Why we make kings

As the new King's coronation approaches, Ian Bradley explores the deep roots of kingship as an answer to anarchy and disorder.

Ian Bradley

Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews.

A medieval illustration of King David being anointed by Samuel

Samuel anoints David king. An early 14th century illumination from the Vaux Psalter.

Lambeth Palace Library.

At the most solemn moment of King Charles III’s coronation on 6 May, the Westminster Abbey choir will sing Handel’s thrilling setting of words from the first chapter of the first Book of Kings:

Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon king.

It provides a reminder that the anointing of the monarch with holy oil is carried out in direct imitation of a practice described in the Bible in connection with the inauguration of the kings of ancient Israel.

This is not the only link which the coronation will make with stories found in the Bible. Legend has it that the Stone of Destiny, on which Charles will be seated when he is crowned, started life as the pillow on which Jacob slept when he had a dream of the ladder leading up to heaven as described in Genesis. Jacob set the stone up as a pillar to commemorate the place where God had talked to him. Later stories identify it as the pillar beside which Abimelech was crowned king of Israel and King Josiah made his covenant with the Lord to keep his commandments and statutes.

The theme of monarchy looms large in the collection of books making up the Hebrew Bible which tells of God’s dealing with the chosen people of Israel and forms the Christian Old Testament. The word ‘king’ occurs 565 times and ‘kingdom’ 163 times. Six of the so-called historical books have the monarchy as their main subject matter, including the aptly named first and second books of Kings. The life of one particular king, David, occupies more space than that of any other figure, including the great patriarchs, Abraham and Moses.

By popular request

Kingship is presented in the early books of the Old Testament as both the popularly requested and the divinely appointed answer to the anarchy and disorder prevailing under the judges who ruled the people of Israel for the first two hundred and fifty years or so after their arrival in the promised land of Canaan around 1250 BCE. The Book of Judges emphasizes the corruption and lawlessness under this form of government, noting: ‘In those days there was no king in Israel: everyone did what was right in his eyes.’

The inauguration of the Israelite monarchy, which took place around 1020 BCE, is described in the Book of Samuel. A crucial role is played by Samuel, the last of the great judges who becomes the first king-maker and presides over the coronations of both Saul and David, the first two Israelite kings. Samuel is portrayed as prophet, seer and intermediary between Yahweh/God and the people, to whom the elders of Israel come asking for ‘a king to govern us like all the nations’. Samuel puts this request to Yahweh who is initially reluctant to accede to it and tells him to spell out to the people the dangers of kingship in terms of the accretion of private wealth and military might. These warnings are ignored, however, and the people continue to insist that they must have a king ‘to govern us and go out before us and fight our battles’. When Samuel reports this to God, he is told, ‘Hearken to their voice and make them a king’.

On king making

If there is a certain initial unease in God’s mind about the desirability of kingship, the institution is subsequently given divine blessing, with the king been seen as God’s chosen one – Messiah in Hebrew, or Christos in Greek. There is a sense of partnership between Yahweh and the chosen people of Israel in the making of kings. The emphasis is on a three way covenant between God, king and people. This concept of covenant is one of the most distinctive and central features of Israelite kingship, as is the idea that the monarch mediates and represents divine rule and stands for justice, fairness and truth.

During and after the long period of exile that followed the ‘Babylonian captivity’ of Israel in 597 BCE, Jews increasingly pinned their hopes on the future coming of a new Messiah, a king from the house of David, raised up by God to deliver Jerusalem from where he would reign, restoring and re-uniting Israel and bringing about a new world order of justice and righteousness, as looked forward to and promised in the Psalms and the writings of the prophets.

The theme of kingship, so fully explored in the Old Testament, continues to figure prominently in the New Testament, although its central focus is on the kingdom of God, inaugurated and proclaimed by Jesus, with its dethroning of the rich and powerful and exaltation of the humble and meek. All four of the Gospel writers use royal titles and monarchical allusions in their descriptions of Jesus. He is identified as the anointed king, the Messiah or Christos, leading his followers to be known as Christians. From his birth in Bethlehem in the house and family of King David, and his baptism where he is identified by God as his beloved Son, to his trial and crucifixion for being ‘King of the Jews’, the royal theme runs as a clear thread through his life and death.

Jesus himself redefines the concept of kingship. This is signalled most dramatically by his choice of a donkey on which to make his entry into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday. He deliberately opts for an animal associated with humility, humiliation even, rather than a proud charger or stallion more fitting for a king on a triumphal progress. In washing his disciples’ feet on the first Maundy Thursday, he further shows that he is, in Graham Kendrick’s memorable words The Servant King displaying meekness as well as majesty. When Pontius Pilate repeatedly asks him whether he is indeed the King of the Jews, he gives the cryptic answer 'You have said so'. Jesus never repudiates the idea of kingship but gives it a wholly new meaning of humble servanthood which has been the inspiration for Christian monarchy ever since.

Article

Christmas culture

Culture

Film & TV

21 December 2024

4 min read

This is love, actually

Love is not always simply a joy, delight, and comfort.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is a curate in Leicestershire

Michael and Sarah.

I’m not a great lover of Love Actually, actually. I find it overlong, boring, and unrealistic. The plot holes are yawning. Aurelia’s lack of French despite her living and working in France with a father apparently fluent in French always irks me. Why would anybody in Keira Knightley’s shoes give her husband’s best man that kiss? On this year’s rewatch with my family, Joanna’s run all the way back through the airport, despite her plane to New York being on last call for some time, joined the list. The chauvinism and some of the jokes get more uncomfortable with each passing year.

I guess the suspension of disbelief is the point with a film that is deliberately tongue-in-cheek. Amid the mawkish tat there is a little in the way of saving grace- Emma Thompson’s performance, both in support for her friend Daniel as he grieves, and in dignified devastation at her husband’s unfaithfulness, will always be masterful and deeply affecting. But it is in Sarah’s storyline, caring for her mentally ill brother Michael, that best demonstrates love, actually.

Unless you’ve been under a rock for twenty years, you will know the story. Sarah silently yearns for her colleague Karl, something everyone in the office has become aware of. They get together at the Christmas party, and are about to get to it, when Michael rings, distressed, asking for the Pope, and needing Sarah’s reassurance. She answers the phone, twice, knowingly ending her chance with Karl for that evening, and possibly forever.

Love Actually is mostly full of glossy and unrealistic love. Attraction is easy, love comes quickly, meet cutes are abundant, demonstrations of love are impulsive and Christmas romances happen all over town. Pretty much everyone ends up twinkly-eyed despite the origins of their own story arcs. But Sarah turns down this kind of romantic love for an older, deeper, more burdensome love and a less happy ending.

In leaving behind her chances with Karl to care for Michael, Sarah self-sacrifices her own dreams to embrace the circumstances she has been given. In our current era of boundaries, self-prioritisation, and idealising of (particularly Christmas-orientated) romantic love, Sarah’s example is never more important. Hers and Michael’s story would not feature in a Hallmark Christmas film, and it feels the most real of all for that reason.

Sarah demonstrates that love is not always simply a joy, delight, and comfort, but very often a scarred, painful, and deliberate choice to put oneself second even when some or all of our being is resentful and resistant. The hand she has been dealt, being the only family for Michael, carrying his care on her shoulders alone, is not particularly fair. The demands sacrificial love makes of us are often not fair; romantic, familial, or otherwise, but to love truly is to love anyway, bearing the cost of loving those who are a burden to us, and the humiliation of being loved by those to whom we are a burden.

The siblings’ story strikes at the truest meaning of love at Christmas. Jesus’ birth is the eternal demonstration that God is not content to remain in the comfort of heaven in perfection, but instead comes to suffering and hurting humanity. In the same way that Sarah gently and firmly deals with Michael’s violence, so God deals with all the violence we throw at each other and at God, and loves us anyway. Just as Sarah sacrifices her own dreams of life with ‘lots of sex and babies’ with Karl to spend Christmas Day in a more costly, more true relationship with Michael, so God’s own Son gave up heaven and humbled himself to spend the first Christmas Day in a feeding trough, present to humanity and all its burdens.

If you attend a carol service this year you will probably hear the title given to Jesus by the prophet Isaiah of Immanuel, meaning God with us. This name demonstrates that although we all carry our own instability, weakness, and selfishness, God’s love does not leave us, but is all the more present with us in our need to be loved although we offer little or nothing in return to God. On a cosmic level, we are the burden, with our individual and communal tendency towards self-destruction. And yet, the Christmas story reminds us that God remains present to us.

This is love actually at Christmas. It’s not happy endings and spontaneous proposals. It’s painful, suffering, difficult, unfair, sacrificial love. Sarah and Michael’s story expresses the truest expression of love we will ever see. The kind that gives up dreams to be present to those who are suffering. The kind that gives up heaven to be present to those on Earth. The kind that accepts the love given by those who can give it, even if we feel humiliated by the depths of our need. If we choose to embrace the unglamorous, the burdensome, the inconvenient, we will never be closer to the first and truest of all Christmas stories.

Thank God for Sarah and Michael, who point us to the cowshed containing the God who does not abandon us for better and easier things, despite our fragility.

(And makes Love Actually a little less insufferable).

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