Ronald Knox, The Creed in Slow Motion

VII

Our Lord

WE GET so accustomed to the words which we use in saying our prayers that we are apt to forget where the use of them came from; forget, therefore, in a sort of way, what they mean. Why is it, for example, that Almighty God is so often referred to as "the Lord" in the Psalms; and why is it that if we want to allude casually to the Incarnate Son of God we refer to him as "our Lord "? The origin of the habit is a rather curious one.

The Jews had a name for their God; he was called Jehovah; or rather, the scholars tell us, he was called Yahweh. But a feeling grew up among them that this word, Yahweh, was too sacred a thing to be read out loud. So when they read aloud they substituted for it the word "Lord ", which was the sort of word one used when one was talking to a king, and on state occasions like that-wives used to call their husbands, "my lord ", a thing they very seldom do nowadays. And it's a curious thing that we have the same instinct; only to us the holy name isn't the name of Yahweh, it's the name of Jesus. Although we use the holy name of Jesus freely enough in our prayers, when it comes to ordinary conversation we don't quite like to use it; it sticks in our throat. So, if we are looking through a book of pictures, we say," That's a picture of our Lord driving the traders out of the temple "; and if somebody said, " That's a picture of Jesus driving the traders out of the temple ", we should probably find it was somebody who wasn't a Catholic and perhaps wasn't a Christian at all. We've got into the habit of using the phrase "our Lord" merely as a more reverent way of referring to Jesus, and therefore we are apt not to reflect what the phrase "our Lord" really means.

What I want you to see is that this title of Lord had an everyday, common-or-garden meaning for the Jews in the Old Testament and even for Christians in the New Testament, whereas it hasn't got any such meaning for us. You said "Adonai", "my Lord", not only when you were talking to a king, but when you were talking to any important person; for example, a prophet. Servants used it regularly in addressing their masters, and, as I say, wives in addressing their husbands. Sons used it in addressing their fathers, though apparently not always. I hope you remember the parable of the man who said to his two sons, each of them in turn, " Go and work in my vineyard ". One of them, if you remember, said, " I go, Sir ", and went not. The other said " I will not ", but afterwards he repented and went. You see, the one who isn't really fond of agriculture wants to get the right side of his father and put him in a good temper, so he calls him "Sir", or "Lord"- it's all the same word in Greek. And when St. Mary Magdalen met our Lord in the garden after his resurrection, and mistook him for the gardener, she said, "Sir", or "Lord", "if thou hast carried him hence tell me where thou hast laid him ". She didn't know she was talking to her Lord; she was merely trying to put the gardener in a good temper. So that when a Jew in the Old Testament, or a Christian in the New Testament, started saying his prayers, and began them with the word "Lord", he was using everyday language, though in a special sense. He was addressing the King of all the earth by a title which you used in talking to kings, the Spouse of his soul by a title which wives used in talking to their husbands, the eternal Father by a title sons used in talking to their fathers, the Giver of all good things by the title you used in talking to a stranger, if you wanted to get something out of him. The word wasn't just a form of address; it meant something to him.

But with us, if you come to think of it, it's quite different. We don't address our fellow men as " lord " except on ceremonial occasions, when we are using ceremonious language, a survival from the past. In a court of law the learned counsel will address the judge as "melud"; but he doesn't think of the judge as his lord, really, any more than the judge really thinks of the counsel as learned. And in the same way when you are talking to a bishop it's polite to call him "my lord" now and again--not too often, because it gets tiresome; but you only do it with an effort, and probably get rather flustered about it. Like the boy in buttons in the very old story you probably know, who was carefully coached about saying "my lord" when the bishop came to stay; but when he knocked at the bishop's door next morning, and the bishop said "Who's that?" he forgot about saying "The boy, my lord", and said "The lord, my boy" by mistake. So that when we come to say our prayers, and start, "Lord, please give me a better report this term", the word "Lord" doesn't convey any definite meaning to us; it's just a vague title which we use, in a general spirit of humility, to Somebody who is much more important and much more august than we are. It doesn't remind us in any way of the encounters of everyday life.

Living in the twentieth century, living in the Western part of the world, and not under a totalitarian government, we have all gone so frightfully democratic that the idea of having a lord in the literal sense, that is in the sense of being owned by somebody else, has become quite strange, quite foreign to us. We've all read about Sir Walter Raleigh putting his nice new cloak down in the mud so that Queen Elizabeth shouldn't dirty her shoes; that seemed all right to him, because she was the Queen and he was her subject. But you wouldn't find Lord Woolton, for example, putting down his new overcoat for the queen to walk on; he might, I mean, but I don't think it's likely, unless he was very well off for coupons at the moment. And you hear people singing that Indian love-lyric in which the lady tells her husband she is less than the dust beneath his chariot wheels, but you wouldn't find an English wife talking like that; she'd be much more likely to tell her husband to go out and clean the car.

So we don't find it easy now to get a line on the meaning of the word Lord by thinking of a king's relation to his subjects, or of a husband's relation to his wife. But, you see, the thing goes further than that. The Latin word for Lord, which (as you perhaps know) is Dominus, meant, literally, the owner of slaves. And the immediate picture which the word called up to the early Christians, many of whom were slaves themselves, was that of a master who really owned you, owned human beings just as he owned his cattle and sheep. We don't find it easy to put ourselves back in the atmosphere of the ancient world, where the master had a perfect right to kill his slaves if he wasn't satisfied with the way they cooked the dinner. But that is what Dominus meant when the title of Dominus was first given to Jesus Christ. We say that collect for the Holy Souls, Fidelium Deus omnium, and think we are asking God to have mercy on the souls of his servants and hand-maids. But what we are really asking him to do is to have mercy on the souls of his men and women slaves. The lash, the branding-iron, crucifixion-those were the punishments which the lord could deal out to his slaves at the time when the Bible was written. And it is that kind of atmosphere which we have somehow to recover before we can realize, even remotely, what is meant when we say we believe Jesus Christ is our Lord.

The point is that he owns us. We are always forgetting that, simply because he is so good to us; but the plain fact is that he redeemed us, that is to say, he bought us, and we belong to him. You and I have never seen a slave. It was a common enough sight a hundred and fifty years ago, but now, thank God, there are very few left in the world; how, then, are you and I to imagine what it means, belonging to Jesus Christ? One human being doesn't, nowadays, belong to another. I suppose our Lord saw that coming, and took it into account. And that is, perhaps, why he made things easier for us by encouraging us to think of ourselves, in relation to him, not as human beings, but as animals. "We are his people," the psalm says, "and the sheep of his pasture." Our Lord took up the echoes of that old psalm, and told us, " I am the good Shepherd ".

We belong to our Lord, that is, our Owner, just as the farmer's sheep belong to the farmer; that is why we carry his mark. If you have had anything to do with sheep, you will know that they have an incorrigible habit of squirming their way through hedges and getting mixed up with the sheep of the farmer next door. And that is why, especially when sheep are turned out to graze on hill-sides, the farmer who owns them puts a sort of splotch on their sides, rather like what happened to you the last time you spilt the red ink. And so, if they do get straying and mix up with other people's flocks, there's no great harm done. So it was that, when you were baptized, our Lord put his mark on you, the sign of the cross. You and I can't see it there, because it belongs to the supernatural, not to the natural order; but an angel can see whether you are baptized or not, just as easily as you or I can see when somebody's got a smut on their nose. And that mark is indelible; it never comes out. Not that our Lord would find any difficulty in recognizing us without a mark to distinguish us. He calls his own sheep by name, the Gospel tells us; when you are christened you are given a set of names; and by those names he thinks of you, My sheep So-and-so. To us, of course, one sheep looks exactly like another. But Mr. Vaughan could tell you which was which among a lot of the sheep here, and where each of them came from; although he doesn't call them by name, except the cade lamb up at the Hurst, which is called Sam. A shepherd who has a whole-time job looking after sheep comes to know pretty well all of them apart. And the good Shepherd knows you and me individually, knows all the millions of Christians in the world by their Christian names.

One bother about sheep getting through hedges is that they are apt to come across food which doesn't agree with them. If a sheep gets loose in clover, for example, I'm sorry to say that it eats too much of it; and when that happens it swells out to an enormous size and lies down on its side and can't get up. It's all very well laughing, but if you will examine your own conscience you will find it difficult not to have a kind of sneaking sympathy with the sheep's point of view. That's why our Lord says he leads his sheep out and finds them pasture; he arranges that they shall feed on what is good for them. And that is where I come in; that is where the clergy come in. The shepherd doesn't run after the sheep when they get straying; he shouts to his dog, and the dog runs after them, barking at them in a very rude way. When you see a sheep-dog doing that, it ought to remind you of my sermons; you should think of the clergy yapping at you and saying, "You ought to do this", and "You mustn't do that"; they do it because they are acting under the Shepherd's orders. I don't say the clergy don't sometimes enjoy it; but then, I dare say the sheep-dog enjoys it. The point is that the clergy, like sheep-dogs, aren't just making up rules for you; they are telling you what the Shepherd wants you to do, the Shepherd who owns you.

Sheep can't live out in a field and eat grass all the year round. At least they can, but they wouldn't thrive on it; the farmer has to give them swedes and things; and sheep, you must remember, don't share our great dislike of vegetables. You and I couldn't live our supernatural lives properly if the good Shepherd didn't give us supernatural food; and what that is you all know-he gives us his own Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist. But we haven't time to stop and think about that now.

And then there's one last picture our Lord has given us, the most familiar of all; the good Shepherd going out in search of the lost sheep. He owns us, and he can't bear to lose us. We are all familiar with the picture, but there's one thing we tend to forget about it. When a sheep gets caught, say, in a bush, and the shepherd comes to free it, you don't find the sheep sitting there quiet under the process; it struggles like mad-to get away from the shepherd. He has to save it in spite of itself. And so it is with a human soul that has fallen into grave sin; the grace which sets it free is something it doesn't want, something it is tempted to refuse. Somebody ought to paint a picture of the good Shepherd coming to rescue his sheep, and the sheep trying to get away.

One question ought to have been occurring to you all this time, if you were more intelligent than you are. You ought to be wondering, "If we call our Lord by that name because he owns us, on what principle do we call the Blessed Virgin our Lady? Does she, too, own us?" I don't think it's quite the same idea; but our time has run out now, and we will have to talk about our Lady next Sunday instead.

Ronald Knox, The Creed in Slow Motion

 
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01/22/2000