This is the last week of the Christian year. The bible readings are to do with ultimate justice.

Reading 1, Daniel 2:31-45 31

 ‘You have had a vision, Your Majesty; this is what you saw: a statue, a great statue of extreme brightness, stood before you, terrible to see. 32 The head of this statue was of fine gold, its chest and arms were of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, 33 its legs of iron, its feet part iron, part clay. 34 While you were gazing, a stone broke away, untouched by any hand, and struck the statue, struck its feet of iron and clay and shattered them. 35 Then, iron and clay, bronze, silver and gold, all broke into pieces as fine as chaff on the threshing-floor in summer. The wind blew them away, leaving not a trace behind. And the stone that had struck the statue grew into a great mountain, filling the whole world. 36 This was the dream; we shall now explain to the king what it means.

37 ‘You, Your Majesty, king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given sovereignty, power, strength and honour- 38 human beings, wild animals, birds of the air, wherever they live, he has entrusted to your rule, making you king of them all — you are the golden head. 39 And, after you, another kingdom will rise, not as great as yours, and then a third, of bronze, which will rule the whole world. 40 There will be a fourth kingdom, hard as iron, as iron that pulverises and crushes all. Like iron that breaks everything to pieces, it will crush and break all the earlier kingdoms. 41 The feet you saw, part earthenware, part iron, are a kingdom which will be split in two, but which will retain something of the strength of iron, just as you saw the iron and the clay of the earthenware mixed together. 42 The feet were part iron, part potter’s clay: the kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle. 43 And just as you saw the iron and the clay of the earthenware mixed together, so the two will be mixed together in human seed; but they will not hold together any more than iron will blend with clay.

44 In the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed, and this kingdom will not pass into the hands of another race: it will shatter and absorb all the previous kingdoms and itself last for ever- 45 just as you saw a stone, untouched by hand, break away from the mountain and reduce iron, bronze, earthenware, silver and gold to powder. The Great God has shown the king what is to take place. The dream is true, the interpretation exact.’

Until fairly recently, the official Christian view was that “Daniel” was a genuine prophecy from the 6th century BCE, and the four kingdom were: Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome, with the new kingdom being the Christian Church. Once it became clear to all but fundamentalists, that the book was written in the time of the Greek rule of the Jews, the four kingdoms were correctly interpreted as, Babylon, Media, Persia and Greece, the latter characterised as ‘partly strong and partly brittle’ -a shrewd estimate.

"The Satan showed him the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time"

The new kingdom is not named but is clearly established by God. The passage masquerades as prophecy, to make the point that the great King is ignorant of the future, which is controlled by God, and interpreted by God’s prophet, Daniel. “It is God who holds the nations in the hollow of his hand”, as the hymn says. But hang on! The history laid out here may be within the will of God, but it is driven by the human strength and weaknesses of great, bloodthirsty empires, until the time of the” stone untouched by hand”, when God will reveal his hand. In the story of the temptations, Jesus pointedly refuses the Satan’s offer to make him the ruler of another world empire. Consequently, when God’s hand is revealed, it is nailed to a cross. In the lectionary this week, the readings from Daniel are ultimately reflections on the kingship of Christ and what it means to belong to his kingdom. The powerless of the earth, who trust in God, can see the might and cruelty of empire as a pathetic pageant. “The dream is true, the interpretation exact.”