The Writing on the Wall
21st November 2021 Christ the King Evensong
Daniel 5
John 6.1-15
I can’t have been more than about five or six when we had a scripture lesson at school about Daniel and I remember being absolutely fascinated about the story of Belshazzar’s feast and particularly the fingers of the hand that began writing on the plaster of the palace wall: those mysterious words MENE MENE TEKEL PERES. I remember looking round the classroom and wondering what it would be like if human fingers unattached to any human body started tracing words on one of the walls. A totally weird and arresting image. And we all know what it means. The story has provided a phrase we use quite often. The writing’s on the wall. Something bad is going to happen.
Every child knows as I did then that a big, proud, brash, overpowerful and possibly rather stupid tyrant is just waiting to be overthrown. That he will, as we say, get his come-uppance. And he does. Belshazzar’s blasphemous and extravagant feast is ruined. And in spite of his gabbled attempt to bribe his way out of disaster by promoting Daniel to high office, he drops dead shortly afterwards and his kingdom is overthrown.
This is the time of year when the Church traditionally reads through the apocalyptic books of the Bible, Daniel and Revelation, with their themes of the last days, and Christ’s return. ‘He sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty – from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead’ as we have just said in the Creed and in the Nicene Creed, ‘He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead’. The Church year ends this week, and next Sunday, Advent begins. And here on the cusp of change is Daniel reminding us that worldly power is much more fragile than it looks, that it can be taken away in an instant, that the high and the mighty can be reduced to knocking knees, panic, terror and madness and death of they if they contravene the will of God. The writing’s on the wall.
The book of Daniel was written two centuries before Christ, though it is set hundreds of years earlier during the Babylonian captivity. Both times were dangerous for the Jewish people. Daniel kept the faith through the Babylonian period, and so his story would be the one to inspire later Jews to keep the faith against another potential oppressor, the Seleucid King Antiochus Epiphanes, whose sacrileges are referred to by Jesus. It’s difficult to realise this sometimes with Holy Scripture, but there are passages, often in the teaching of Jesus and certainly here in the Book of Daniel which we are meant to find funny. The Book of Daniel is full of satire. It sends up the grim, narcissistic Nebuchadnezzar. And it does the same to the greedy, stupid, blasphemous, Belshazzar. And by making these figures ridiculous it encouraged the Jews to hold on to their faith in God and keep their spirits up in the time of Antiochus.
How does Daniel’s message play out today? There’s plenty of tyranny in our world, plenty of pretension, blasphemy and greed. With the decline of Christian faith in the West many of our rulers and leaders have given up even the pretence of being humble servants of the
people. And I think we are right to feel angry with those who love the trappings of power without much sense of responsibility; those who lobby shamelessly for money and favours and peerages, those ghastly business magnates with their million-pound yachts and endless sense of entitlement, those celebrities whose self-absorption and narcissism deceive the young and insecure.
It is right to feel outrage at injustice. But the book of Daniel is a pantomime not a tragedy and its theme is that the powers of this world are much more fragile than they look. Waiting in the wings is God’s judgement and God’s salvation.
That’s why later in the book of Daniel there is the vision of one like a Son of Man coming on the clouds: From next Sunday we shall sing ‘Lo, he comes in clouds descending’ as we enter the Advent period of watching and waiting. If we take tonight’s two readings together we see the contrast between the tyranny of Belshazzar and the kingly rule of Jesus. Jesus the true king who heals the sick and feeds his people so generously that twelve baskets of remains were gathered up and nothing was lost, Jesus who fled when people tried to make him king by force: John’s gospel making the point that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world. Daniel gives us the image of unknown human fingers writing condemnation in the plaster, later in John’s Gospel we see Jesus writing in the dust, as he forgives the woman taken in adultery. Both bear witness to what we might call the underside of history, that is, the achievements and failures of humanity brought into the light of divine judgment where the last are first and the first are last where sinners are saved and the self-important righteous are cast out.
We in the West have already nearly destroyed ourselves by our greed, our entitlement, our sense of superiority. We are having to learn painfully that God is not a bigger version of ourselves. God does not endorse military might or economic dominance or moral superiority. Of course most of those who are important in the world’s eyes no longer believe in God – how could they, when to believe in the God of Jesus challenges our sense of entitlement and justifies our selfishness? Yet for those of us who still turn to God in wonder and worship God is powerfully at work in the smallest ways, in the resilience of the weak, the sick and the needy, in sharing small gifts and jokes and friendship, in feeding the hungry, and breaking bread with strangers, in modesty and humility, and in laughter at the pretensions of the powerful.
Above all, I think, the readings for today call us to a kind of pious rebellion against oppression of all kind. A refusal to believe in fate, a refusal to despair, mockery of the self-important and a new readiness to trust in our Saviour King, our Servant king, Jesus who comes from the underside of history and raises us to new life, both here in earth and in the world to come.