Well friends, election season is over. Sort of. It was a bit of a damp squib of an election night for those of us who stayed up to watch.
But for months we have listened to promises. Cost of living and housing sat near the top of almost every party’s list, and we know those pressures well, because they turn up in conversations at parish activities every week. Making promises is part of asking for a vote, and that’s not a criticism. Many who stood this year did so out of a real wish to serve, and some of them worship in our churches.
Election campaigns also ask something of us. They ask us to trust that the right leader with what they believe is the right plan will put things right.
In ancient Israel every king was anointed for the job by a prophet, and Scripture often calls them “the Lord’s anointed”. Most of them were a resounding let-down. So the prophets began to speak of one more King, a descendant of David whose reign would have no end, with a kingdom which he will uphold “with justice and with righteousness” (Isaiah 9:7).
Mark opens his Gospel by naming Jesus in exactly these terms: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). At his baptism Jesus is anointed by the Holy Spirit, and the signs follow. When John the Baptist, sitting in prison, sends to ask whether Jesus is the one, Jesus points to what his followers have seen: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Matthew 11:5).
This is the political manifesto of the kingdom of God, and Jesus delivered it among the poorest people of an occupied province.
When his own disciples jostled for the best jobs in the government they were sure was coming, Jesus stopped them. The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over people, he said. “It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant … just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:26–28).
The religious leaders rejected him and handed him to the Roman authorities, and he was crucified. For his followers that was the end of a hope. On the road to Emmaus two of them tell a stranger that they had hoped that Jesus was the one who was to redeem Israel. I suspect a few people in our congregations have said something similar this week about a party or a leader, and many more have felt it about the state of the country for far longer than one campaign.
The stranger is Jesus, risen, and he answers by opening the Scriptures, declaring that the cross was part of God’s plan all along. (Luke 24:26). Read with Emmaus eyes, the Old Testament keeps showing us a King who suffers. Jesus’ way of being the Christ is shaped by that servant, and it sets him apart from every pretender, ancient or modern, who offers rescue without a cross.
The hope that we now have is in the risen Christ who sits “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion” (Ephesians 1:21), and Paul says the Church we are part of is seated with him. That gives us a particular freedom in the week after an election. We can pray for the new government sincerely, and work alongside it wherever it seeks the good of the people. We can also say no, kindly and firmly, when any power asks for the loyalty that belongs to Jesus, or treats the people he loves as expendable.
Meanwhile the work of the Kingdom carries on in places no manifesto mentions; in foodbanks, in hospital and prison visits, in community meals, in after school programmes and youth work. That is what a local church looks like when it has decided its surrounding streets matter.
Before the official result is declared on 27 November, I’d like each of our local faith communities to do two things. Pray for your electorate MP by name in Sunday services, whoever they turn out to be. Then, once we have that elusive final result, write to those MPs. Tell them who you are and what your parish does in its community, and invite them to come and see it in action. Most MPs will accept a cup of tea and a tour of a community at work, and it is a good place for them to see what their promises look like on the ground.
+Justin
