Abstract
In 1649, the poet John Milton put his pen to the service of the Republic to support the right of the people to kill King Charles. Milton’s pamphlet Eikonoklastes, published just two weeks after Charles’ decapitation on a chill January afternoon outside Whitehall’s banqueting house, justified the right of a people to kill their King if he broke his covenant with them by acting as a tyrant. Throughout the following decade, Milton served diligently as Oliver Cromwell’s correspondence secretary. Unsurprisingly, therefore, when the murdered King’s son, Charles II, was restored to the English throne in 1660, Milton was arrested. In the event, he was lucky to escape with his life, saved by the intercession of friends and the pitiful fact of his blindness. In Paradise Lost, the great poetic drama written after his narrow escape, Milton reflected therefore on Satan’s corrupted political rule on Earth following the Fall. Yet for Milton it wasn’t only kingly rule that caused him to feel so disillusioned with politics. Milton was tormented by the realization that the Republic, which he had hoped would be the means by which God’s kingdom on earth might be established, had also failed to deliver.
Today’s readings explore, from several angles, similar themes to those that vexed Milton. In Psalm 20 we are presented with a prayer for the king who is God’s anointed; in our reading from the first book of Samuel we have the story of God’s sorrow that he had made Saul king over Israel and his instruction to his prophet Samuel to seek out and anoint a new king, and in Mark’s Gospel we have two parables of the kingdom of God. Harder at first glance to fit with the themes of kingship and kingly rule is our reading from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians and to which we will need to return.
The circumstances that led to the composition of Psalm 20 cannot be known with any certainty. It may have been used regularly at the anointing of a new king, or composed for a particular moment as a prayer for the victory of a king in battle. Whatever the case, the Psalmist in this case does not share Milton’s Republican sentiments, but prays for the fulfillment of all the king’s plans and prayers. Yet crucially, the Psalmist is clear that ‘our pride is in the name of the Lord our God’ whose anointed the king is to be.
The story of God’s disillusionment with the kingship of Saul and of David’s anointing as a new king shares with Psalm 20 the conviction that the spirit of the Lord may come mightily on the king truly anointed by God, yet it is nonetheless shaded by a certain ambiguity about the institution of kingship. If God can come to regret the decision to appoint Saul king, why not a subsequent king too? Passing over the possibility that God had, in instructing Samuel to anoint Saul, made some kind of error (why is forgiveness not an option?), what is clear is that from this point in the narrative Saul is finished and the story of David has begun. In an effective bit of story-telling, Samuel at first overlooks David, who is indeed absent with Jesse’s sheep when the prophet looks over his seven brothers in turn. When he is finally brought before Samuel, the narrator remarks – another nice touch in an heroic tale – on David’s ‘beautiful eyes’ and good looks. But there is no evading the sense that, when it comes to kingship God sees clearly that which Samuel cannot see. God’s plan for Israel, and – in Christian terms - for the salvation of the world through David’s royal descendent Jesus, is hidden even from a prophet’s eyes. God’s plan of salvation is one that sneaks up on humanity in unexpected ways.
The happening of God’s plans while humanity is looking somewhere else is at the root (pun intended) of the two parables of the kingdom of God told by Mark. One of these, the parable of the seed that grows in ways that the sower cannot understand, is unique to Mark. The parable of the mustard seed is also told (with greater hyperbole!) by Matthew and Luke. The two parables trade in imagery familiar to Jesus’ Jewish audience: the image of a tree sheltering birds is, for example, used by Ezekiel and Daniel as a visionary promise of divine protection. (It is interesting to note in passing that the phrase translated in the NRSV at Mark 4:29 as ‘he goes in with his sickle’ is so odd in Greek that it is quite obviously an awkward translation of an Aramaic or Hebrew original.) Yet Jesus’ use of familiar metaphors is here, as so often, transformed by a sense that God’s promised kingdom is now being brought about in Jesus’ ministry. The gist of the first parable seems to be that God’s kingdom comes about in ways that human beings cannot fully understand, the gist of the second, that that which has the humblest of beginnings will grow to become the greatest of kingdoms.
The kingdom of God is not only, however, to be greater than other kingdoms; it is also to be different in character, and it is in this regard that Paul may be able to shed some light. For Paul, the effect on Christians of the love of Christ is utterly transformative. What once the believer saw through human eyes and from a human point of view, she now sees in a new way: ‘if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away: see, everything has become new’ (2 Cor 5:17). Eyes opened by the love of Christ see things differently. God’s plans, once obscure, are made clear; people we once would have overlooked as insignificant become significant because they too are loved by God; a kingdom that was once as hard to see as a mustard seed becomes a bush large enough to shelter many.
During the years of his political service to the Republic Milton’s hope that God’s kingdom could be built in Britain and Ireland by Cromwell’s hands drained slowly from him like sap from an injured tree. By the time he published Paradise Regained in 1671, Milton had come to realize that in Jesus there is a new kind of kingly rule, one characterized by humility, self-giving and obedience to God. It is poignant to note that John Milton saw politics most clearly after he had become blind.