Jesus in the den of life

A sermon preached at Choral Evensong

Daniel 6.1-23; Mark 15.46-16.8

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Daniel in the den of lions is a much-loved story in Sunday Schools and children’s Bibles. Often when we’re a bit older we think we’ve outgrown it, but here it is tonight, along with the women coming to the tomb of Jesus: what’s going on?

Daniel’s place as a ‘high official’, given that he was a foreigner in Babylon seems quite remarkable.

But then Daniel, and his fellow Israelites were not in Babylon by choice.

Daniel was a Hebrew, an Israelite, who along with ‘brightest and best’ of Israelite society had been forced to leave their homeland to work at the heart of the Babylonian Empire.

This was something Empires did, and do.

Nowadays it’s more likely to be in the form of a brain drain, the bright Brit going to work in Silicon Valley: the Israelites weren’t migrants by choice in Babylon taking the jobs of the natives: they were forced labourers, even if in some very significant positions.

Some Jews had been left back in Judea, in and around Jerusalem, but they were the farmers and certainly not the elite.

So Daniel was both bright and good at his job, a trusted lieutenant of the king.

And, as is a perennial issue for migrants, even those who have been settled for some while in a country, resentment breeds.

The native elites don’t like it when others break into their positions of influence and power or who won’t toe the line of the elite groupthink.

So it was that the other ‘high officials and satraps sought to find a ground for complaint against Daniel with regard to the [running of the] kingdom, but they could find no ground for complaint or any fault, because he was faithful, and no error or fault was found in him. ⁵ Then these men said, “We shall not find any ground for complaint against this Daniel unless we find it in connection with the law of his God.” (Daniel 6.4,5)

So they approach the king and manipulate him, through flattery, into making a ludicrous, irrevocable law - what we might recognise as a law that seeks to restrict religious freedom - ‘that whoever makes petition to any god or man for thirty days, except to [the] king, shall be cast into the den of lions’. (Daniel 6.9b)

This is the only way they were going to get him.

Freedom of religious conscience is one of the deep principles of our society and born out of Christian teaching:

[The human] response to God in faith must be free: no one therefore is to be forced to embrace the Christian faith against his own will. (Dignitatis Humanae 9, 10)

Notwithstanding examples in history, it is not Christian to coerce belief, but to invite belief from the heart, as a loving response to the God who made us and loves us.

That is where Marxist-Leninism was so anti-human, it sought to force everyone to think and believe the same things, things that were palpably untrue and unreasonable.

Yet that spirit lives on in those who cannot tolerate the religious perspective and voice in society.

Secularism talks of diversity but pushes religious faith into the private sphere and refuses to listen to that voice, fooling itself into believing that a ‘neutral society’, by which it means one that holds to dominant secular mores and norms, is desirable.

Inconvenient Christian voices written off as backward, irrational, bigoted or just tiresome.

Daniel knew different; the practice of his faith was not to be privatised but something under obedience and conviction he would carry on practicing.

So he consciously and intentionally resisted.

Knowing precisely what the law now was, ^‘he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously’. (Daniel 6.10)

He walked purposely and boldly into the trap set for him.

The trap springs, much to the king’s distress, who seeks a way out.

But the king has tied his own hands: the all-powerful king is the trapped one, not Daniel; Daniel, shut in the lion’s den, is free.

Famously Daniel walks free from the den of lions.

The goodness, beauty and truth of God cannot be locked up, and even if they are temporarily suppressed, they will walk free because they cannot be constrained.

All this is why Daniel is a ‘type’ – a precursor - of Christ.

Daniel trusts in his God against the powers; Jesus Christ remains faithful to the Father in the face of Roman tyranny.

Both Daniel and Jesus trust in God to deliver them.

The king didn’t believe Daniel guilty and Pontius Pilate finds no guilt in Jesus but allows those who plot after his life to have him killed (Luke 23.4).

In St John’s Gospel Pilate says this three times, ‘I find no guilt in him’. (John 18.38; 19.4;19.6)

Yet both Jesus and Daniel are sent to their death.

And that’s where parallels cease.

Daniel doesn’t die; he is miraculously protected, as you might expect a hero to be.

Jesus, unheroically, dies on the cross.

And what is found, after Daniel goes to the den of lions and Jesus’ body laid in the tomb, is different.

Just as the king rose at break of day to go to the den of lions, so the women go to the tomb ‘very early on the first day of the week’ (Mark 16.1).

No king comes to seek Jesus, but Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.

The women don’t come to see if they have got away with a miscarriage of justice like the king, but to anoint Jesus’ dead body.

The king finds Daniel there alive; the women find the tomb empty.

The king is relieved; the women filled with holy awe because of the message they are told: ‘He has been raised; he is not here’.

Life itself, the majesty of creation, the prophets and scriptures all hint at resurrection in the general sense, but in Christ’s triumph over death, proclaimed in this Easter season, Creation itself is renewed, human life animated to the glory of God and each person given the possibility of living life in all its abundance.

May we remain faithful, to our belief and practice, in proclaiming the victory of Christ over sin and death, and always seek to shape our lives after his example, reflecting the lively life that deathless shall persevere.