20.11.05 Michael The
LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.
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I have managed to avoid ever shaking hands with a monarch in my life though our children Lydia and Ben used to go to school with the King’s grandchildren in Kuala Lumpur many years ago. Something in me is rather glad that I have never been required to bow before the monarch even though I am a Londoner by birth, and I was taken up to town to peer through the gates of Buckingham Palace as a small boy. Somewhere in my genes there is a West country dissenter trying to get out – I am just not very good at obeisance. I was then rather taken aback a few weeks ago when I was required to declare my obedience to the Queen and her heirs and successors in the process of being installed as a Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral. One of the things I like about living in Scotland is that we Episcopalians can sit light to the authority of the Queen and her successors – indeed North of the Border she literally ceases to be an Anglican. Consequently our witness to the Kingship of Christ is not clouded by the ambiguous claim of the monarch to be defender of the faith, and moreover supreme governor of the established church in England.
The Books of Samuel and Kings are very ambiguous about Kingship. From the first Yahweh did not want his people to have a king for was it not the kings of other nations – Egypt, Babylon, Persia – who led their people into slavery to their grand projects, their cults of blood sacrifice and their vicious wars? God appointed Judges to rule over his people and they did a better job than Kings. But the people of Israel wanted to be like the other nations and petitioned Yahweh to give them a King. And when they got a king, after long pleading, and against God’s own preferred form of governance, and the man whom Samuel first anointed, Saul, went mad, and his successor – the blue eyed shepherd boy – used his office to acquire for himself a wife who belonged to one of his officers, whom he first had killed. Solomon too – though famed for his wisdom – amassed considerable power to his court and used this power to build the biggest temple imaginable. The building of Solomon’s temple was the mother of all Grand Designs and involved so much gold, copper and timber that he had to enslave his own people to procure it from Hiram the King of Lebanon. And from David and Solomon things go downhill pretty rapidly according to the historical record. Instead of caring for the people of Israel the Kings of Israel favored the elites who surrounded their courts, and turned to building up their military power and fighting foreign wars; they put their faith in merchants and traders who bought up the land from every tribe and enslaved the poor and landless to make the few rich.
Hear what Ezekiel has to say about these kinds of rulers in the first part of this chapter:
You shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? 3 You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. 4 You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. 5 So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and scattered, they became food for all the wild animals. 6 My sheep were scattered, they wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill; my sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth, with no one to search or seek for them.
So perverse and vexatious did the Kings of Israel become that they even split the Kingdom into two – Israel and Judah – as they pursued their greed and the strife that went with it. Greed begets violence and as Israel sought to live by the sword so eventually it fell to the sword of its more powerful neighbours in the form of the king of Persia – the great King Cyrus whose scroll has been loaned by Iran to the British Museum for us all to see if you are in London this winter. Actually Cyrus does not seem to have been such a bad fellow and given how corrupt the Kings of Israel and Judah had become the prophets – Isaiah in particular – declared that this foreign ruler over Israel was even the anointed of God. By Ezekiel’s day things had gotten a lot worse however and many of the people of Israel had been forced into exile, the temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed, and the land of milk and honey had been left desolate, its fields no longer producing grain or grape.
Even as Ezekiel announces that it is God’s firm desire and intention to reign again in Israel, and to rescue his people from exile, he also reminds the exiles from Israel why this judgement had come upon them:
20 Therefore, thus says the Lord God to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. 21 Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, 22 I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep. 23 I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. 24 And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them; I, the Lord, have spoken. 25 I will make with them a covenant of peace and banish wild animals from the land, so that they may live in the wild and sleep in the woods securely. 26 I will make them and the region around my hill a blessing; and I will send down the showers in their season; they shall be showers of blessing. 27 The trees of the field shall yield their fruit, and the earth shall yield its increase. They shall be secure on their soil; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I break the bars of their yoke, and save them from the hands of those who enslaved them.
There are of course some who believe that now is the time in which this prophecy is being fulfilled as the deserts of Palestine are once again blooming with dates, grapes and citrus fruits and as Jews are resettling the plains and hills of Judah. But were Ezekiel to return to Israel today he would hardly be able to declare that his prophecy had been fulfilled – the Palestinians, who are now confined behind a 30 foot high wall which in the case of towns like Bethlehem literally encircles their homes, are 60% unemployed, unable to walk out to tend their goats or olive trees, or to work as plumbers or sell their produce in Israel. Having penned in the poor and weak the Israelis enjoy the fat of the land, and far more than the lion’s share of its wealth.
We are I take it not Zionists but Christians who proclaim in this annual liturgical feast of Christ the King that Ezekiel’s prophecy has been fulfilled not by the return of Jews to Israel but by the birth of Christ as the Messiah, by his reign on earth as a servant King who was put to death by sinful rulers, and by his resurrection and ascension on high as Lord of Lord and King of Kings. For Christians who live after the ascension there is no absolute right to rule for there is only one power and authority which we recognise has our absolute fealty and it is the power that was manifest on earth in Jesus. Hence St Paul prays for the Christians in Ephesus that they may be blessed with a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that they may know what is the magnitude of the power of God
which was at work in Christ when God raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. 22 And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
For
me there could not be a more powerful Biblical basis for challenging
the idea that the monarch should be head of the church. This is
perverse indeed and of course in England it is a historical accident
which has made it so. And yet I confess that even though I do not
think that the monarch should remain head of the church, I do think
there is value in having a titular head of state who has no, or at
least remarkably little, executive power. For one thing it acts as at
least a symbolic break on the otherwise exceptional powers that the
Prime Minister continues to gather to himself and his own office. And
indeed has the absence of a monarch in the United States prevented
monarchic and monopolistic power accruing to the first family there?
Hardly. The Bush family are a dynasty and they and their friends
between them not only hold political power in the United States but
also the economic corporations from Coca Cola to Time Warner which
challenge the authority and right to rule of communities and elected
governments in other nations.
I
find it strange in a way that when the people of Israel look to an
idealised condition of government they do not look back to the Judges
but instead remember the time of King David.
Jesus
however takes a very different approach and thankfully so. First he
himself models a completely different style of Kingship. His rule
combines the roles of prophet, priest and king. As prophet he
denounces bad rule and elitism; as priest instead of sacrifices of
sheep and goats he gives up his own divine power and becomes the
friend of sinners, doctor to the poor and sick, and distributor of
food to the hungry and goes the way of the cross.
And
as king he models a new way of taking power which is to share it, to
disperse it, to give it out, and ultimately to be crucified: thus he
trains his disciples in his own prophetic and priestly roles and
sends them out among the people of Israel to minister in his stead.
And when they ask about the Kingdom which the Messiah was to bring in
Jesus announces that they will rule alongside him in the Kingdom of
heaven; they will act as judges over the twelve tribes of Israel, and
over all the peoples of the earth who come to own that Christ is Lord
and King.
And
by what standard will they judge and be judged? Well in the parable
of the Last Judgement we learn that the rule of the apostles and
their heirs and successors will be judged by the same standards as
Christ’s own ministry – as he ministered to the sick and freed
those captive to the devil and fed the hungry so it is by these
behaviours that Christ will recognise his own disciples at the
resurrection. It will not be enough to carry the banner of Christ, to
fly flag, even to proclaim the name – these might be sufficient
obeisance for an earthly monarch but the divine king will be revealed
at the end of time as more like a judge – he will judge by
behaviour which is in accord with justice and not by claims of
fealty, honour or loyalty.
Priestly
kingdom – this is the distinctive account of rule that we find in
the New Testament and in the power of the Spirit this new kind of
rule is exercised by the first Christians after Christ’s ascension.
The body of Christ according to St Paul is a new kind of political
order in which the weak are given voice alongside the strong, and
where the needs of the poor and the sick take priority over property
rights and a claim on the generosity of the wealthy. But the point
about politics after the coming of Christ is that it is no longer
possible to speak of political rule as secular; the divine principle
of rule has been established. Christ is the source of all authority
and from the moment of his appearing every human ruler only has a
share in divine authority, a share given to him or her by the God who
is revealed in the servant king. Herod is the first ruler to suspect
this and hence he sends his servants to kill all the male infants in
Bethlehem. Pilate is the next to encounter it when Christ says to him
as he stands under Pilate’s judgement that he would have no power
had it not been given to him by Christ’s own father.
How
though does the world since Christ encounter this claim? How does the
politics of Christians influence the world beyond the church. For
example – how might our team model of leadership here at St James
influence the larger political sphere here in the capital of
Scotland? Well there are a number of possible ways in which this
might happen not the least being that it might influence each one of
us in our working lives as to how we ourselves exercise power and
leadership. Do we share power, do we divest our offices of excessive
privileges or trappings of power, do we see ourselves as servant
leaders who model rather than coerce the right uses of power and
authority?
But
historically there is of course another way and this is the extent to
which Christian models of political power have influenced monarchy
and statehood and governance in Christendom and beyond. Democracy in
its modern form – a mode of governance in which all have a voice
and not just the rulers – originates in European and American
history among dissenting Christian communities who believed that
every member had ‘that of God’ in them and therefore had a right
to be heard in the meeting of the congregation.
But
democracy of this kind seems to be increasingly attenuated in
contemporary Britain. The representative rule of government
increasingly becomes monarchic rule as more and more power accrues to
those who write the laws and hold executive power rather than those
representatives who vote in the House of Commons. Just two weeks ago
the executive experienced a momentous defeat as it tried to impose a
90 day period of internment in British law. However such moments of
challenge to executive power are all too rare.
Perhaps
then we need in Britain more than ever the institution of monarchy
for the monarch is a symbol of tradition and custom which harks back
to a society where the monarch did indeed exercise divine rule and
was required in that office to be not only servant king but
penitential subject of Christ the King. The classic example in
English history where we see this acted out is when courtiers of
Henry II killed Archbishop Thomas a Becket, putatively at the King’s
behest. After this outrage the King himself goes in sackcloth and
ashes on foot to Canterbury to atone for this terrible wrong and to
seek forgiveness. He is a King but he remains ultimately subject of
and answerable to Christ the King.
Democracy
has never been more threatened by business interest and elite power
than it is at the present time in America, and increasingly even here
in Britain. Part of the problem is precisely that monopoly power in
the form of corporate rule and the rule of the market has subverted
the dispersed centres of power and authority that a functioning
democracy – like a priestly kingdom – requires. I guess another
way of saying this is that it would really be better for us to remain
subjects of an earthly king, who is not only visible but is also
himself subject to heavenly rule, than to be citizens of a state
which abandons its duty to uphold the common good to the vested
interests of big business and multinational corporations. So
dissenter I remain but nonetheless one who is prepared to acknowledge
the institution of the monarch whose fidelity to Christian faith acts
as a reminder to her ministers that they, and we, are not answerable
to her but to the heavenly King whose orb she carries for the
standards of justice which they and we administer and practice.
The LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.