Royal Thrones

The spirit of the present season, the weeks following Pentecost, is an extended meditation on the Saints in Light. We take the occasion of American Independence Day (observed on the Gregorian Calendar today) celebrating democracy, to ask basic questions about the life of a saint and, therefore, of Christian life itself. For as the Apostle Paul repeatedly has said, Christian life is fundamentally the path of sanctity. And what is sanctity if not to live in the world that has been ordered by God?

From the beginnings of the monastic movement, vowed religious have read the Psalms every day. They followed the Master and His Disciples in this, who followed the Jews, who followed the Hebrews. The great "Hero" of this long, variegated epic poem is the great Liberator King, Whom we call God.

He is Liberator over the tyrant Pharaoh. But the particularity of Egypt or of Pharaoh does not matter. For He liberates His people from every form of oppression. His heart is for the humble and lowly. He despises the proud. He calls His beloveds away from civilization to be with Him. This is the point of wilderness. He calls us to Himself, which is perfect rule, perfect understanding, and, for those Who bow before His Kingship, perfect life.

As the Hebrew Bible records, when man in his perverted longings begins to yearn for a king, God must console His prophet, Samuel:

He warns His beloved people of the blood-lust that accompanies human kingship:

And the Son of God (Whose voice is always heard in the human emotions of the Father) admonishes His Apostles sternly:

The occasion for this teaching is lust for power just displayed by the Disciples James and John.

The Father has sent the Son to order the world rightly, and He ordains a governance of royal thrones:

We see this structure coalescing: One Throne and beneath it twelve others.

First, there is the undoubted King. We say, "King of kings" and "Lord of lords" (Rev 17:14). The story of His Incarnation is about Kingship. The Kingdom of God was a phrase unknown to Scripture until it appeared in the New Testament. Any first-century Jew hearing this phrase would not know what it meant. And its near relation, the Kingdom of Heaven, appears only once, and that in the Septuagint version, occurring only once: in the Wisdom of Solomon (10:10).

The entire concept of life ordered as a Divine Kingdom is a major revelation of the Lord Jesus, unknown to history before then. Nonetheless, the phrases Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Heaven are commonly heard in the New Testament, occurring ninety-seven times.

Then, we have this other startling fact: the title for Jesus in the original Greek Gospels Κυριος (Kyrios) means King (often translated Lord), occurring in the New Testament more than seven hundred times. Of towering importance, Kyrios is also the title conferred upon YHWH, God the Father, in the Septuagint (the Greek Hebrew Scriptures that Jesus used). It is a very special word, for God's Name could not be spoken in the Hebrew Bible. Kyrios, then, naming God the Father and then later His Son, is a word having extraordinary dignity and prestige.

Just beneath the King in hierarchy are the Three: Peter, James, and John. They have been chosen to experience the most startling revelation of Jesus' earthly life: the Transfiguration, and receive the highest human honor of approaching the Throne of God .... meeting also with the greatest of Hebrew prophets, Elijah and Moses.

Peter is singled out for other honors. Unlike James and John, he is granted to step in the Master's Own footprints: he will walk on water; he will be crucified; he will break through to the recognition that Jesus is the Son of God; he will be identified as the chief shepherd. On lists of the Apostles, he normally is listed first. On the morning of the Resurrection, St. John lightly leaps to the Tomb entrance, but he defers to Peter, huffing and puffing behind him, that the older Apostle may enter first. Among the "Twelve Thrones of Israel," St. Peter's prominence cannot be denied.

Beyond Judea, King Jesus attends to "other sheep I have which are not of this fold"   (Jn 10:16). The chief shepherd rising among this coalescing flock indisputably is St. Paul. And when the Lord Jesus consecrates the as-yet foggy Saul of Tarsus to this high office, striking him to the ground with a burst of Divine light, he retreats for three years to Arabia and then Damascus. And then what does he do? From there, he will speak to no man, but journeys to Jerusalem only

We may divide the Christian Scriptures into three great divisions. First, there is the world according to St. Peter. His amanuensis, John-Mark, wrote the first Gospel, which then dominated the Gospel of St. Matthew (94% of Mark's Gospel appears in Matthew). Along with Peter's letters, this makes for 23% of the New Testament. Second, there is the world according to St. Paul. His dear friend, the physician St. Luke, followed Paul on some of his journeys, which undoubtedly influenced his two-volume Gospel, Luke-Acts. Along with Paul's Epistles, this makes for 57% of the New Testament. Finally, there is the world according to St. John the Theologian — his Gospel, his Revelation, and his Catholic Letters, in all 18% of the New Testament. As his names and titles suggest — Beloved Disciple, Apostle, Evangelist, Divine, Theologian — he stands apart as a kind of philosopher-king. It was left to St. John to explicate the deepest mysteries; to set a pattern of Christian life in his Community, graced by the Most Holy Theotokos; and to be God's last prophet of the human era .... the soaring eagle.

God's ideal of governance is Kingdom. We in the West, who have accorded democracy a kind of sacred status, usually balk at this premise. My parishioners have asked me (especially on this special weekend of American Independence), "Shouldn't the Heavens above be ruled by democracy?"

Certainly, democracy was known to the world of Jesus' time. Athenian democracy can be dated to the sixth century B.C. More to the point, that stupor mundi of governance, the Roman Empire, which occupied Judea (and much of the rest of the known world), was the world's first republic of any magnitude and significance. During Jesus' lifetime, prominent Romans continued to conspire with the goal of restoring this form of democracy to Rome. Democracy as a theme and subject was very much in the mix of Jesus' Graeco-Roman lifeworld.

The United States itself was inspired by and founded upon this ideal of republic. Indeed, the U.S. would appropriate the Roman word senate. And Roman architecture dominated the imagination of the Framers including the home Jefferson designed at Monticello.

The driving force giving rise to the American republic was the struggle against tyranny. This is the theme you would hear in the taverns and inns of the American Colonies. This is the stuff you would read in leaflets and manifestos. It would not take long to get the main drift. It is a primary subject and constant subtext of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. For this reason, the intial foundation laid in the U.S. Constitution is the Bill of Rights: protections for individual liberties.

Jefferson's Declaration begins with the axiom that all men are created equal. And this is key if each man is to be sovereign. Wisdom then is seen not to reside in one figure governing all, but a dignity vested in all men .... if democracy is to succeed. But true wisdom is no light thing. Look around you. Can you say that you are surrounded by truly wise men and women? Would you appoint your neighbors to be deciders over your own family, property, prerogatives, and life?

The United States was famously an experiment in government, which many saw as being doomed from the start. One has only to glance at that other experiment in liberty, equality, and fraternity, playing out at the same time, to see what government-by-the mob can look like. The French Revolution set out to achieve the same objectives but devolved into an orgy of protest, dissent, blood-lust, and deadly chaos for more than a half-century.

You see, a sober view of democracy understands the need to watch over this ever-simmering volcano — cities erupting in rage and flames; de-funding police, who then resign; families and businesses departing (I read in the news that U-Haul could not keep up with families leaving Minneapolis during their crisis of anarchy); cities spiraling downward into decay and crime (a basketball star who became mayor of Detroit proposed to move in the city limits drastically to make an impossible situation more tractable); roving bands of "cop-killing" anarchists; self-appointed militias .... The price of liberty, it is said, is eternal vigilance .... not only guarding against threats from without but also threats from within. Remember the Lord Jesus when He said,

Once Independence had been secured, the Founding Fathers realized that they were sitting on a powder keg. For power-to-the-people is always a dicey proposition. They decided that only landowners could vote — that is, people who had proved they could manage their own lives .... before undertaking to manage the lives of others. (Given the biases of the age, landowning black men were dealt out of the franchise, and women could not even own property in the U.S. until 1848.) By the time Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address in 1863, the phrase, "government of the people, by the people, for the people," was still considered too radical to be generally accepted, denoting anarchy, as Gary Wills has brilliantly discussed in his landmark work, Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992).

Certainly, I am not anti-democratic. I admire the champion of democracy, Winston Churchill, who said,

It is this overlooked and never-quoted phrase within Churchill's famous remark that goes to the heart of the question: ".... in this world of sin and woe." Until we will admit the truth that surrounds us — a vast mess dominated by greed, lust, perversion, disordered egos, and cruel advantage, not to say a global scene where starvation and needless disease go unchecked and ignored — than we can begin to gauge how well democracy has worked. Democracy is messy, and we live in a mess.

We must admit that no government can manage to do all things well. (This is true in any complex problem.) Our government has been designed to stave off tyranny; that has been its main objective. It is not for nothing that generation after generation of young men have been told that they must die at war to protect freedom.

Supreme Court decisions over the past century have been chary of a particular tyranny within our borders: tyranny of the majority. After all, democracy proposes to be a government by popular vote. "The majority wins," we say. But Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that numbers can never be the decider; rather doing the right thing in all cases must be the goal. Few would disagree in principle, but the devil is in the details. How exactly do 168 million registered voters (2020 Census) decide what is right? Should you vote for self-interest? Should you vote for the common good ..... and how do you determine what that should be? Do we not now live in a nation where "everyone has his own truth?" What is common good, then? We seem to have come full circle, back to Churchill's phrase, "in this world of sin and woe." More important, we have come full circle, returning to the Master's teaching: it is the heart of man which is the beginning and end of governance on Earth: the evil heart or the heart filled with goodness. And His Kingdom is an interior Kingdom.

The King of kings stood among earthly kings saying that His Kingship was not of this world. He then founded a Church to be governed by royal thrones and spoke of a Kingdom of Heaven and Kingdom of God. He sternly admonished His viceroys not to lord power over others. They are to be servants. They are to wash feet, to feed starving children, to clothe the naked. But their highest service, having most consequence for most people over the longest span (eternity) is the care of souls.

In a wrong-headed understanding of servant-leadership, fighting always against a tyranny of the majority, the United States as a culture, society, and government has arrived to an absurd extreme: a dangerous and cruel tyranny of the minority. For these minority protections have brought us to the place where we have banished God from the public square and discarded His morality as a guide for daily living. It has been replaced by the rather weak credo, which is little more than officially sancitioned list of causes and hot-button issues: "live and let live." Exactly how does that guide anybody's life? And no one dare criticize lest they be "cancelled."

Even within the political-cultural left who have spawned this tyranny, subgroups are outflanked by subgroups with minority rights becoming ever-more finely sliced. And our lifeworld begins to resemble a vortex having making ever tighter turns over a drain. We have come to a place where many evils must be accounted to be good, and many goods are demonized. Our confused children are told they can be whatever they want to be as they look out on a field of ruin and depravity.

A great vote was arranged two thousand years ago. Two thousand years ago, the people were offered the most consequential choice in human history. It will be put to a vote! Do you choose Jesus, your King, or Barabbas. In retrospect, we say see that it was a choice between perfect wisdom and perfect rule, on one side, or liberty for its own sake, on the other. Liberation! Remove the bars!

We all know how the election went: the people chose for pure liberty, life without restraint: let each one do what seems right to him or her, a free-for-all.

The War in Heaven, was the ultimate image of the free-for-all, burning and looting, a struggle amongst disordered egos: sin and woe on the grandest scale, forever enshrined with the fallen angels in Hell .... which led St. John of Kronstadt (a Russian saint who died before the Bolshevik Revolution) to write of towering egos midst their own pandemonium. "Hell," he said, "is a democracy." "In Heaven there is a Kingdom."

Meantime, One King sits far above on a Divine Throne, unreached by rebellious spirits. He has set an invisible Kingdom on the Earth. It is all around us even as we speak. And it is governed by royalty: the saints in light, with Peter and Paul as High Kings. They have been well-taught by the Master. And they teach His wisdom to us. May I conclude this morning's meditation with an ancient prayer?

What is this servitude which is perfect freedom? The Master explains it further:

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.   Amen.