The story of Daniel in the Lions’ Den is perhaps just one more story in the unhappy history of the Israelite and Jewish people, perpetually living in a land they feel to be both foreign and yet home, looking forward to arriving at or returning to the Promised Land. Even when apparently in occupation of the whole of the Promised Land, archaeology, non Zionist archaeology, at least, suggests that conquest was not as complete as the Bible suggests. But the experience of the Exile was altogether different; the Israelites were conscious of their position, and even if, as Daniel, they did well, they still looked, and prayed, towards Jerusalem. The early chapters of Daniel have a, modern ring about them describing a talented but precarious community belonging and professionally and politically active, but somehow not at home and conscious of its exile.
The difficulty for the Israelites in exile was only a special case of the perennial difficulty in relations between religion and state, and thus between the divine and the human. The Exile made these relations especially complex in that the usual (for the ancient world) identity of God and a place and God and a people was displaced. Yahweh was unquestionably the God of a people, but while he promised them a home land, and had strong associations with particular places, Jerusalem is only the most obvious; he was not the God of the land. One of the developments in Israelite religion, most apparent in the later Isaiah, little later than Daniel bur during the Exile, is a universalising of Yahweh, whom Isaiah sees as God of all people , not just the Israelites. And there are the germs of this in Daniel’s story.
In that story the great contrast is between divine steadfastness and constancy, manifested in Daniel’s unattainable righteousness, and Darius’ ephemeral vacillation and human weakness. We can, up to point, empathise with, if we don’t approve of Darius. He’s a bit like Henry VIII; likeable when not lethal. Daniel is insouciant and immoveable ; he is as faithful and true in the service of his temporal sovereign as of his God. Provocatively so in fact; does he really need to throw open the windows to pray? Like so many martyrs he courts punishment, confident that it will only promote the true religion.
There could hardly be a greater contrast with Darius; himself a parvenu, owing his position to conquest, he is fooled by the transparently self serving flattery of his other officials. He believes he can proclaim himself all powerful, and yet knows himself – and this is his saving grace- to be wrong, and is racked by remorse when forced (as he feels it) to condemn Daniel. His very inability to take his own decision demonstrates his weakness and the absurdity of his pretensions to power.
The nicest and deepest irony, it is almost sarcasm, comes in the flattering phrase used by the Babylonian officials: “according to the law of the Medes and the Persians which altereth not” They should have added “altereth not, that is more than once or twice in every 24 hours” We can’t help comparing it to the Law, the divine and unchanging law of Moses in obedience to which Daniel is so provocatively punctilious.
The story has a contemporary flavour and the most obvious and important message must be one of encouragement and hope to persecuted minorities, among them Christians living now in the same region as Daniel. If the story of Daniel can bring them inspiration and comfort, there is nothing more that I can add.
But I want to suggest a few ways in which the story may have something to say to us. Christians in this country can hardly be said to live in a foreign land; we saw on Friday, at the Royal Wedding, the acme of the established church as prelates galore assisted at an essentially state occasion. To be fair there seemed (I did not see it all) to be no lack of emphasis on the human and spiritual act at the centre of the ceremony. I may risk getting myself lynched for suggesting it but was there also a little of Darius’ pretension about it too?
Darius, volatile as ever, having thrown his fawning ministers to the even hungrier lions, precedes to declare that the God of Israel shall henceforth be the God of his empire, another example of the law of the Medes and the Persians “which altereth not”. But do not we do something similar in borrowing religion to support essentially constitutional ends? The pomp and ceremony, superbly done, make everyone feel good, but do they have much to do with the Gospel? Yet how very empty that pomp and ceremony would be without a religious foundation. Bishop Richard’s sermon certainly gave a wider spiritual significance to the proceedings and that is very positive; but I find the association of the church with temporal and especially national power, not to mention vast expenditure, less helpful, not least because it tends to reverse the trend to universalise religion. Daniel’s steadfastness to an immutable law is the basis for the movement I noted earlier in later Isaiah; it is a movement which comes to its full realisation in Christ who dies and rises again for all humanity. We may sometimes need to make ourselves as unappealing as Daniel in our loyalty to the universal Gospel; I just hope I won’t be thrown to the lions for suggesting it. Amen.