Lord [Marana tha].
Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
The prayer reports like those Paul mentions in the Thessalonian correspondence do not occur elsewhere in the rest of the corpus, except for the benedictory “grace” that concludes all the letters addressed to churches, including Philemon. This happens most often in the following form: “May the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, be with you.” It takes an altogether different form in Ephesians and lacks the phrase “of our Lord, Jesus Christ” in Colossians. But in each of these instances, there are two reasons to believe that this is a form of prayer addressed to Jesus as Lord.
First, if we replaced “the Lord” with any other divine title or name, it would be clear that this is indeed a form of prayer. It would work perfectly as a prayer, for example, if we substituted “God our Father” for “our Lord” so that it read, “May the grace of God our Father be with you.” If this were the case, it would be universally recognized as prayer. But, interestingly, Paul never does that; he always expresses his benediction in some form of “the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, be with you.” Clearly such an expression would not work if we substituted a nondivine being for “our Lord.” So, for example, no one would even think of saying, “May the grace of the great archangel Michael be with you.” More unthinkable yet would be such a benediction in the name of a mere human, even a divinely exalted one. Thus this usage is a form of prayer report, pure and simple, and it is therefore another example of Paul’s presuppositional high Christology. No Jew of the first century could imagine addressing prayer to one who is merely human and not also truly divine. And despite Paul’s Damascus road “conversion,” the Apostle not only retained his Jewishness as such but also at times made a considerable point of it.
Second, that these passages are intended as benedictory prayers is confirmed by the singular triadic elaboration found at the conclusion of Paul’s second letter to the believers in Corinth (2 Cor. 13:14). Here Paul begins with the standard line, “May the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ,” but then for reasons that are not at all clear he adds, “and the love of God, and fellowship [koinonia] of the Holy Spirit.” Scholars agree that this triadic benediction is a form of prayer, but surely Paul’s benedictions are no less so when Paul’s phrase, “the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ,” lacks the addition of God the Father and the Holy Spirit.
The remaining instances of prayer reports also occur in the Corinthian correspondence. In the one instance (1 Cor. 16:22), we are given in its Aramaic formulation the actual content of the earliest known prayer to be used among followers of Christ: Marana tha (“Come, Lord”). By any definition, this is clearly a prayer addressed to Christ as Lord.
The next instance occurs in his second letter to these same believers (2 Cor. 12:8–9) and has a unique, twofold feature: (1) it is addressed to “the Lord” for a very personal matter of which (2) Paul reports the answer, which was not what he prayed for. “Three times,” he says, “I pleaded with the Lord to take [the thorn in my flesh] away from me.” And Paul then reports the Lord’s response: “My grace is sufficient for you.”
To be sure, the answer Paul received was quite in keeping with what he had come to know of Christ his Lord. Paul had already learned—and had made a considerable point of the fact to these same believers in his earlier letter to them—that God’s power is evident in the “weakness” of the ultimate oxymoron: a crucified Messiah (1 Cor. 1:18–25). As he had already put it there: “The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (v. 25). The present passage makes it equally clear that Paul himself was in the process of learning that discipleship meant to live a cruciform life—that is, a life that is conformed to Christ as the crucified one. Thus Christ responds: “My grace is sufficient” because “my power is made perfect in [your] weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).
By anyone’s definition this passage can be understood only as a report of Paul’s prayer addressed singularly to Christ as Lord, which in this case includes the unusual feature of a response to his prayer by Christ his Lord. Such prayer with its recorded answer would seem to put considerable theological pressure on a monotheist who had not included the Lord in the divine identity, which suggests that Paul was indeed living for, and talking about, the one God in a triadic way long before such an understanding of God needed to be spelled out in the context of the later creeds.
As we will discuss further in the concluding chapter, such a triadic understanding is expressed most certainly by Paul at the beginning of his corrections of the abuses of Spirit-giftings in his first letter to this believing community in Corinth: “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work” (1 Cor. 12:4–6). This passage is the first of eight such moments in the Pauline corpus of letters that provide the basis from which a later articulation of the triune nature of the one God becomes an absolute necessity. But at this point Paul is not attempting to formulate trinitarian theology; he is simply expressing a conviction that is presupposed to be held in common between himself and the believers in Corinth. What is at stake in these passages is not theology but behavior in the context of worship, having to do with Spirit-manifestations in the gathered community.
Conclusion
In this chapter we have observed further instances of the pattern we have seen throughout Paul’s letters: in his application of the roles of Yahweh to Jesus as well as in his various reports of prayers to Jesus, Paul assumes that he and his letters’ recipients share the same high Christology, which he then argues from rather than having to argue for. The Apostle does not expect any of his readers, or hearers, to be shocked or startled by what he asserts. Rather, what makes the christological point so thoroughly compelling is that this startlingly high Christology is something Paul barely expects his readers to take notice of at all.
1. Paul’s word, ekdikos, is difficult to render in English. The Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed., ed. Frederick William Danker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 301, defines it as “pertaining to justice being done so as to rectify wrong done to another.” The English word “avenge” is defined in the standard English dictionary (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. [Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 2014], 85) as “to take vengeance for” or “to exact satisfaction for.” It would thus seem to any ordinary reader that ekdikos and “avenger” are not quite interchangeable! This is one of those rare instances where probably the richest language in history falls just a bit short. It simply does not work well—correct as it might have been in the English of another day—to say, “The Lord will rectify such people’s wrongdoing”!
2. This is another instance where various translators have tended toward quite different words to render Paul’s Greek verb (anakrinō) into English.
3. This is also yet another instance where one of the world’s richest languages fails to have an adequate adjective since “fear” in English is consistently a negative idea. Paul’s clear point is rather that true believers live in constant reverential awe in the presence of their Lord—as in “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7).