Preached at St John’s, Devizes
1 Corinthians 12. 1–12; Matthew 5. 13–20
“I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified … so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.”
You may know the famous poem by Shelley, named Ozymandias. In it, he gazes at an enormous, ancient, shattered statue lying in the pieces in the middle of a desert. The face has broken off from the main body of the statue, and now lies half buried in the sand, but its “sneer of cold command”, artfully and accurately sculpted, still bears witness to a long-forgotten ruler who was used to having his every instruction obeyed.
The inscription below reads:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
This was a man who could clearly strike terror into the hearts of his subjects and his enemies alike. The wise thing was obviously to not put yourself at the wrong end of Ozymandias’ power. And yet the poem concludes:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
It is said that Shelley penned those lines after reading descriptions of the statue of the Pharaoh Ramses II, who lived 3,200 years ago and whose bust now stands in the British Museum. He ruled Egypt shortly before the great crisis of climate and economics that we now know as the Late Bronze Age Collapse, which upended the Mediterranean world of its day. For all his might and power, Ramses’ legacy was swept away by forces of history beyond human control.
As St Paul reminds us this morning, the rulers of every age before us have passed away. Those of our age are doomed to pass away also, through forces that they are unlikely to be able to detect in advance, let alone control. The last remnants of the world that I came of age in, that of the long boom between the end of the Cold War and the financial crisis of 2008, have just been swept away by a virus invisible to the naked eye. Perhaps some future poet will see the wreckage of an ancient statue of President Putin, or President Macron, or Boris the Unsteady, and write a meditation of the quality of Shelley’s on the transience of power and the shortness of human life. This poem speaks to us not so much because it teaches us something new, but because it reminds us of things that we instinctively know, but which the world, and especially the media locked into its over-excited twenty-four hour news cycle, risks making us forget.