The public duties and responsibilities of the new King and Prime Minister are enormous.
And yet each of them is a human being. Watching the King having to perform so many public functions in so many places at such a pace in the immediate aftermath of his mother’s death, you had to wonder what space there was for private grief and what toll the extraordinary number of events he was expected to attend would take.
Likewise, regardless of our politics, it was impossible not to feel for Liz Truss having such a baptism of fire as Prime Minister just 48 hours into her term of office.
Whatever our feelings about the monarchy or particular political leaders, we do well to remember that they are all, like us, human beings. As Psalm 103 says, ‘we are dust’ and our life is ‘like grass… like the flowers of the field…’ Or, as the great hymn puts it, we – and they – are ‘frail children of dust, and feeble as frail…’ Elsewhere in en, the MP Tim Farron rightly reminds us of the importance of how we speak of those with whom we disagree politically and in other ways.
And the challenges we face as a nation are also first and foremost about people. It is not, and never should be, simply ‘the economy, stupid’ – to use the famous phrase coined by one of Bill Clinton’s advisers about what was most important.
The economy is important – but ultimately the challenges we face are about individual people, families, communities. These challenges are about people who face enormous gas and electricity bills, inflation and uncertainty about the future. There are thousands of people, even in the UK, using food banks. There are millions of people in Pakistan facing the most terrible floods.
And for us, as believers, whatever our reflections in this time of great national change, above all else it is – and has to be – about individuals who need salvation. People who need Jesus. The most pressing questions we face? ‘How are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?’ (Romans 10:14)
