The Iconic King

We need rulers clad in the symbols that speak directly to our imagination and awaken images deep-seated in our collective memory.

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

In Romans 13, St Paul describes all rulers as “ministers of God.” He calls on Christians to pay their taxes, echoing Our Lord’s command to “render unto Caesar.” And quite clearly, given that he is writing to the church in ancient, pagan Rome, he is not talking only about obedience to Christian kings. This caused the Lutheran pastor Bonhoeffer difficulties as he confronted the Nazi Führer, and around the same time, caused difficulties for Japanese Christians ordered to venerate the Emperor as a kami, as the State divided their churches into new, unwanted denominations.

One can therefore understand the tendency in 20th-century Christian liberation theology to portray Christ’s rule as overthrowing all the power structures of the world, and the heavenly Kingdom as being in radical discontinuity with the kingdoms of this world. It offers a neat solution to the quandary: but, I think, rather too neat to be true.

The Jewish Scriptures themselves are ambiguous about kingship, but it is wishful thinking to read that ambiguity as unqualified hostility. Before the Israelites had kings, they had judges, but the judges failed to keep order, hence the book bearing their name ends:

“In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

This is no paean to a libertarian free-for-all. It is a condemnation of anarchy. That is why the Israelites called on the prophet Samuel to anoint a king for them, so that they might enjoy the stability they saw in other nations. This should not be read as an act of disloyalty to the God of their fathers. The ancient Israelites were not xenophobes and were quite capable of seeing God’s blessing even outside their tribal confines. God had, after all, blessed Abraham through the offering of bread and wine precisely by a foreign, gentile priest-king, Melchizedek of Salem. Although Samuel objected and warned his people that kingship meant tyranny (1 Sam 8), God ordered him to obey the people and give them a king as they desired.

The results of that decision were mixed. The outer beauty of their first king, Saul, disguised a fickle temper leading, at least in the eyes of posterity, to outright madness. David, the greatest king and progenitor of Jesus’ line, whilst a great general and noted musician, committed atrocities. His son Solomon, builder of the first Temple, was known for his wisdom but descended into lascivious folly. The next generations were worse. Yet this does not suffice to condemn monarchy itself. Even when their own kings had been destroyed and the leaders exiled, the Israelites were rescued from Babylonian captivity by another king, and a pagan one at that: Cyrus of Persia, stirred by God’s spirit and honoured in Scripture. Particular kings may do wicked things, but it strains interpretation to suggest that the Hebrew Scriptures abhor kingship itself.

Indeed, for Scripture to abhor kingship would be to abhor the origin of all things. For when God rests on the seventh day in Genesis 1, He does so not for refreshment, but as I have said before, to rest upon his throne, seated in majesty as King of all. He is the image of Kingship, or dominion, which He creates Adam and Eve to reflect and enact on his behalf.

So, the ancient Israelites did not invent kingship. It was already there in their collective memory in the figure of the priest-king Melchizedek. It was there in the bad memory of Pharoah, too. Neither of these kings were Israelites. Rather, their peoples too held a universal image of kingship. To say that humans are made in the image of God is to imply that kingship resides conceptually in the fabric of the human mind, Israelite or otherwise. And well it might, since it is woven into the wider fabric of reality of which the human mind is only a part.

Kingship inheres, for example, in the animal kingdom, and not only among the higher primates, but among pack animals, too. When we call the lion “king of the animals,” we are not just anthropomorphising. Rather, we are paying homage to the particular concentration of kingly essence that the lion embodies: not only its sheer power and the fear it inspires, but also its grace and nobility of bearing. The image of the lion as king is not a human fancy, but the articulation of a reality in poetic register.

That reality is not confined to the animal kingdom. There is a principle of order at work throughout all things. And that order is not confined to the violent, evolutionary, Pharaonic aspect of kingship. That is part of it, to be sure: the King wields a sword, for the defeat of enemies, ministration of justice and maintenance of virtue; the lion has teeth and claws. Yet it has also the “fearful symmetry” and feline grace of movement enjoyed by other great cats; and the King bears also an orb, symmetrical sign of our spinning sphere, which dances with its partners in the great cycles of space, yet beneath our feet stays stable. The human order is part of the wider order which governs the cosmos, not just in tooth and claw, but in harmony, grace and stability.

Hence, returning to St Paul’s words (Romans 13:1), “every soul” – as the King James Version literally renders the Greek pneuma, often lost in other translations – is to “be subject unto the higher powers.” He is talking of a spiritual order. But there remains the problem of what happens when the powers stray from their allotted course, when kings forget that they are subjects of a higher King. The problem is one of disorder, of things not being as they should be, moving from rest to violence. The solution therefore is unlikely to be the revolutionary resort to further violence, the breakdown and overthrow of all order.

Clearly, violent revolution is not what Christ Himself taught. If anything, that was the path of Judas, who resented Jesus for not taking it. To find out what true Kingship entails, we have to climb Golgotha and sit at the feet of the wooden throne.

The Cross shows us what allusion to the realm of nature cannot. It carries us beyond the limits of our reason to the One who is its source and so exceeds it. It takes the King of our imagination and crucifies Him. Now we see the teeth and claws turned against the lion, biting His feet and scratching His head. We see the Priest-King offer Himself in body, blood, bread and wine. We see the order of the cosmos, Holy Logos, not turned upside-down but inside-out, microcosm yielding macrocosm, flesh unfolding Spirit, blood and water feeding the Tree that its roots may reach down as far as Hades, its limbs embrace the whole horizon and rise to pierce the Heavens. From the side of the dying King, worlds are born. Yet death does not destroy the King, but perfects Him.

It is not my place as a foreigner to tell Japanese Christians what to think of their Emperor. However, it is my place as a priest to warn against assuming that kings per se are incompatible with Christianity. There is every reason why Christians should honour and obey a good monarch, whether Christian or not. There are even good reasons why Christians should honour and obey a bad monarch, within limits, since order is essential to the peace of God’s Kingdom. One might legitimately depose a ruler, as Bonhoeffer rightly tried to, when the ruler is himself a threat to God’s peace. The demand on Christians to fight injustice must not be diluted: Christ’s grace must not be held cheap. And yet, Our Lord’s cup consisted, like Socrates’ last drink, in refusing to overthrow the temporal order by force or guile.

The image of the King which we inherit in nature and culture is not an idol to be purged. It is an image of God. But the reflection is smudged and blurred, sometimes distorted into something hideous and unrecognisable, until it is washed with the blood of Christ. We speak of “baptising” institutions, even pagan ones, such as Easter eggs or Christmas trees, as though baptism were synonymous with a certain rather gentle appropriation, a mild shampoo. It is not. To be baptised is to be crucified and buried with Christ. So, to baptise the image of the King is to purge it of distortion and make it a window of heavenly reality, an icon of God’s rule.

The Church has a higher calling than overthrowing kings, and that is to perfect them. This means showing them the Way of the Crucified King, and awakening in them the desire to offer themselves and walk it. To that end, the Church, it perhaps needs not be said, could do a better job of showing what Crucified Kingship looks like among its own leaders.

We need rulers who, like God, offer longevity and stability, beyond the four-year term of a President or Prime Minister. We need rulers who have the time and the desire to dedicate themselves to the spiritual path, and so become icons of God’s wisdom, beyond the calculating intelligence of the economist or politician. We need rulers who channel God’s justice, the unchanging peace of celestial order, unmoved by the spinning fashions of the world. We need rulers clad in the symbols which speak directly to our imagination and awaken images deep-seated in our collective memory, beyond the statistics and soundbites that fix our attention on ephemera and utility. We need rulers who can re-enchant the world. That is why we need kings, and better still, Christian ones.