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What stands out to me, and has always stood out to me as being of vital importance when discussing the Queen, is that she viewed her position, and others, generally speaking, viewed her position as one of service. Indeed, in not just the contemporary British monarchy, but in talk about monarchies around the world, and in the past, there was much talk of service – often the word used was “duty”.
There is a sense that there is a tradeoff – yes, when you’re a monarch you get lots of money and nice stuff and you get big houses and people have to kneel and all that jazz – but the tradeoff is that your life is a life of never-ending duty and service. You are choosing to live in a fishbowl, and in times past it was a very carnivorous fishbowl. History and literature have no lack of stories about soon-to-be monarchs who run away.
Now, perhaps that doesn’t quite hit us with our democratic and modernist sensibilities. Why should anyone run away when they have the opportunity to wield authority? Why would people run away from a life of wealth, power, and prestige?
Maybe because it’s not all it’s cracked up to be!
Maybe the tradeoffs that must be made to live a life of monarchical wealth, prestige, and power are more than most can bear.
Now look, I’m not gonna try to convince you that monarchy is all about service, because, frankly, we’re all Americans and we hold a pretty low view of monarchy round these parts. And I’m sure that my even talking about monarchy as service and duty has some of your Uncle-Sam-Senses tingling. Maybe you’re thinking, “well, golly, Luke, all this pro monarchy talk makes me wonder if you’re a secret monarchist!” And so, I understand that some of you are thinking that MAYBE, just MAYYYBBBBBE I’m a crypto-Imperialist who wants to overthrow the government and reassert King Charles III as our rightful and lawful sovereign. Maybe all this radio preaching has just been one long ruse, so that someday, eventually, upon the death of the Queen, I could rally my half dozen listeners, and we could begin a movement to revoke the constitution and have the people of this colony sing God save the King from sea to shining sea!
Maybe that’s what this is. Maybe that’s what I’m doing. It’s not. But I guess you’ll never know! Or conversely, you can know and that’s not at all what I’m doing.
What I will say is that I do, in fact, believe that monarchs, at their best, are servants to their people. Monarchs, at their best represent stability, the honor of traditions and norms, they are a voice for the past that can guide the future. At their best, monarchs can guide a people, a nation, an empire, an they can guide them into greater prosperity, greater morality, greater unity. A monarch can unite a people by reminding them that there is something that binds them that goes beyond ideology, or even blood and soil – devotion to a monarch is able to unite people of broad differences, ideological, religious, racial, economic, and so on.
And this is both good and bad. It’s good when it allows modern Britons, some Anglo, some Scottish, some Welsh, some Irish, some Jewish, some Indian, some Pakistani, some African, some Arab, some Caribbean, and even some French, to all unite around a person whom they call a sovereign.
Now, right now you’re thinking, “there he goes with that pro-monarchy crap again! Luke, don’t you know that what you’re saying is heretical – it’s idolatry?!”
No. It isn’t idolatry. It’s close to it, sure. Respecting a sovereign king or queen is always going to be in danger of becoming idolatrous. But don’t let’s pretend that there isn’t an equal and opposite error. Treating royals as though they were nobodies because you don’t want to be an idolator is crass and rude and violates Romans 13 and is in danger of becoming blasphemous.
Idolatry and Blasphemy are two sides of the same coin – which is the corruption of the image of God. When we mistake the glory inherent as man as a glory to replace God’s it is idolatry. When we denigrate the glory inherent as not glory worth glorying in we blaspheme the image.
That’s why, despite how many, MANY problems I have with the Roman Catholic church, I have never bashed them for their ornate vestments and clerical garb. I have never had a problem with priests wearing special clothes that separate them from other people and give them special honor and dignity. And it isn’t just Catholics who have clerical vestments, by the way.
And the reason that I, as an Ex-Catholic Mennonite have no problem with, and even encourage clerical vestments is NOT because I think priests and pastors are just better and holier than lay Christians. I mean sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t.
But that’s not what it’s all about. Vestments are about dignity and honor to the office, and the hope is that the man in the garb will strive to live up to the honor imbued into his collar, or robe, or stole, or miter. The point is not that you look at a guy in long robes with a funny hat and say, “wow, he must be very pious!” The point is that you look at him and say, wow, he stands in an office that is honorable and he is the personal embodiment of an ideology that honors God and His servants.
Now, you might think that I’m cutting that hair into some pretty fine splits. OK. Maybe. And maybe I’m just a died-in-the-wool conservative. But I think that there is NOTHING inherently idolatrous about looking to the Queen and pledging loyalty to her – or King Charles. Can it be idolatrous? Of course! Is it by necessity? Of course not! And can it lead us to a deeper anthropological truth? Most definitely!
God has made us to want to seek to elevate someone or something. We are made to worship. We have an innate and unshakable impulse to look to someone and pledge loyalty and fealty to them.
We are, if you’ll forgive the neologism, we are “obligate worshipers”. We die if we don’t worship and so we find things to worship. And part of being obligate worshipers is that we want to elevate those we worship to kingship and queenship and lordship. We want those whom we worship to lead us and command us. There is something inherently submissive in humanity. Part of our inherent need to worship is a need to serve, to dedicate our lives to not merely a cause, but a person. Now, when that Person is God, the worship and service are glorious and redound to our own personal flourishing. When we direct worship, not merely loyalty, but worship, towards someone who isn’t God, that worship becomes idolatry and the service becomes servile. There is a distinction with a difference between being a servant and being servile! Just as there is a difference between being loyal to your queen and dedicating your life in service to her as a way of serving God…there’s a difference between THAT and worshipping the queen a licking her boots.
And, let me go farther, there is even a sense in which we should “worship” people who aren’t God. The old English word “worship” merely means “to pay honor to worth” – it was worth-ship. So, when you see something worthy, you give it its due. If a man was worthy of praise, you praised him; if a woman was worthy of honor, you honored her – you gave worth-ship. I know that’s not how we use the word in contemporary theology, today. But what I’m suggesting is not that words change, but that perhaps we’ve lost a concept. Perhaps in our move to modernity and postmodernity we’ve lost this nuanced middle-ground of paying honor to worth in a way that is worship, but not idolatry.
Because in the end, we are, all of us, bearers of the image of God. And if God is glorious and worthy of worship then aren’t those who bear His image also glorious and worthy of worship? Yes, God deserves greater honor and our first loyalty – He deserves our best love; but does that mean that others are entitled to NO honor and NO loyalty and NO love? Just because God is entitled to our highest and first worship does that mean that no one else is entitled to any?
And let me go yet further, and I’m sure I’ve made many of you doubt my orthodoxy at this point, but, hey, in for a penny, in for a pound! Let me go yet further and say that the worship that a husband pays a wife, the worship that a daughter pays her father, the worship a knight pays to his queen, the worship that a queen pays to the nation. Perhaps these things are not idolatries, but rather, are inklings, just little hints, just appetizers that train our emotions, our intellects, our hearts and our heads, to worship Christ as greatest and most glorious.
Perhaps, if we wander about in the old attic of truth, rummaging through the lost and past ideologies and theologies of human history, maybe as we wonder through these Mathom-houses we would discover that the love and honor and devotion we pay one another are not the fusty, tattered cobwebs of a dead and dying paganism that get in our eyes and stick to us, leaving us feeling like we need a bath; perhaps they are the old tin soldiers, imitations, and sometimes bad imitations of really truly courageous men from a bygone time – imitations, yes, but imitations that point to a greater reality. And like the tin soldiers, they once filled us with happiness and imagination and gave us grand notions of duty, honor, sacrifice, loyalty, bravery, brotherhood, and more. Now that we’re older and wiser we know that they’re imitations, just a game. And yet a part of us knows that they were real and that they served a purpose.
Some day all the vestments and royalties and honors will be swept away and a new economy of honor will be established, and we’ll see, once and for all, what all kings and kingdoms pointed to! We’ll see what all the funny hats and strange uniforms were all about. We’ll see Christ. And when we see Christ it will all make sense – even what was wrong will make sense now that we know the right.
The King is coming and some day we will see him, and everything will make sense.