Today as you will have realised by now, is the feast of Christ the King and the culmination of the Kingdom Season when among other things we think about Kingship and Divine authority. The first thing you might think is that God and Royalty do not have a lot in common, although it’s not at all uncommon for Secular rulers to claim or seek divine inspiration for their authority (and not unknown for Spiritual leaders to assume secular rights over those whom they lead). I’m tempted to think that the moral probity or godliness of regimes may in practice be in inverse proportion to their claim to divine authority.
The compilers of the Lectionary no doubt had this in mind when they chose readings from the first half of the prophecy of Daniel for recent Sundays. The terrific stories, so familiar from Sunday School, are an incisive analysis of bad kingship. Nebuchadnezzar and, in our reading his son Belshazzar get it about as wrong as an absolute monarch can. They are capricious and impossible-demanding, requiring the interpretation of dreams which they have themselves obviously forgotten (and we all know how easy it is to forget even the most vivid dream). They are staggeringly vain; having been told the disastrously ominous meaning of the gold, silver, bronze, iron and clay statue, Nebuchadnezzar is found putting up a gold statue and demanding that it be worshipped. Daniel is admirable and incredibly bold in telling the truth to power, especially as his interpretation of strange tree dream comes true as Nebuchadnezzar does indeed suffer the predicted mental breakdown clearly resulting in a palace coup which puts his son Belshazzar on the throne. Daniel’s temerity goes further as he refers to this incident when addressing Belshazzar, as we heard, prior to predicting his, Belshazzar’s, downfall.
Belshazzar’s nemesis is arrogance generated perhaps by irrational fear the Jewish presence in Babylonian life. We missed the prelude to his story this evening but in it we would have been told how Belshazzar had taken the sacred Jewish vessels stolen from the Temple when his father sacked Jerusalem and used them as wine glasses for his wives and concubines to toast their Gods of gold and silver. This provokes the divine finger to write the mysterious words on the wall terrifying Belshazzar who calls his wise mean to interpret the words, but to no avail, until as we heard Daniel was summoned.
The point of all these splendid stories is to contrast the capricious volatility of worldly rulers with the consistent solidity of God, exemplified in Daniel; to compare the steadfast truth that trust in God entails with the pathetic human vanity of the powerful; and to mark the eternal existence of God with fleetingly changeable and ephemeral pretensions of Kings.
To be sure, Daniel- or the writer of Daniel- is writing in terms close to caricature and the lesson we might take from them is that divine authority or as we might think of it today, the kingship of Christ has little presence in human affairs, indeed that gods and kings are, to adjust a phrase, clean different things. The Babylonian dynasty was successful- until it fell to the Persians and Medes- yet was seriously dysfunctional according to Daniel; readers of I Claudius might say the same of Imperial Rome which as a European and Middle Eastern power was spectacularly successful and long lived. Readers of the duc de Saint- Simon or Hilary Mantel might say something similar countries nearer in space and time. Appalling regimes all of them and all claiming divine authority for support. I am, of course, ignoring the few enlightened depots dotted around history. Monarch is not always bad, but on the whole it has an unedifying and irreligious record.
However, in contrasting God’s permanence and stability with the Babylonians’ vacillating narcissism I have ignored the obvious truth that the characteristics some of which we most readily associate with God, Justice, Equity, Mercy are all one which can only have any meaning in a context of human society, with all its tendencies unfairness and vindictiveness. We may think of God as beyond this world or existing on a spiritual level, but he matters as a force in or social and personal lives. We believe he created the world and that it is intrinsically good, but justice and fairness and forgiveness are his interventions in a world that through our misbehaviour, has gone wrong. Daniel is an example of what insistence, brave and unswerving insistence, on divine principles may bring about even in a world obsessed as ours is with vanity, wealth, power and instant gratification- all the faults so vividly drawn in the stories of Daniel. That insistence is perhaps what we should see in the kingship of Christ and what we should seek to emulate. Amen.