The litmus test for public leadership

Less than a week on from the Diamond Jubilee weekend, where we thanked God for the 60 years of our Queen’s reign, and the lectionary has us reading 1 Samuel 8 where God says, through Samuel, that in wanting to be ruled over by a King, the people of Israel were rejecting him and his rule over them. Did those who compiled the lectionary deliberately select this reading for the Sunday after the Diamond Jubilee weekend as a corrective to our celebrations and is this passage the definitive word on monarchy to be found in the Bible?

I don’t know the answer to the first of those questions, having no idea what goes through the minds of those who compile the lectionary year on year but the second question is well worth exploring more closely before looking at 1 Samuel 8 itself more closely.

The first thing to say is that, as Sam Norton (the Rector of Mersea) put it recently on his blog: “One of the most important things to understand about the Bible is that it is a library of Holy Scripture – that is, there are many different voices within the Bible (even within particular books of the Bible) – and this is of God. That is, it is in recognising both what different books have in common, and where they disagree, that an individual Christian is enabled to come to a mature understanding of the text.”

On some subjects, like the value or otherwise of monarchies, the Bible has a huge amount of comment (but often without there necessarily being any clear agreement on the subject), while on other subjects, like that of same sex relationships, the Bible has hardly anything to say. It is interesting to note that the issues on which the Bible has lots to say are often issues that we don’t view as controversial, while issues on which the Bible has little or nothing to say can sometimes assume huge importance in the life of the Church.

This is one illustration of the fact that we often assume we know what the Bible says when actually we haven’t really got to grips with what it says at all. Our Gospel reading (Mark 3. 20 - 35) is a case in point. Many Christians assume that the Bible supports what we now call ‘family values’ but, as our Gospel reading shows, the Bible often asks deep and searching questions of what it is that we value about family life. Because the Bible often does not actually say what we seem to want it to say and doesn’t always take a simple or consistent line on particular issues, it seems that we can actively shy away from wrestling with the challenges or complexities that it poses in favour of something simpler and more comforting.

So, having set all those hares running, as we come back to 1 Samuel 8 we need to come with an openness to hear what the Bible is actually saying to us, which on this occasion also means being open to the possibility that our celebrations of monarchy last weekend were entirely wrong.

A good guide, who I commend (because he takes the complexities of reading the Bible into account), when reading the Old Testament generally is a Bible scholar called Walter Brueggemann. Brueggemann writes that: “… in 1 Samuel 8, Samuel is in deep dispute with Israel over the function and nature of public leadership. Israel wants a king, in order to be “like the other nations.” Samuel, here the reliable voice of Yahweh, refuses them a king, on the grounds that human kingship is an act of distrust in Yahweh … This interpretive tradition, suspicious of concentrations of power, anticipates that the centralized government is in principle exploitative, usurpatious, and self-serving. We may say that this recognition is fundamental to a biblical critique of power.”

The people of Israel, in the course of the rest of their history, were going to endure many examples of monarchs who were self-serving and who exploited their position and power for their own ends. What God said, through Samuel, would occur did occur on many occasions in the subsequent history of the people of Israel.

But that is not all that this passage or the Bible, as a whole, says on the subject because God and Samuel, despite their misgivings and predictions, all the people of Israel to have what they want. Why do they do this? In part, because there is another, more positive, strand of thinking in the Bible about monarchs. This is the strand which sees David and, initially, his son Solomon as great Kings under whose reign Israel was at the peak of its prosperity and influence.  

Brueggemann notes that the kind of kingship that we see David and initially Solomon exercise: “had the establishment and maintenance of justice as its primary obligation to Yahweh and to Israelite society. This justice, moreover, is distributive justice, congruent with Israel’s covenantal vision, intending the sharing of goods, power, and access with every member of the community, including the poor, powerless, and marginated.”

This is what Brueggemann thinks the Bible sees as key to any form of public leadership: “The claim made is that power – political, economic, military – cannot survive or give prosperity or security, unless public power is administered according to the requirement of justice, justice being understood as attention to the well-being of all members of the community.”

This, then, is the litmus test which, as those seeking to be faithful to what the Bible actually says about monarchy and all forms of public leadership, we should be applying to all those who have power and authority over us in some fashion – monarch, prime minister, cabinet, government, and local authority councillors and officials. The questions we should be putting to them and using to assess their value and legitimacy are questions of justice, particularly for those who are the poorest and least powerful.

It is interesting then to note that this is the very test that the Archbishop of Canterbury used in his sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral last Tuesday. In that sermon, he criticised “the traps of ludicrous financial greed, of environmental recklessness, of collective fear of strangers and collective contempt for the unsuccessful and marginal” and said that what will save us from those traps is a vision of dedicated service to others. One important aspect of discovering that vision is to have “stories and examples available to show it’s possible.” One of those stories over the past six decades, he said, has been that of the Queen who “has shown a quality of joy in the happiness of others” and who “has responded with just the generosity St Paul speaks of in showing honour to countless local communities and individuals of every background and class and race.”

He was saying that the Queen passes the litmus test set within the Bible for those in public leadership but at the same time making it clear, as the Bible also does, that those who lead us into “the traps of ludicrous financial greed, of environmental recklessness, of collective fear of strangers and collective contempt for the unsuccessful and marginal” are not worthy of the office which they hold.

As we follow the story of the monarchy through in Israel’s history, we see this worked out in practice. Brueggemann writes that: “… the royal system was not finally effective in sustaining Israel … at the centre of Israel’s self-awareness is the debacle of 587 B.C.E., when king, temple, and city all failed.”

What happens next is fascinating and central to the development of Christianity: “The dynastic promise … was turned to the future, so that Israel expected the good, faithful, effective king to come, even though all present and known incumbents had failed. Out of concrete political practice arose an expectation of the coming of messiah: a historical agent to be anointed, commissioned, and empowered out of the Davidic house to do the Davidic thing in time to come, to establish Yahweh’s justice and righteousness in the earth.”  

As Christians, we believe that Messiah to have already come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and that through his life, death and resurrection the establishment of God’s justice and righteousness on earth, as in heaven, has begun to be established and is now awaiting his second coming for its full completion. This brings us back to the place where we began, the centralizing of power in the hands of one human being is always likely to lead to that power being used in ways that are self-serving and exploitative. It is only we acknowledge God as the ultimate and just ruler of all that our lives and society are placed in their proper perspective.

As we await that day, we can both hold our rulers to account on the Biblical basis of the issue of justice for all and, as the Archbishop emphasised in his Diamond Jubilee sermon, seek “the rebirth of an energetic, generous spirit of dedication to the common good and the public service, the rebirth of the recognition that we live less than human lives if we think just of our own individual good.”  

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Madness - Our House.