Shepherd Kings and Emissaries of Beauty: Telling Stories That Matter

Dear Storyteller, Reporter, Preacher, Artist:

Do you know the power you wield?

Recently a photographer captured the image of a father and daughter lying face down, drowned, on the bank of a river. His arm wrapped around his young daughter, holding her close even in death. Several media outlets ran the photo. And just like the image of the three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned as his family tried to flee to Greece in 2015, the image of this new pair put flesh on a divisive and disturbing issue. 

They had tried to enter the United States illegally. Some called them asylum seekers or refugees; some criminals. Some denounced the father for putting his daughter in such danger; some asked what danger they were already facing that the father would be willing to take the risk. But all caught their breath when they saw the picture. It told a story. It reminded us of what we have to lose in the debate: our humanity.

Elusive Humanity

We live in a global community, but we are far from communal. We are pockets of self-interested societies and tribes and clans, unable to see the beauty in one another. And like Cain after he killed Abel, we seem to know one thing: we need the protection that comes from power because in a world of violence and the survival of the fittest, the mightiest one wins.[1] And so our humanity slips away as we all clamor for the upper hand in one way or another. The global community is a stadium of gladiators, certainly, but so is the nation and the city and the church. Every day we drip lifeblood on the sand or pay to spectate the gruesome scenes from the stands.

Somewhere in far distant memory, we understood how to live as noble people. But in the garden of Paradise, we grabbed for something more, something shiny and new and forbidden, and after doing so we forgot that anything was ever more important than me and mine. Yet in the midst of our clambering for our stake in this world, art and story can remind us of our humanity, our communal responsibility. Because beauty and justice go hand in hand. And because story has the power to give a voice to the powerless.

Gladiator Hero Versus Shepherd King

In ancient and olden days, justice was the prerogative of the king. The people expected their monarch to protect their interests and lead the country in battle. Landowners and tribal leaders pledged loyalty and a percentage of their wealth in exchange for an alliance and common defense from enemies. The king put himself in mortal danger on behalf of the kingdom, and the people, especially those without power, paid a high price for his sovereign obligation to protect them. They were required to submit to his rule, pay large taxes, and give their sons and daughters into his service.

When the nation of Israel demanded a king, the prophet Samuel gave them a vivid description of just how tyrannical a monarchy would be (1 Sam 8:11–18). Often the more powerful the king, the more he took from those he ruled to express and display his glory. Kings fought to maintain their borders, trade, and resources, but they were usually not the people’s advocate. Most often they got rich on the backs of the populace and saw themselves and their status as more valuable than the persons in their care. They were gladiator heroes enslaved to their ambitions and gods. Slay anyone to stay alive. The mightiest wins.

The God of the Hebrew Bible had a different idea of how a king should wield power: A king should go before his people and drive out the enemy. A king should lead the people to enough food and water, shelter, and security. He should rule between his people with wisdom and integrity, impartially treating all with parity and dignity, and justly punishing those who transgress the law. He should work toward the increase of the people, both in their generosity and prosperity. He should seek the lost. He should help them achieve peace and wholeness. He should put their needs before his own and spend his life on their behalf. And more than desiring tribute from his people, he should desire that his people treat one another with righteousness and justice, going out of their way to care for the most vulnerable among them.

This vision is the beauty that will be.

When God chose David as king, he chose a man who had learned to rule by caring for, leading, and protecting sheep. Gentle yet strong. A man of integrity rather than ambition. A man who understood God’s heart for righteousness and justice. David understood how to go from warrior shepherd to shepherd king.

Or so we thought. Along the way, even this “man after God’s own heart” became blinded by his own privilege and power. David did exceedingly well until that fateful time when “in the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle,” he sent his top general, “and his servants with him, and all Israel” to mind the border (2 Sam 11:1). But David stayed at home.

When we care about the sheep, we fight off the bears and lions ourselves. When we want to eat lamb chops in the palace, we stay home.

The King Stops Going Out to Battle

Staying home—or spectating from the stands—is all it takes for the lion to eat the sheep. But whose responsibility is it now to care for the sheep? For millennia, the idea of the king going out to battle held strong, even though many stayed home. On June 27, 1743, Britain’s King George II led his troops into battle. In 1794, President George Washington rode at the head of 13,000 militiamen to put down an insurgency of rebels in the Whiskey Rebellion. During World War I, though perhaps never in as much danger as his troops, King Albert I of Belgium led his army and fought alongside them while his wife, the Queen, worked as a nurse at the front. In 1918, Albert led the final offensive that liberated his country.[2] But these protector kings were the last of their kind.

Our current era has never seen a king or head of state physically lead troops into battle during his or her reign.[3] Our heads of state lead from a place of safety while the troops carry out the orders. Our expectation has changed. Leaders push from behind rather than lead from the fore. In many venues, leaders have fallen out of practice taking personal risks for the sake of others, whether on the colosseum sand, the boardroom, or the legislative floor. The people are on their own.

The Noble Character

In literature, we find an interesting shift as well. For millennia, epic poems and dramas depicted kings, nobles, and demigods in heroic journeys and conflicts. From these we expected an extra measure of strength or courage or honor. The Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia follows King Gilgamesh as he seeks the plant of life from the underworld to bring back Enkidu from the dead (c. 2100 BCE). Homer (c. 700 BCE) tells of a quarrel between Trojan War heroes and Odysseus’s ten-year journey home to his reclaim kingdom. The Greek tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes, such as Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE), detail the conflicts and circumstances of nobility as they wrestle with the gods, prophecy, and fate. Beowulf (c. 700 CE) stars a prince of southern Sweden as he rescues the Danes from the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother. Reaching even up to Shakespeare (c. 1600 CE), tragedies, if not other forms, invoke the lives and great heroism or failures of the noble class.

But around the time we stop seeing kings lead the charge into battle, we start seeing the common person celebrated in literature against characters of the higher classes: Moll Flanders (1722, Defoe), Oliver Twist (1839, Dickens), The Scarlet Letter (1850, Hawthorne), Jean Valjean in Les Misérables (1862, Hugo), even Nick in The Great Gatsby (1925, Fitzgerald)—and many more. The Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment gave more value to the individual and common citizen (at first essentially defined as the white male) and mobility of economic station and status.

In the present day, depending on who you ask, the noble character might be considered the progressive academic, the Midwest farmer, the common laborer, the soldier, or the first responder. But more and more consistently the term noble is no longer seen as bearing on the monied gentry and politicians. And more recently, even the once-honored pulpit has become a bastion of lamb-chop eating. These once-noble characters have exhausted the populace’s tolerance for power hoarding. They have fought for themselves rather than the people and been found wanting.

As the past three hundred years have gone by, concern for every person’s basic human rights (concern, not success) has become almost ubiquitous and global in a manner inconceivable before now, even as scientists and philosophers debate the source of human dignity. In many venues, the people are fighting for each.

But have you ever noticed how many stories still embody the concept of the protector king or a specially appointed hero charging into battle? Aragorn fights on behalf of all Middle Earth; Williams Wallace rises up to defend his people; and Avengers and X-Men alike, given an extra measure of responsibility to rescue us regular people, and reject temptation, dishonor, or undue vengeance, channel the demigods of old. We even create fictional presidents like President James Marshall (Harrison Ford) of Air Force One who will fight to free all the hostages on the hijacked plane.[4] We long for a leader like these who is willing to put him or herself in mortal danger on our behalf. We long not just for a protector king, but a protector king who is also good.

So the question remains: In a gladiator world with no shepherd king, where we are all clamoring for the upper hand to keep our footing and gain ground, who will stand and fight for the little guy, the one with no chance of winning on his or her own, the one of whom those in power take advantage, the one in whom few see beauty?

Is it truly up to each common individual to fight Goliath alone? Or does the artist have a role in bringing justice?

Prophet Storyteller

When King David abandoned his rightful role at the front of his army, we assume his focus turned to Bathsheba (2 Sam 11:2–3). But while he was certainly looking at Bathsheba, his focus was not on the woman but on himself. He did what we all do; he saw not what she needed but his own desire for pleasure. Most of us know what happened: he required her to lay with him and she got pregnant. To cover up his guilt, he had her husband killed at the front lines.

The consequences of this evil stayed with David and his family for generations. The issue here is not whether one man fell into sin; all of us are guilty of one thing or another. The issue at stake was whether David could somehow resume ruling as a good shepherd king. Would he be restored or would his fall forever compromise his ability to rule with justice?

Enter the prophet Nathan, emissary for the One who is beauty. Nathan could have immediately condemned David for his actions. But David was lost in a self-serving protectionism, blind to the suffering of others—as many in our country and churches are today. Condemnation would most likely be met with defensiveness. Instead, Nathan told a story about a rich man and a poor man, the former with many flocks, the latter with one little ewe lamb. When a traveler visited the rich man, the rich man took the poor man’s lamb rather than his own to feed the guest (2 Sam 12:1–4).

It was a short story and a simple one, but the right story at the right time. David, showing the heart of justice that God loved in him, rose up with anger against the character of the rich man and proclaimed a sentence of death and restitution fourfold. He could see the problem when someone else was eating the lamb chops. Without a blink of an eyelash, Nathan told David that he, the king, was indeed the rich man of the story (v. 5). And David crumpled in guilt and repentance.

Nathan, emissary of beauty, helped the blind to see. This is what the prophet storyteller does. We push spectators out of the stands and put shepherd’s crooks into the hands of gladiators.

Artist Advocate and Visionary of Beauty

When the king—and the church, the royal priesthood—ignores and abuses the oppressed, the prophet must tell the story. You, my fellow storytellers, reporters, preachers, and artists, are called to be prophets in God’s good world.

And like Bezalel, who crafted the elements and dwelling space of worship, we artists should craft something of beauty. Beauty embodies something of harmony—even the right balance of discord and darkness is harmony—but also wholeness and revelation of who God is and what he loves. And how can we create the “harmonious,” the “whole,” and a longing for this wholeness without pointing out where beauty has been defaced? Without taking a good look at our larger and smaller cultures and seeing the trembling sheep about to be made into lamb chops?

Storytellers don’t have all the answers, but we do have a sword to push back and shape the power brokers and give a voice to those sheep. We have sway to remind each other to be a shepherd king rather than a gladiator.

What stories are you seeking to tell? Will they help us see the One who is? Do they immediately condemn us, or do they draw us into the beauty of justice so that we point the finger at ourselves?

You are a visionary of the beauty that will be, an emissary of the beauty that is, and an advocate of the beauty that was and has been effaced. Do you know the power you wield?

I pray you step out of the stands and lead the troops into battle.

[1] Genesis 4:13–14.

[2] If Wikipedia is to be trusted in this case (since I have no ready access to the source), King Albert once echoed the theme of this essay in a meditation “on what he viewed as the harm that would result if Christian ideals were abandoned in Belgium,” saying, "Every time society has distanced itself from the gospel, which preached humility, fraternity, and peace, the people have been unhappy, because the pagan civilisation of ancient Rome, which they wanted to replace it with, is based only on pride and the abuse of force.” (Commemorative speech for the war dead of the Battle of the Yser, given by Dom Marie-Albert, Abbot of Orval Abbey, Belgium, in 1936). “Albert I of Belgium,” in Wikipedia, July 17, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Albert_I_of_Belgium&oldid=906647074.

[3] As there are many small countries and conflicts globally, it’s quite possible I’ve missed some modern instances during my brief search. It goes without saying, also, that many leaders have served valiantly in the military prior to their role as sovereign, president, or prime minister.  Nonetheless, the dearth of examples in the modern age and the developed world’s consistent moving away from kings leading troops into mortal danger still prove the point.

[4] Trivia note on IMDb: “Since the release of this film, it has been a source of humor for entertainment magazines, websites, commentators, et cetera, to conduct public polls during real Presidential elections to vote on which fictional movie President Americans would like to see in office. Harrison Ford as President James Marshall has ‘won’ every election.”

[4] Maximus line from The Gladiator

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[i]Genesis 4:13–14.

[ii]If Wikipedia is to be trusted in this case (since I have no ready access to the source), King Albert once echoed the theme of this essay in a meditation “on what he viewed as the harm that would result if Christian ideals were abandoned in Belgium,” saying, "Every time society has distanced itself from the gospel, which preached humility, fraternity, and peace, the people have been unhappy, because the pagan civilisation of ancient Rome, which they wanted to replace it with, is based only on pride and the abuse of force.” (Commemorative speech for the war dead of the Battle of the Yser, given by Dom Marie-Albert, Abbot of Orval Abbey, Belgium, in 1936). “Albert I of Belgium,” in Wikipedia, July 17, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Albert_I_of_Belgium&oldid=906647074.

[iii]As there are many small countries and conflicts globally, it’s quite possible I’ve missed some modern instances during my brief search. It goes without saying, also, that many leaders have served valiantly in the military prior to their role as sovereign, president, or prime minister.  Nonetheless, the dearth of examples in the modern age and the developed world’s consistent moving away from kings leading troops into mortal danger still prove the point.

[iv]Trivia note on IMDb: “Since the release of this film, it has been a source of humor for entertainment magazines, websites, commentators, et cetera, to conduct public polls during real Presidential elections to vote on which fictional movie President Americans would like to see in office. Harrison Ford as President James Marshall has ‘won’ every election.”