The High Court ruling about Parliament’s role in Brexit, Guy
Fawkes’ Night yesterday, and Tuesday's American election make for an interesting
constellation of events. In their different ways they all make us think about political
authority: what it means and how it should behave towards the citizens it
governs. For people of faith they pose the even larger question about where God
belongs in the structures of human society. In the language of our New
Testament reading, what does it mean to “give to the emperor the things that are
the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s”?
The story in our Old Testament reading doesn’t answer these
questions. But it does shine a light on the nature of leadership. The young
king, unsure of himself at the outset of his reign, goes into the sanctuary,
the place he senses he will grow wise in.
God appears to him, and asks what gift he should give him. It’s an annunciation moment: when the angel
comes, what will he say? Like Mary, he
rises to the test. He asks for the only
gift worth having: wisdom. How else can he
govern this great people? There is a
divine sigh of relief. God is pleased
with his prayer, and gives him not only what he has asked but also what he has not
asked: riches, honour, glory. And the
story goes on to show how Solomon’s wisdom was such that Israel
But things are more ambiguous than we might think. Is Solomon cynically praying for what he
knows God wants him to ask for, calculating that in a world where outward show
counts for so much, God will give him riches and victory and power anyway? It would be churlish to be too suspicious. The
natural reading of the story echoes our instincts when we begin any new task we
know we are ill-equipped for. Helplessness has a way of concentrating the mind.
I prayed just such a prayer on the day I was ordained in this very chapel forty
years ago this year. At least Solomon is wise enough to know that he must ask to
be wise. It’s only when we know what we don’t
know, the ‘known unknowns’ in Rumsfeld-speak, that we begin to be wise.
No, what is intriguing is how the author introduces his
reign at the outset. He could so easily have
begun with Solomon’s noble prayer. Instead, he embarks on the new king’s career
with some not very subtly disguised hints that all is not happy and glorious. First, there is his marriage alliance with
Pharaoh’s daughter. Egypt is the place Israel had left behind in the exodus. To marry into Egypt would be a betrayal of
history. It anticipates what the text says later on about how Solomon loved
many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh, who ‘turned away his
heart after other gods’.
Then there is the reference to his building ‘his own house,
and the house of the Lord and the wall about Jerusalem’. We might say that this is precisely what
kings do. But think about this: whereas it took just seven years to build the
temple, no less than 13 years were spent on his own palace with no expense
spared. In Solomon, a king had arrived ‘like
all the nations’, just what they had so misguidedly asked for in the days of
Samuel. And notice the order in which these
grands projets are listed: his own
house first, then the house of the Lord, then the city walls: king first,
shrine second, the people and their safety last of all. There is already a hint of the forced labour
with which Solomon realised these achievements and the heavy taxes he levied to
pay for them, something for which the northern tribes of Israel never forgave
him, and which after his death led to the kingdom’s fatal schism. Was God still
king in Israel? – that was the big question.
So Solomon is introduced to us, not altogether as the
legendary wise and good king, but as a man already compromised in his public
life and personal relationships. In
this, he is his father’s son, for the story of the golden days of David is also
one in which the conflicts of his private life threaten to subvert his public
role and destroy both the kingdom and its king with it. The storyteller is unsparing in his scrutiny
of how Solomon’s reign ended badly. His huge wealth, his taxation policies, his exploiting of slave labour, his comprehensive harem of
women from across the world and his toleration of their gods all betrayed
the promise of his early years. No doubt
the story is reading the ending back into the beginning: the overture is
warning us that we must prepare to be disappointed in this man.
So Solomon’s prayer is the petition of an already
compromised ruler. It suggests that the king is not so much the innocent child
as the young man who knows about the ambiguities that could lure him from the
path of wisdom. He can glimpse his demons, the conflicted desires that could
get the better of him, the seductions of money, sex and power that corrupt even
the best of leaders. And he can also see
that good leadership calls for real integrity of mind, heart and motive. Is
this why he prays for wisdom? If it is,
we should admire Solomon for his emotional honesty. What else can purify his ambitions, wash them
of the corrosive instincts for self-aggrandisement and the pursuit of pleasure that
a king in the ancient world would have to be superhuman to resist?
Our society likes leaders who can be either heroes or
villains. It’s good at erecting
pedestals but enjoys it when they are fallen from. We find it hard to accept
that our leaders are flawed, that their failings could be forgivable, and
that even their brokenness could be the raw material of greatness or at least dignity. This is precisely the drama being acted out
before our eyes in America: whose personal story makes them more fit to be
Commander in Chief? The scriptures don’t regard Solomon as unambiguously good;
perhaps he is more of a tragic figure brought down by the flaws in his
character, and in this he is of a piece with so many in public life we could
name.
But I like to think that Solomon never forgot how his best
instincts led him to ask for the wisdom to know not only how a king should govern
his people but how he should govern himself.
The oversight of ourselves is a task we all have to face, leaders or
not. We know how we fall short of what
the psalm calls ‘truth in the inward parts’.
But our exemplar is not any human king, not even Solomon in all his
glory. It is the one who is God’s wisdom
incarnate, who comes to forgive our failures, and mend our broken lives and
make us fit to serve him. In him, our
Redeemer, a greater than Solomon is here.
Balliol College Oxford, 6 November 2016 (1 Kings 3.1-15, Matthew 22.15-22)
