Medes and Persians | hughdbryant

A Sermon for Evensong at All Saints, Penarth, on the First Sunday of Easter, 16th April 2023

Lessons: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=548333336

Daniel 6:1-23; Mark 15:46 – 16:8

This is the first Sunday in the 50 days from Easter to Whitsunday, Pentecost. So where are we now, one week on from Easter Sunday? Well, leaving aside for a minute the story of Daniel in the lions’ den, in our Bible readings, in the Lectionary, we are at the very end of Saint Mark’s gospel.

But before we start looking at that, you might wonder why our first lesson was the wonderful story of Daniel in the lions’ den, and you will, no doubt, be relying on me to pull out a suitable lion story.

Many people see lions in their mind’s eye as just bigger versions of ginger tomcats, and just as lovable. Just like the lion you can see on YouTube in a lovely little documentary which was made in the 1960s (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx1gRyewAnQZhBqiNNP-u9V9sUsi36ebK), about a couple of likely lads living in swinging London; in Chelsea, who acquired a lion cub from Harrod’s pet department. In those days the ‘well-known Knightsbridge corner store’ even had a pet department, where you could buy a lion cub.

And they christened him Christian, Christian the Lion, which was rather nice, and took him home to their flat. Once he’d settled in, they put him on a lead and took him for walks up and down the King’s Road, perhaps stopping to exchange the time of day with Mick Jagger as he stepped out of his elegant house on Cheyne Walk.

Christian the Lion stopped being a lovable cub and got rather too big to go out safely without the risk of his taking a leaf out of Hilaire Belloc’s book.

I am sure you will remember Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Cautionary Tale’ of Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion. Shall I read it to you?

There was a Boy whose name was Jim;

His Friends were very good to him.

They gave him Tea, and Cakes, and Jam,

And slices of delicious Ham,

And Chocolate with pink inside,

And little Tricycles to ride,

And read him Stories through and through,

And even took him to the Zoo-

But there it was the dreadful Fate

Befell him, which I now relate.

You know – at least you ought to know,

For I have often told you so-

That Children never are allowed

To leave their Nurses in a Crowd;

Now this was Jim’s especial Foible,

He ran away when he was able,

And on this inauspicious day

He slipped his hand and ran away!

He hadn’t gone a yard when – Bang!

With open Jaws, a Lion sprang,

And hungrily began to eat

The Boy: beginning at his feet.

Now just imagine how it feels

When first your toes and then your heels,

And then by gradual degrees,

Your shins and ankles, calves and knees,

Are slowly eaten, bit by bit.

No wonder Jim detested it!

No wonder that he shouted “HI!‟

The honest keeper heard his cry,

Though very fat he almost ran

To help the little gentleman.

“Ponto!” he ordered as he came

(For Ponto was the Lion’s name),

“Ponto!” he cried, with angry Frown.

“Let go, Sir! Down, Sir! Put it down!”

The Lion made a sudden Stop,

He let the Dainty Morsel drop,

And slunk reluctant to his cage,

Snarling with Disappointed Rage.

But when he bent him over Jim

The Honest Keeper’s eyes were dim.

The Lion having reached his head,

The Miserable Boy was dead.

When Nurse informed his parents, they

Were more Concerned than I can say:-

His Mother, as she dried her eyes,

Said, “Well- it gives me no surprise,

He would not do as he was told!”

His Father, who was self- controlled,

Bade all the children round

attend To James’ miserable end,

And always keep a hold of Nurse

For fear of finding something worse.

Hilaire Belloc (1907) Cautionary Tales,

included in Cautionary Verses, Omnibus Edition, (1993) London, Jonathan Cape

Thinking of Daniel’s escape from the den of lions, the story of Jim is a very good illustration of the fact that lions are not nice pussy cats; although in distinct contrast the story about Christian the lion does have a happy ending – perhaps I should issue a spoiler alert at this point.

The two chaps gave Christian to Joy Adamson of ‘Born Free’ fame for her to introduce the lion to the wild in Africa. A couple of years later they went to Kenya, and perhaps showing that touching faith in leonine good nature, which they had originally exhibited when they adopted Christian, they went for a walk in the bush in the hope of seeing lions, and, incredibly, a large male lion did appear, and he came bounding towards them. I think any normal people would have turned tail and fled; but not these two. They stood there, and this mighty king of the jungle leaped up and put his paws around their necks, licking them and embracing them. He was Christian, he remembered them, and he loved them.

Well, in the middle of all these nice lion stories, we mustn’t forget where we came in, which is, after all, one of the nicest lion stories, the one about Daniel in the den of lions. King Darius is tricked by jealous courtiers into having to condemn Daniel to what was normally a bloody fate, by being locked up in a den of lions overnight.

The great king Darius was terribly distressed. Should he uphold the law which he had made, his interdict, or should he spare Daniel who had become his most trusted administrator? And he decided he had to uphold the rule of law, the immutable law of the Medes and the Persians.

Poor Daniel had to be condemned. It was pretty ironic that Daniel had been condemned for worshipping the one true God, but the king figured that the only way Daniel could be saved was by praying to that same God, and indeed so he was, protected by an angel from being eaten by the lions.

But why do we remember Daniel at Easter? I think because, here again, after shutting somebody up in a place of death they rolled away the stone blocking the entrance and the dead man came out alive.

What about Jesus’ empty tomb? What happened to Daniel was nothing like as mysterious. Certainly if all you have to go on is Saint Mark’s gospel and this original so-called short ending, what happened is that the three ladies, the two Marys and Salome, found that the stone sealing the tomb had been rolled away and a young man in white was sitting inside, who told them that Jesus had been raised and that he was not there.

The young man was presumably an angel too; he had been promoted from lion-taming duties by this time, and he told the ladies to go and tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus was going ahead of them to Galilee where they would see him. And they fled in terror, and in fact told no one. The last words were, “…and they said nothing to anyone; for they were afraid”.

The original Greek words have intrigued scholars ever since. Literally it does not say, “for they were afraid”. It says, “they were afraid, for…” Or “they were afraid, because…”. It looks as though something is missing; but is that something all the material that’s in the other gospels, for instance about the two men in white and Mary hearing a familiar voice, thinking it was the gardener and and then recognising her teacher, and so on? Perhaps not. Then Mark would have made a gospel which really spoke to people like us, people who haven’t experienced the miracle of resurrection with their own eyes.

It is generally accepted that Mark is the earliest gospel, so this is the one which most closely reflects what the earliest Christians said about what happened on Easter morning. There is a lot more to come, when we do look at the other gospel accounts, in the weeks to come.

But I expect you’re not really sitting down and reading great tomes about it just now. One week on from a really happy Easter Sunday, as we come back to church today, it has still got a gently vague, happy buzz to it.

The Lord is risen; he is risen indeed! We’ve just sung ‘Jerusalem the Golden’, but perhaps in this Easter season we will also sing ‘Ye Choirs of new Jerusalem’, which has this splendid verse:

How Judah’s Lion burst his chains,

and crushed the serpent’s head;

and brought with him, from death’s domains,

the long-imprisoned dead.

The lion. The Lion of Judah. We haven’t even mentioned C.S. Lewis, and Aslan, the lion who stands for Jesus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed.

Sermon for Evensong at St Mary’s on 17th November 2013, Second Sunday before Advent
Daniel 6 – Biblical Big Cats

In the 1960s, if you had gone shopping at Harrod’s, you would have found that they had an Exotic Animals Department. You may remember the wonderful story of the lion cub who was sold in Harrod’s and who became known as Christian the Lion. He lived in Chelsea with two young men who owned a trendy furniture shop, for a year before he got too big and was taken to Kenya to be released into the wild. There is a very sweet story about him meeting up with his former owners several years later, and fondly remembering them.

We tend to be rather soppy about cats – and that includes the rather daft idea that lions and tigers and leopards, big cats, are just that, big cats. If only they got to know us properly, we think, they would be just like big pet cats, with sweet, gentle dispositions, keen on sleeping and climbing under counterpanes on the spare bed when no-one is looking: happy to be stroked and to have their tummies tickled.

You will remember the famous zoo owner and gambler, John Aspinall, who kept tigers and encouraged his keepers to go into their enclosures with them, to play with them as pets. Unfortunately, those tigers didn’t know what Mr Aspinall expected of them, and on several occasions, they devoured their keepers.

The truth is that even domestic cats do not have entirely reliable tempers. My two Bengals are very good at rolling on their backs, purring and generally appearing very friendly, inviting you to tickle their tummies: but you should be aware that the height of ecstasy for both of them is then to grip your hand in their paws and give you a good bite! Nothing personal, of course. It’s just what cats like doing.

Which brings us to the story of Daniel in the lions’ den. There were several Persian kings called Darius, but most scholars agree that this was Darius I, who died in 486BC. He set up a complicated administration structure for the Persian empire. According to the Book of Daniel he divided Persia into 120 administrative zones, although the contemporary account in Herodotus’ Histories suggests that Darius only set up 20 regions, called satrapies, and his descendant, King Xerxes, increased the number of satrapies, perhaps indeed to 120.

It is possible that the Book of Daniel was written not just in order to tell historical stories – and indeed it may be that the history is a little bit shaky in places – but rather for prophetic teaching purposes, to demonstrate the power of God. So Daniel going into the lions’ den illustrates this. It is an escape story, just as in the earlier chapter, chapter 3, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, three other Jewish exiles in Persia, in Babylon along with Daniel, were cast into a fiery furnace because they refused to worship a golden image which Nebuchadnezzar, the king before Darius, had made. And again, God saved them and they were unhurt, even though the fiery furnace was so hot that the people who were throwing them into it were themselves consumed by fire.

Daniel portrays Darius as a benevolent king, who was tricked into signing into law an edict, that anyone who prayed to anyone apart from him, the king, for thirty days – and according to the commentators, ‘prays’ should better be translated as ‘makes a request’ either of gods or of humans – that anyone who prayed to anyone apart from the king, should be punished by being thrown into a den of lions.

Interestingly, none of the historians can find any evidence that the Persians had dens of lions, or that they used them to deal with criminals as a way of execution. The Romans certainly did. They had a special expression for it, damnatio ad bestia, condemnation to the beasts. The main reason why the early Christians were martyred by being thrown to wild beasts was because they refused to worship the emperor; similar circumstances to those in which Daniel found himself.

There are a couple of other interesting things which we should note in the story of Daniel in the lions’ den. One is the way in which King Darius refused to contradict the law which he had made, the edict. The laws of the Medes and the Persians could not be changed. Indeed that expression, ‘The laws of the Medes and the Persians’, became synonymous with the idea of immutability, unchangeability in the law.

I think also that we are meant to understand that it was not one of those cases where the Israelites on the one hand were God’s chosen people, and on the other hand there were their oppressors, the Gentiles, the ‘nations’, people who didn’t believe in God and who were vastly inferior to them. In this case, the Medes and the Persians were decent people, who treated the Jews in exile fairly and well. One defining characteristic of the Medes and the Persians was that they recognised the rule of law.

As Lord Denning famously said, ‘Be you never so high, the law is above you.’ He was quoting Dr Thomas Fuller, who said this first in 1733. This is a hallmark of civilisation. This is something we look for today as a desirable feature in all countries. When we talk about ‘failed states’ – Somalia, perhaps Iraq, Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier of Pakistan, the rule of law is said to have broken down.

So here Darius felt that, whatever he personally may have wanted to do in order to be compassionate to Daniel, he was not allowed to do, because there was a higher principle, the rule of law. And so he very reluctantly sealed the lions’ den with Daniel in it, with his own signet ring.

This is a terrible story. So often in ancient literature we don’t get the gory details. The King simply decrees that somebody should be done in, and he is: witness Herod with John the Baptist. But here, King Darius personally supervises his good friend and trusted minister Daniel being fed to the lions.

Clearly those lions were very fierce, because when Daniel’s story has had a happy ending, and Daniel has survived a night in the den without being eaten, King Darius makes sure that all the people that tricked him into making the law and putting Daniel in mortal danger by it, are themselves thrown into the den, with their children and their wives; ‘Before they reached the bottom of the den the lions overpowered them and broke all their bones in pieces.’ So it’s not the case that the lions’ den had been filled with special soft lions like Christian the Lion. These were normal cats, and for Daniel to survive a night with them really was a tremendous miracle.

This is one of the great Bible stories, which I’m sure we all remember from Sunday School, from our earliest days. It’s right up there with Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories. But are there any lessons which we can learn from it as grown-ups today? What about the laws of the Medes and the Persians? Are there laws today which result in cruelty? Is there anyone like Daniel, who, despite being innocent, is being thrown to the lions? Can we by prayer, by relying on God like Daniel did, in fact negate the effects of these immutable laws?

I will leave you to ponder on that. There are 38 shopping days left until Christmas. It’s a fortnight until the beginning of Advent. Christian the Lion and his descendants are no longer available in Harrod’s. Perhaps in Advent there is another lion that we should remember. What about Aslan, the lion in ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’? Now there was a Christian lion!

The Lion of Judah

Biblical Cats