It was revealed last week that the Queen’s funeral cost the government an estimated £162 million. The cost of the Coronation has not yet been calculated, but it is estimated to have been £50-£100 million. That’s just one of the reasons why the hashtag #NotMyKing was trending in the lead-up to the big event. As much as I have my reservations about our new king however, slogans and protests don’t change the fact that Charles III is now our monarch. A recent Guardian cartoon made a similar point in the wake of reports that global temperatures were heading towards ‘unchartered territory’. The drawing is of the earth with a sign stuck in it saying ‘Not my planet’. But for better or worse this is our planet – and Charles is our king.
In a way it reminds me of what the Bible says about a far greater king – Jesus Christ. Indeed, the whole Coronation service is designed to remind us that there is a greater king than the one being crowned. As the new monarch is given the orb he is told ‘remember always that the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our God, and of his Christ’.
Just as King Charles was anointed, so was Jesus. ‘Christ’ is not a surname; like ‘Messiah’ it simply means anointed. Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ – he’s God’s anointed. As the Archbishop of Canterbury prayed at the Coronation: ‘Thy prophets of old anointed priests and kings to serve in thy name, and in the fullness of time thine only Son was anointed by the Holy Spirit to be the Christ’. This was prophesied long before Jesus’ birth in the likes of Psalm 2, where God says ‘As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill’. Elsewhere in the psalm he is called God’s ‘Son’ and his ‘Anointed’.
On one level a psalm like that could be understood as speaking of a human king, like the Biblical King David. But the language is far too exalted to describe any mere human being, as the Apostles realised when they quoted its language in reference to Jesus’ crucifixion (Acts 4:25-26).
And there’s the rub. The Christ was long-expected – but quickly rejected. Jesus’ friend Martha once told him: ‘I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world’. But though he was expected, when he came, he was crucified.
How did the world react to their King? It reacted, and still reacts, just as Psalm 2 predicted: ‘the nations rage…the kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed’.
In other words, the world – including each of us by nature – respond with the hashtag #NotMyKing. Jesus’ rule looks restrictive. We believe the whispers that to follow him would conflict with human flourishing. And so we say of the LORD and his Anointed: ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us’.
How does the psalm tell us that God reacts to this? By wringing his hands? Not at all: ‘he who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision’. How we react at the enthronement of a king says more about us than it does about the king.
Last month, as Charles and Camilla visited Merseyside, the BBC shared a video of protestors chanting ‘not my King’ being drowned out by children chanting ‘he’s our king’.
Protestors chanting “not my King” are drowned out by children chanting “he’s our King” pic.twitter.com/1YrEPoeb8C
— BBC Radio Merseyside (@bbcmerseyside) April 26, 2023
It was remarkably similar to a prediction in another psalm that even if God’s anointed king is rejected by the sophisticated of the world, children will worship him: ‘Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.’ (Psalm 8:2). Jesus quoted that very verse to the religious leaders of his day when they complained about children praising him.
The coronation of an earthly king is designed to point us to a greater King. One man who realised this at the Coronation of William IV in 1831 was the Reformed Presbyterian minister Thomas Houston. William IV, who was crowned at the age of 64, was the oldest person to assume the monarchy until Charles III. On the morning of his Coronation, Houston wrote in his journal:
‘Today, the King of these nations will be crowned, and many will be anxious to testify to him their affection and loyalty. Let me ever bear faithful allegiance to Messiah the Prince of the kings of the earth.’
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 1 June 2023