Dorothy L. Sayers’s life-of-Christ radio drama series, The Man Born to be King, was first broadcast in Britain on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 1941-42, in the midst of World War II. From her earliest phase of writing she chose the Kingdom of God as her theme. This theme has been noted in passing by many scholars — who give more notice to her Christology and use of vernacular English — but by revisiting Sayers’s eschatology within the plays, readers can more fully appreciate her craft of playwriting.
In July 1940, she wrote to Dr. James Welch — who commissioned the plays as Director of Religious Broadcasting at the BBC — that she had chosen the theme of the kingship of Christ because “even children can’t help knowing that there is a great dispute going on about how the world should be governed . . . I shall make this business of the Kingdom the framework of the series, and choose incidents that will bring out this aspect of the story.”1 We will consider how Sayers’s plot structure shows both what the Kingdom of God is not and what it is. Next, we will consider her characterization of Jesus under various titles used for him: King, Messiah, Christ, Son of Man, and Son of God. These ideas of kingdom and kingship will then be discussed as features of Sayers’s eschatology of the Kingdom of God within The Man Born to be King.
A few Words About Sayers’s Kingdom Plot Structure
Sayers herself makes a distinction between plot and theme: “Theme-structure by itself will not . . . make a play. There must also be a plot structure.”2 Sayers recognized that there was a large amount of thematic kingdom material:
Certain high-spots, of course, we have ready-made for our theme: the Nativity, the entry into Jerusalem, and so on; and when we come to the Trial and Crucifixion we are, dramatically speaking, on velvet; but there are all sorts of little twiddly bits — such as the tribute money, and the disciples arguing about who should be the greatest, and the parables of the Kingdom, which, while very relevant to the subject, are just fragments of teaching and dialogue, unless they can be worked into some sort of sub-plot.3
I propose that the overarching plot she creates is a clash of kingdoms. Rome and Israel, representing different ideals, are locked in conflict when a third contender, the Kingdom of God, is introduced by Jesus. This allows Sayers to reflect “not only philosophical concerns about power common to both the first and the twentieth centuries, but as, by using the British Empire as a modern parallel to Rome, she ma[kes] the past real.”4 Though she says little else about how the plot develops through the play-cycle, we can gather evidence of its development across all the plays through subplots, character development, and dialogue. Characters discuss and debate the kingdom and ask questions, something Sayers often uses to acknowledge disputed theological ground. As characters develop, Sayers uses their changing perspectives to underscore competing visions of Rome and Israel.
A definitive example to which we will return is found in Play 11 (The King of Sorrows) Scene II, Sequence 2 where Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathaea, and Caiaphas discuss the recent trial and crucifixion of Jesus. Caiaphas laments that more would-be messiahs will rise up in continuous waves of revolt and eventual disaster because the Jews have not learned to adapt themselves to outside rule like Rome. Joseph responds,
Strange. You echo the prophecies of Jesus. But he, I think, would have enlarged the boundaries of Israel to take in all the world. “They shall come,” he said, “from east and west and sit in the Kingdom of God.” Samaritans, Romans, Greeks — he received them all. . . . Is it possible that he saw what you see, and would have chosen to fling the door wide open? Not to exclude but to include? Not to lose Israel in Rome, but to bring Rome into the fold of Israel? (393–4)
Sayers describes this speech as a “flash of imagination” wherein Joseph sees the “‘spiritual’ truth about the kingdom, with all its enormous social and political implications” (378). It strongly echoes what she writes in Begin Here: “There are only two ways to move the world: the way of the Gospel and the way of the Law, and if we will not have the one we must submit to the other.”5 This is no ethereal inner kingdom. A decision must be made by each character. Sayers is seeking to plant her Kingdom of God in the realities of first-century Judaea, what she calls “determined historical realism” (29). This Kingdom of God is in direct conflict with the Empire of Rome, which envelopes all subordinates through political and military might, and also the Kingdom of Israel, to whose golden age of exclusionary independence some characters long to return. What Sayers describes through Joseph of Arimathaea is, in fact, catholicity — a Kingdom of all times, places, and peoples.
The Kingdom of God Is Not . . . the Mighty Empire of Rome
In the Roman Empire with its subordinate kingdoms, Sayers sees reflections of the best and worst of the British Empire, or even the expanding German Reich of her own day.6 The benevolent dictatorship of Rome creates peace at a great cost for many characters in The Man Born to be King. Herod has won loyalty and obedience only by force, and the Jewish religious leaders maintain the last threads of their national identity only through compromise and collaboration. Sayers places Rome and Israel in an uneasy tension with each other, which, in her series, comes to a breaking point at the trial of Jesus. Though this tension is not explicit in the Gospels themselves, many recent adaptations of the Gospels have followed Sayers’s lead in highlighting this for dramatic effect, including the 2013 History Channel’s The Bible series and the current popular series The Chosen.
By setting the very first scene in the court of Herod, Sayers has brought this Roman vision of government “right into conflict with the Kingdom of God at the beginning of the story.”7 Sayers knows her audience has little knowledge of Roman history or politics, and she uses characters and dialogue to provide some background in the first scene of the play. King Herod summarizes Roman rule in Judaea to the three kings who come seeking the new-born king foretold in the stars:
You do not know the history of this kingdom. For many years it was torn by wars and rebellions, till Augustus Caesar took it under the protection of Rome. Under his imperial mandate, I assumed the crown; for thirty years I have kept the peace, by force and policy. It has not been easy. There have been continual revolts against the Roman order — all made, do you understand, in the name of religion (66–67).
He goes on to describe the Jewish people as “Looking always for the warrior Messiah that shall lead them to victory, and independence. But . . . [t]he only safety for this country lies in playing her part within the great new order of Imperial Rome” (67). Sayers’s audience is already being prepared here for dramatic tension with a Jewish independence party whose cause is religious as well as political. The kind of kingdom found with Rome, then, is one of strength and peace, but peace at a price — what Sayers describes as “alien but tolerant despotism.”8 Sayers presents the genuine peril of both Herod and Judaea, which supports Herod’s reasoning for the slaughter at Bethlehem. He tells the kings, “Men call me tyrant and autocrat, but I am not my own master. The grip of Rome is on Judaea” (69). Thus, Herod’s request to know more about the child “born King of the Jews” from the visiting kings is much more than protecting his own interests. Sayers shows that, at least from Herod’s perspective, it is shrewd “statecraft” to protect Judaea from the Roman reprisals that would accompany the public rallying around a Jewish king.9
A final look at Herod’s position within the Roman system in Kings in Judaea, Scene III is when the stone Roman eagle is broken off the gate of the Jerusalem temple, a non-biblical scene Sayers adapts from the first-century historian Josephus.10 The “odious symbol of pagan power” is taken down by a mob, but they are confronted by Herod from his balcony: “I observe that somebody has been carried away by his enthusiasm for the Imperial emblem . . . Caesar shall be informed of your devotion” (80-81). This sarcastic threat has genuine force behind it. Sayers heightens the drama of the scene by having a note delivered to Herod that the three kings have returned home by another way. Compared to the mob outside Herod’s window, the killing of a few children in Bethlehem seems like a simple precaution. “It was a perfectly reasonable political step,” Sayers writes in a letter, “if you once allow that the good of the State is more important than the rights of the individual. The thing one wants to put up against the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven is the idea of the political kingdom, not the caprice of one wicked man.”11 This empire is both strong and terrible, with peace enforced through violence.
The Jewish religious leaders of The Man Born to be King also hold their power at the pleasure of Rome. They are characterized as pragmatic, working within the system of Roman rule for a variety of motives: some for what they see as the good of the Jewish people and some for personal gain. Sayers writes that “Caiaphas was the ecclesiastical politician, appointed, like one of Hitler’s bishops, by a heathen government, expressly that he might collaborate with the New Order and see that the Church toed the line drawn by the State” (29). Judas reminds him of this in Play 6 (The Feast of Tabernacles) Scene II, Sequence 3: “There was a time when the Lord High Priest could give orders in Israel. Today, you must cringe to Caesar” (231). But Sayers does not portray Caiaphas as seeing himself as cringing. He sees that the only way for the Jews to survive is to follow a “policy of reconstruction and collaboration with Rome” (232). It is essential to Sayers’s characterizations that the political and religious leaders are seeing the situation of Jesus from their own unique perspective and doing their best with the information that they have available. Sayers insists that they did not know they were “engaged in crucifying God” and to think they did so in full knowledge “gives us a reassuring sensation that ‘it can’t happen here’” (27). For the religious leaders of Sayers’s plays, killing Jesus is simply a means to an end.
This is seen clearly from the first meeting of the religious leaders of various persuasions in Play 4 (The Heirs to the Kingdom), Scene II, Sequence 2. The Herodian leader comments that “When by quarrelling among ourselves we broke up the power of the Herodian house, we sold ourselves into bondage to Rome” (169). 3rd Elder then unites the group by saying, “The question is, how to get rid of him [Jesus], without causing a popular uproar that would provoke interference by Rome” (169). This theme is found sprinkled throughout the plays as elders, pharisees, and high priests alike comment on the need to “keep on the right side of the Government” and to “discourage Messianic claimants and disturbers of the peace,” culminating in Caiaphas’s prophecy from John 11:50: “It is sometimes expedient that one man should die for the people” (227). This is, he says, “not persecution: it is policy” (266). Sayers’s clash of kingdoms plot gains dramatic tension as they decide to play Jesus and Rome against each other, in hopes that they themselves may escape the long arm of Roman force.
The clash of kingdoms plot comes to its climax at Jesus’ trial before Pilate, found in Play 10, The Princes of this World, where Caiaphas plays this masterstroke. Sayers writes, “The thing to be borne in mind is the aspect of all these scenes as a cut-and-thrust duel between Pilate and Caiaphas” (344). While the Gospel accounts attribute the shouting outside Pilate’s Praetorium to “the Jews” or “the chief priests,” Sayers puts many of the lines directly into the mouth of Caiaphas, who threatens Pilate with Rome itself if he drops the charges against Jesus. Through masterful ordering of the dialogue, Pilate forces Caiaphas into a position where Caiaphas has to say that the Jews “have no King but Caesar,” and Caiaphas then turns the tables back on Pilate: “This fellow calls himself a king. We deny it. Do you admit it?” (285–369). And Pilate’s assistant Flavius urges, “Pilate — it’s madness. You can’t go on. They’ll denounce you to Rome” (370). The threat of Roman intervention can be used by both sides to attempt to gain the upper ground. Even within the presentation of the existing power structure, Sayers incorporates effective dramatic tension; all sides hold their power precariously.
The Kingdom of God Is Not… the Kingdom of Israel
On the other side of the clash of kingdoms plotline is a group of characters that want an independent Israel. This group does not have might on their side, but they do have a sense of ethnic and religious justice. At the time of the broadcast of He That Should Come in 1938, Sayers already had a developed sense of the importance of this nationalistic group:
. . . we know now that the Messiah came to establish a spiritual kingdom; but that was not what the devout Jews of His time expected. They expected a military hero who would put himself at the head of a nationalistic movement and restore a political kingdom to Israel; and the Disciples themselves, with every opportunity to know better, persisted in this mistaken idea right up to the time of the Ascension. It is part of the pity and terror of all great tragedy, that the actors in it do not realise what they are doing.12
This is the group Herod had mentioned as “always looking for the warrior Messiah” (67) and Herod’s own servants worry behind his back that after Herod’s death, “Some firebrand might get up and start a movement for Jewish independence” (52). But Sayers does not portray this as an organized army who could realistically hope to overthrow Rome. They could, however, upset the delicate balance sufficiently for Judaea to be “deprived of her last vestiges of independence” (57). This nationalist group consists of small bands of Zealots as well as the average people in the crowd who might be persuaded to follow a popular leader. Sayers also mentions “the Sack of Jerusalem” (276) of 70 AD — the coming historical result of just such a popular revolt.
Some characters are content to criticize the current politics, such as the Father in Play 2 (The King’s Herald), Scene I: “Ah, he was a great lad, was old King Herod. In his time, Judaea was still a kingdom” (95). Others look for more specific change, such as Baruch in the same scene, who introduces himself as belonging “to the party that wants a free Israel” (101). Unlike the religious leaders who have found a way to benefit from the political situation, these others have nothing to lose. Sayers uses her extra-biblical sources to give characters background — especially to the Zealots — and their ambitions are shown by Sayers to be sometimes spiritual, sometimes national, but always distinct from the true Kingdom of God.13 Three characters are important to this part of the plot: the Crowd, Baruch, and Judas.
The reaction of the crowds is a small but important element of understanding this desire for an independent Kingdom of Israel. At the feeding of the five thousand in Play 5, (The Bread of Heaven), Scene III after everyone has eaten the crowd says:
A prophet! The Kingdom is come among us! . . . A Jewish King for the Jewish people! You shall be our king! We want no other leader . . . Carry him to Jerusalem! A Messiah! A Messiah! (197–198)
The Crowd shouts for a “Jewish king for the Jewish people,” little knowing the cost of such a kingship in revolt and reprisals. In Play 5, Scene V, as the Crowd dissipates after Jesus’ strong words about eating his flesh, Judas seems relieved, but wonders “whether he is preaching God’s kingdom, or merely preaching himself” (words borrowed from Baruch in Play 4, discussed below) and Jesus tells Judas to comfort himself in knowing that “they are not likely to crown me king to-day” (203–204). This demonstrates a difference in the mind of both Jesus and Judas between the political king the crowd expects and the Kingdom of God. As Sayers makes clear through side comments in several plays, many such “kings” have tried and failed before this, and an independent Jewish nation cannot ultimately succeed in the face of the overpowering might of Rome. That will not stop the Zealots from trying, however.
Since there are no Zealots with “speaking roles” in the four Gospels, Sayers creates the character Baruch. Baruch is very important to the functioning of several subplots, and without his existence, the overall clash of kingdoms plot would not be possible. Baruch functions as Judas’s dark side; his presence always leads Judas away from trust in Jesus’ Kingdom of God. Baruch fights for a political kingdom and Judas clings to his own interpretation of the Kingdom of God, but both men would rather die than submit to someone else’s kingdom vision.
We meet Baruch the Zealot briefly in Play 2 (The King’s Herald), Scene I, when he makes a first contact with Judas. When next we see him in Play 4 (The Heirs to the Kingdom), Scene II, Sequence 2, he is speaking in a meeting of religious leaders and though his presence is not logical historically, it is essential to the plot. He says, “Zeal for our religion and for our chosen race should know no limits, and I am horrified that anybody should wish to suppress it on the grounds that we have to appease the heathen empire of Rome” (168). Baruch is a man who, far from resigning to the Roman yoke, is eager to break it and found a new Jewish kingdom by any means that come to hand. Sayers says that Baruch’s main goal in using Judas to get to Jesus later is simply making “a demonstration against Rome” (155), not necessarily to form a viable revolt.
Sayers gives the Zealots a sinister edge by saying in her character notes, “Baruch sees Jesus as the Nazi party may have seen Hitler — the Heaven-sent spell-binder, rather mad but a valuable political tool in the right hands” (182). The Zealots are clashing with Rome, but there is a possibility of a clash with Jesus as well. Baruch asks, “How does one handle Jesus of Nazareth?” (187) and suggests that every man has a weakness by which he can be used as a tool. “All we need,” he says, “is a figurehead, a leader, a spell-binder to fire the imagination of the masses and make them fall in to march behind the party” (188).
Judas answers Baruch’s words with a vision of his own for the kingdom. It is still earthly in nature, but eschews initiating the violence Baruch sees as necessary. The Kingdom of Israel cannot be restored through violent protest, he says, because Roman oppression is God’s judgement on Israel itself.
This is the meaning of the Gospel — that all must be endured, and the cup of humiliation drunk to the very dregs. Only when we are stripped naked — when we have reached the nethermost pit of desolation — then, only then, can the white flower of happiness, the blessedness of God’s salvation, blossom out of the dust of our corruption (189).
This introduction to Judas’s way of understanding legitimately raises questions in readers’ minds whether this vision is his own or also Jesus’. Frances Clemson suggests that though it is “not a false picture,” it is ultimately hollow, because of the speech’s “completeness” in embracing the way of purgation. The suffering cannot be “overmastered” and controlled.14 I suggest that Judas sees a false picture of the Kingdom of God because he is portraying suffering as its purpose. It is only later that the reader sees how Judas’s vision of acceptance of — and perhaps delight in — suffering (masochism) inverts to a macabre wish to see Jesus himself suffer (sadism) (see 311). Sayers writes in the introductory notes, “Judas, without knowing it, also sees Jesus as a kind of tool — a person intended to carry out his, Judas’s, idea of the way of salvation; and if Jesus shows any signs of shrinking from that way, he, Judas will force him into it” (183).
Sayers builds dramatic tension as Judas, blinded by his own thinking, misunderstands Jesus’ intentions. Through the colored lens of Baruch’s political scheme, Judas sees Jesus as making a popular appeal for an earthly kingdom in the Triumphal Entry, and betraying the vision of a kingdom purified by suffering. Thus, Sayers suggests that Judas falls for the “the very temptation that Christ resists in the wilderness — that of using the kingdom of the world to bring in the Kingdom of God.”15 In Play 8 (Royal Progress), Scene III, Sequence 3 Caiaphas adeptly uses Judas’s self-righteous pride to suggest that, by aiding the religious leaders in Jesus’ arrest, Judas will actually be helping Jesus. “If he has lost the will to follow his true destiny,” says Judas, picking up this theme, “we must make his words true in spite of himself” (299). Now Judas himself has become a tool.
It only takes a short conversation with Baruch while Jesus is on trial to see through this reasoning. Baruch quickly uncovers that it is Judas who had betrayed Jesus and surprises him with Jesus’ innocence in any political plot. Remembering Judas’s vision of a kingdom of suffering, he jeers at him,
. . . Now’s your moment to practice what you preach. Will you stand by your Messiah? Will you testify from the cross? Will you be eloquent from that pulpit about the value and blessedness of pain? Skewered up there in the broiling sun, like an owl on a barn door, with your joints cracking and your head on fire and your tongue like leather? Will you say from there what you said to me . . . ? (352)
It would seem that Judas, who was so intellectually gifted, missed the true Kingdom — not because he didn’t suffer, but because he has missed who Jesus is. We see this mistrust beginning to form in Play 5 (The Bread of Heaven), Scene III, Sequence 3, when Judas suggests that Jesus stayed behind with the crowd to be made king without the disciples. John replies, “I don’t think Jesus wants to be made a king. Not that sort of king, anyway” (199). But if it is not a new government, what kind of kingdom does Jesus bring?
The Kingdom of God
The contrasting kingdoms of Rome and Israel clash both with each other and with a third contender, the Kingdom of God, centered on the character of Jesus. Is he the kind of Messiah who brings in the promised kingdom “with good wages for everybody, and no more of these cruel Roman taxes”? No, Sayers tells us through the character Driver at the start of Play 2, “That’s politics, that is. Take my advice and keep off it” (94-95). Baruch hopes throughout the plays to use Jesus as a political tool, but instead finds that Jesus “interprets [the kingdom] in some sort of far-fetched mystical sense of which nobody can make head nor tail” (168). The characteristically insightful Baruch sees the truth (albeit cynically): “What he is preaching is simply himself, and a fanatical devotion to his own person. If he sets up anything it will be an idolatrous cult of Jesus. You want to see temples dedicated to Jesus-Bar-Joseph? Is a Divine Carpenter any improvement on a Divine Caesar?” (168). This is an effective use of Baruch by Sayers to undercut listener expectations. If Jesus were merely human, as Baruch believes, such temples would be idolatrous. The mystery of the Hypostatic Union opens the way for those who know Jesus to know the Father, for whoever has seen Jesus has seen God himself. Sayers makes clear that although Jesus is not setting up a new government, his teachings about the kingdom touch every area of life. It may be “mystical,” as Baruch says, but it is not solely an internal, spiritual kingdom. In The Man Born to be King, we see several key characteristics come repeatedly to the forefront through characters and dialogue: the Kingdom of God’s immediacy, rule, people, and King.
The Kingdom’s Immediacy
When will the Kingdom come? In The Man Born to be King, the Kingdom of God is coming now. This theme appears early in Play 2 (The King’s Herald), Scene I, where John Baptist preaches:
Men and Women of Israel! Once more, once more I call you to repent. And quickly, for God’s Kingdom is coming as the Prophets foretold. Not in some distant future. Not a year or a week hence. Not to-morrow. But now . . . . The Kingdom is at hand and you are not prepared. Now, now repent of your sins and the sins of the whole nation. Now let God wash away your guilt in the clear waters of Jordan. Wash and be clean, that you may be fit for the task that is laid upon you — for the great and terrible day of the Lord is at hand (98).
Later, Jesus himself says that since John Baptist came, “the Kingdom of Heaven is here. It stands among you to seize and possess, and resolute men may take it by assault” (175). Even so, Sayers acknowledges that the kingdom is not fully realized: “‘But when’s it coming?’ Andrew asks. ‘If we have to tramp around Galilee for years’ . . . ” (143). The timing of the kingdom is difficult to understand, Sayers implies, both for the disciples and her modern audience. In a letter to a fan Sayers expands on the conflicting ideas of timing:
They [The Jews] had not understood that He that should come was actually God Himself, or that the Kingdom He came to tell them about was a heavenly and not an earthly kingdom . . . But Christians believe that He was literally God Himself, in the full sense of the words — the same God who made the universe and keeps it and everything going — and that, consequently, His life is both the pattern of the world’s history and the power in which that pattern can be lived. The Church is His “mystical body,” trying, by the power of His life in her, to live that pattern in the world.16
A heavenly kingdom does not mean, however, that it only exists outside of time. It becomes the way and pattern of life itself within time as well. In the temple scene in Play 8, (Royal Progress) Scene III, Sayers expands upon paying to Caesar or God the things that are theirs. She adds, “You are men — and the image stamped upon you is the image of God. So what do you owe him?” (292). While Christians have sometimes interpreted this to mean that there are two distinct spheres — heavenly and earthly — Sayers emphasizes the overlapping nature of God’s Kingdom. It begins with a change of heart, not a political revolution, but a change of heart that has revolutionary implications. As Mitzi Brunsdale writes, Sayers’s Kingdom of Heaven “may only be attained by the exercise of free choice, that is, through childlike faith and willing sacrifice.”17
The Kingdom’s Rule
Sayers links Jesus’ Temptation strongly with her clash of kingdoms plot, as she wrote to her producer after completing Kings in Judaea: “The next one [Play 2] ought, logically, to cope with the Temptation in the Wilderness (since that was the moment when the idea of the wrong sort of kingdom was definitely faced and rejected).”18 Instead of simply writing out a dialogue between Jesus and Satan, Sayers has the Temptation described retrospectively by Jesus to Peter, Andrew, and John in Play 2 (The King’s Herald), Scene II, Sequence 3 as a response to these new disciples discussing the political situation. A re-telling offers the character of Jesus the chance to interpret his experience for them. Amid the talk of Israel’s “rights” and a nationalistic messiah, Jesus rebukes them: “Children, children — you don’t know with whose voice you are speaking. Appetite, superstition and force: none of these can bring in the Kingdom. It is God’s Kingdom we are looking for” (113). He then tells them of the voice of the deceiver who offered him these same easy ways to raise up a kingdom. Sayers stays close to Temple’s commentary here, and shows how each temptation represents a partial truth; but instead, Jesus “stripped bare the essential function of the Messiah — to inaugurate the Kingdom of God. And He goes forth from His Temptation to live the life of perfect love, to die the death of perfect love, as the way of doing this.”19
Sayers puts in Jesus’ mouth a definition of true holiness as the way to bring the kingdom: “to love, and be ruled by love; for love can do no wrong” (115). Andrew, who still has political ideas in mind, then asks how that practically relates to the kingdom. Jesus replies with emphasis: “It is the Kingdom. Wherever there is love, there is the Kingdom of God” (116).20 This rule of love is woven by Sayers throughout the plays, returning again and again. Janice Brown notes it as underpinning all of Jesus’ kingdom teaching in the play-cycle and writes that it “is especially developed toward the end of the sequence as individuals — through their choice of Sin or Virtue — gradually reveal themselves as either ‘friends’ or ‘foes’ of the Kingdom.”21 Jesus’ disciples see true holiness through him, which, as Brown says, “shows up Sin for what it is.”22 In this Kingdom of God, Jesus personifies the rule of love and calls out love from others.
The Kingdom’s People
It is this kind of love which draws many of Jesus’ disciples to him. Judas comes as a kind of career advancement from the service of John Baptist — having learned all that John could teach him (159) — but even Judas, Sayers implies, is caught in the trawling net of the Kingdom of Heaven (164). Mary Magdalen, however, is a prime example of those who come through love, and Sayers characterizes her as the traditional composite character of Mary Magdalen, Mary of Bethany, and the Sinful Woman who anointed Jesus’ feet in Luke 7.23 In Play 7 (The Light and the Life), Scene I, she expresses her former sinful way of life this way:
I loved the wrong things in the wrong way — yet it was love of a sort . . . until I found a better . . . But when you spoke to me, I felt the flame of the sun in my heart. I came alive for the first time. And I love life all the more since I have learnt its meaning. (247).
“That is what I am here for,” Jesus answers, “I came that men should lay hold of life and possess it to the full” (247). Rightly ordered love brings this type of full kingdom life.
This is clearly not the kind of kingdom that Jesus’ disciples expect in The Man Born to be King and Sayers uses the dramatic tension of this contrast to clarify her vision. Plays 8 and 9 both contain scenes of the disciples jockeying for positions in the coming kingdom. They are still seeking a political kingdom. At the Last Supper in Play 9 this kind of talk leads to Peter being proposed as Judge of the Supreme Court, John as High Priest, Judas as Lord Treasurer and other disciples complaining that all the appointments are going to men at that end of the table (318). It is in the midst of this discussion that Jesus says to John that he is troubled. “They understand so little,” he says, “and the time is getting so short” (318). And so, Jesus gets up from the table, being “stripped to the waist and girded with a towel like a slave, (318) and washes their feet. He explains to them that “you should behave to one another as I have behaved to you” (319-320). As another of Sayers’s secondary sources, R. A. Edwards, writes, “Jesus did a servant’s work . . . to show that God’s kingdom had reference to life as it really was, not as men had made it.”24 Within this context, he then commissions them to “love one another as I have loved you” (326). Herod had told the Kings to tell the baby Jesus that you “can’t rule men by love,” but here is Jesus giving them the rule of love. Sayers creates a dramatic foreboding, however, over whether the disciples will actually learn this lesson in time.
Within a day of that event, Jesus is put on trial, first before the Sanhedrim for blasphemy, then before Pilate, accused of claiming to be the King of the Jews.25 Like her treatment of Herod the Great, Sayers’s treatment of Pilate is sympathetic and multi-layered, presenting him as someone who “agonised over the death sentence he eventually and reluctantly passed” (344). In Sayers’s characterization, Pilate finds a respect for Jesus; and while finding his “philosophy” boring, he is impressed with his bearing and forthright gaze.26 He “pays him the greatest compliment he knows how to pay: ‘He should have been a Roman.’” (344). Pilate asks about the charges of being a king and Jesus answers, “My kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. If it were, I should have come with men and arms . . . but my kingdom does not rest upon force, or any human authority. It is not of this world at all” (361). Yet Sayers clearly implies that this kingdom does have earthly implications. Returning to the speech of Joseph of Arimathaea discussed at the beginning, the Kingdom of God is set to “fling the door wide open . . . Not to exclude but to include . . . Not to lose Israel in Rome, but to bring Rome into the fold of Israel” (393–394). To bring others in is a sharing — not a losing — of the kingdom’s identity.
After the Resurrection, this theme comes up again as the disciples return to their familiar obsession with positions within the kingdom. Matthew, in Play 12 (The King Comes to His Own), Scene II, Sequence 2, questions why Jesus had not appeared to John, “his best friend,” while he had appeared privately to Peter. He brings up the old dispute about why the church is to be built on Peter and not John. John answers, “I don’t think you can found a church on personal friends and special cases. It’s got to be less exclusive — more — what’s the Greek word? — more catholic” (436). From Sayers’s frequent use of the term, we can be sure “catholic” here is deliberately chosen both to teach its actual definition and to teach an important truth about the Church.27 It is not about inner circles or wielding power; it is for everyone and — linking it back to the foot-washing — all its leaders are to be servants.
The Kingdom’s King
Who then is the king of this kingdom? The question is not as easy to answer as it may first appear. Sayers uses a variety of titles — King, Son of Man, Son of God, Messiah, and Christ — often interchangeably, but also unevenly across the play-cycle. It is not always clear how she or individual characters define each term, and poetic language can add complexity to lines or scenes where Sayers expresses deeper theological concepts. Through considering the examples of the titles used at the visit of the three kings, at the Baptism, and at the Trials, we can see how the use of the title “king” seems to be a special case but how the others, while never defined, are shown by Sayers to be synonymous, based on how frequently she puts them in obvious parallel. It is in the last of these examples — the Trial before Pilate — that the kingdom and kingship of Jesus become the plot climax of the clash of kingdoms.
In their first conversation with Herod in Scene I of Play 1 (Kings in Judaea), the three kings tell him that the stars have predicted that this new king for whom they are seeking will be both priest and king — which reminds Herod of the Hasmoneans who formerly claimed both these linked titles. This new king will also rule in Rome, which seems to be a very dangerous prediction (67). Most strikingly, the kings, strongly evoking wording from Isaiah 9 and 59 and Hebrews 10, describe for Herod the kind of king this new baby will be:
Melchior: Prouder than Caesar, more humble than his slave; his kingdom shall stretch from the sun’s setting to the sun’s rising, higher than the heavens, deeper than the grave, and narrow as the human heart.
Caspar: He shall offer sacrifices in Jerusalem, and have his temples in Rome and in Byzantium, and he himself shall be both sacrifice and priest.
Herod: You speak mysteries. Tell me this: will he be a warrior king?
Balthazar: The greatest of warriors; yet he shall be called the Prince of Peace. He will be victor and victim in all his wars, and will make his triumph in defeat. And when wars are over he will rule his people in love.
Herod: You cannot rule men by love. When you find your king, tell him so (69).
The three kings, though lectured to by Herod, go on to Bethlehem where they ask questions that speak directly to the desire for a greater kingdom: “Shall Wisdom and Love live together at last . . . Shall Power and Love dwell together at last . . . Shall Sorrow and Love be reconciled at last, when the promised Kingdom comes?” (74–75).
These questions give the audience clues about how Sayers will develop the alternative vision of the Kingdom of God through the person of Jesus Christ. He and his kingdom are a kind of riddle, Sayers implies through the kings. His paradoxical human roles described to Herod are here enlarged to take in immortal qualities as well. The kings, though foreigners, evoke the ancient wisdom and human longing of the Old Testament prophets. Their questions link easily with images of the shoot of the stump of Jesse in Isaiah 11 who will have a Spirit of wisdom and understanding, counsel and power, and knowledge and fear of the Lord, and within whose realm the wolf will live with the lamb and even a child can play in safety near a cobra’s hole (Is. 11:1–3, 6, 8). This is a strange, mystical kind of kingdom brought by a very unusual child.
The three kings give Jesus three titles: King of the Jews, King of the World, and King of Heaven (74). These titles are given with the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and Sayers adds a symbolic moment where the baby Jesus reaches not for the gold and frankincense but for the myrrh, the gift of Balthazar. This theme naturally foreshadows Play 11, The King of Sorrows, where Balthazar returns to find Jesus whom he once again calls “King of the Jews; king of the world; king of Heaven” (405). Mary Virgin, with the crucified Jesus in her arms like the Pieta says to him, “These are the baby hands that closed upon your gift of myrrh” (406). This choice by Sayers, for an extra-biblical reappearance of Balthazar at the crucifixion, reminds her audience of the earlier scene.28 It brings back, perhaps jarringly, the fairytale atmosphere of the three kings in Play 1 that Sayers had otherwise let fall to the wayside.
The three kings use poetic language in seeking someone who is divine, in contrast to the crowd who seeks a king as a pragmatic human solution then turns on Jesus when he does not comply. Think only of the contrasting calls for Jesus to be made a king after the Feeding of the Five Thousand in Play 5, Scene III (‘A king! a king for Israel! Jesus King! Jesus King! a Jewish king for the Jewish People!’) and the jeers of the crowd along the way to the Cross (282ff) in Play 11. There is also the soldiers’ mocking view of Jesus as another failed political figure, notably the brutal soldier who is about to pound the nail through Jesus’ feet (“I’ll give you king of the Jews,” 392).
The kings are human enough to “have thought that the heir whom they were sent to announce would be a Prince of Herod’s house,” but they sound more like angels than humans.29 In fact, Mary Virgin says that “you and His angels speak with one voice” (74). They use theological language that is more akin to later creedal wording built upon centuries of theological reflection: “I looked at the Child,” says Balthazar, “and I knew that I stood in the presence of the Mortal-Immortal” (77). Sayers worked hard to ground her drama in the theology of the Creeds and she knows that theological and poetic language have power to express mystery. The kings’ words about Wisdom, Love, Power, and Sorrow being reconciled do not appear again in any of the other plays and this is truly a dropped thread in the cycle’s structural pattern.
Our second case, the scene of Jesus’ Baptism, is a good example of the way Sayers layers various titles in dialogue to emphasize how their meanings are parallel. It is worth quoting a section to show how she weaves them into different lines:
John Baptist: Tell me, Jesus, Son of Mary, who or what is the Messiah, the Christ of God?
Jesus: When you baptised me with the water of repentance
John Baptist: Being utterly unworthy to kiss your feet, my mother’s cousin’s son
Jesus: I felt the shoulder of God stoop under the weight of man’s sin. And I knew
John Baptist: What did you know — you whom the voice called Son of God?
Jesus: I knew what it meant to be the Son of Man (104).
The titles Christ and Messiah are strongly linked together, as Sayers clearly knows that Christ is the Greek word for Messiah. Sayers frequently uses people in the crowd to equate them, by one person suggesting something about the Messiah and another answering by using the title Christ or Son of Man. Here in the Baptism scene, however, this parallelism is many-layered with Jesus’ name and five titles all reinforced as attributed to him. Once again, we also have more poetic or metaphoric language used to describe what it means to be the Son of Man, to be God’s shoulder stooping under the weight of man’s sin through an act of repentance.
Thirdly, the trial before Caiaphas has more parallelism with the titles Messiah, Christ of Israel, Son of Man, and Son of God all attributed to Jesus within three lines of dialogue. The title of king takes center stage in the trial scene before Pilate, where Caiaphas clarifies that the title “Messiah” “amounts to a claim to be king of all Israel” (360). Pilate then questions Jesus, “What is all this about being a king?” and Jesus answers, “That is your word and not mine; but it is the right word — in one sense.” This is the only time in the plays where Jesus uses the title of king for himself, but even here he qualifies it by saying that it is “not of this world at all” and that he rather describes himself as “the voice of truth” (361). For Sayers’s Jesus, the title “king” is perhaps too loaded with political overtones to be used to describe himself. Sayers may also have been staying close to her secondary sources, which connect truth and kingship by saying that “The nature of His sovereignty corresponds with the nature of His mission,” and that “it is not the difference of the supernatural from the natural that distinguishes Christ’s Kingdom; it is the difference between control of conduct by force and control of heart and mind and will by love and truth.”30 31
This scene before Pilate is the climax of the clash of kingdoms plotline. It is the face-to-face confrontation between the kingdom of Rome and the Kingdom of God, just as Jesus’ refusal of the war-horse offered by Baruch (277) was the last confrontation between the kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of God. Caiaphas outmaneuvers Pilate by threatening that he will invoke more senior Roman authorities against Pilate if the latter acquits Jesus of the charge of treason. In Play 11 (King of Sorrows), Caiaphas also admits that his efforts to get rid of Jesus is only a temporary measure against the eventual crushing of Judaea by Rome. By default, Rome appears to be the victor — Jesus is dead, Pilate is outmaneuvered, and Caiaphas sees the end in sight.
If Sayers as a dramatist were to make up her own ending to suit her clash of kingdoms plot, she could play up the Resurrection as a public triumph and Caiaphas, Pilate, and the Zealots would acknowledge the victory of the Kingdom of God as Caiaphas does in one of Sayers’s secondary sources, Ronald Gurner’s We Crucify.32 But she cannot sacrifice the theology for the sake of a good dramatic ending — she must re-tell the Gospel account in the best way possible and allow the theology to emerge, as she says in her Introduction. As raw material for a drama, there is something slightly unsatisfying about all the private and personal Resurrection accounts that must make up Play 12, The King Comes to His Own. Sayers writes to a friend,
I hope you’ll like the Resurrection play. It’s not as exciting as the others, but that isn’t really my fault altogether. The thing ends on a quiet note, and I think that is really right. But NINE supernatural appearances are a bit stiff, dramatically speaking — all in forty-five minutes!33
Dramatic structure and theological structure must therefore work together to create a satisfying ending to the whole cycle. In Play 12 after the Resurrection, we have John giving his speech (mentioned above) about the need for the Church to be “more catholic,” and this is also emphasized by making the Great Commission from Matthew’s Gospel the last scene of the play. This creates an ending with a sense of expectation: it is not the final ending of the story. Sayers also cannot not leave her kingdoms theme behind; she incorporates a last scene with Pilate and Claudia, which hints at further skirmishes in the clash of kingdoms. The three kings had said that this child who was born to be king would rule in Rome and Byzantium (69) — clearly a reference to the eventual Christianization of the Roman Empire. The true end of the clash of kingdoms in The Man Born to be King may, therefore, in Sayers’s mind, be the sea-change that happened because of the conversion of Emperor Constantine (the title character, incidentally, of a later play by Sayers).34 The Kingdom of God at last conquers Rome by truth and love. Just as the Kingdom of God was growing within Judaea, so too it will begin spreading within the wider Empire, to bring a more complete victory over the political might of Rome. This must remain a theory, since Sayers mentions very little about her theme of the kingship of Christ after the few letters with James Welch with which our exploration began. It does, however, fit well with Sayers’s emphasis on the continuity of Christian history and the Creeds, since Constantine, apart from legalizing Christianity, also called the first Ecumenical Council. This council drew bishops from all over the known world (catholicity) and led to the formulation of the Nicene Creed. To Sayers, this may be a long-term fulfillment of Joseph of Arimathaea’s summary of Jesus’ vision: “Not to lose Israel in Rome, but to bring Rome into the fold of Israel.”
Conclusion: Sayers’s Kingdom of God
As far back as Augustine’s City of God, theologians have debated how far one can identify the Kingdom of God with the earthly Church. Sayers shows herself to be aware of the variety of opinions in Play 12 (The King Comes to His Own), Scene II, Sequence 2, just after John suggests that the Church must be catholic. Nathaniel follows up by asking, “What is the church? The thing we looked for was the Kingdom. Is that going to come now? Or isn’t it?” (436). Here Sayers is at least acknowledging the Church-as-Kingdom theology of Augustine, but she lets the question hang in the air without taking a position.
Sayers clearly did see the Church as part of, but not synonymous with, the Kingdom of God. The Church and the kingdom are overlapping and, importantly, both centered in Jesus. He is indeed, as Baruch predicted, “preaching simply himself.” Near the end of the cycle, in Play 12 (The King Comes to His Own), Scene II, Sequence 4, Sayers has Jesus telling his disciples what it means to be a part of his kingdom:
You are not slaves, but sons. Free to be false or faithful, free to reject or confess me, free to crucify God or be crucified with Him, sharing the shame and sorrow, and the bitter cross and the glory. They that die with me rise with me also, being one with me, as I and my Father are one (443).
We have seen that the pronouncement of this Kingdom is in the midst of the real circumstances of history, which must be understood as the context of Jesus’ teaching. This includes the struggle between the overwhelming might of Rome and the longing for an independent Israel. The Kingdom of God is, in fact, larger than either and able to embrace them both. Sayers emphasizes Jesus’ Jewish context for bringing the Kingdom of God, but that kingdom is different from what anyone expected.
As important as is the context, the content of the Kingdom of God is also a priority for Sayers. Our analysis of the Kingdom of God’s immediacy, its rule, its people, and its king has shown a variety of ways that Sayers stays close to the content of the Gospels while using a range of characters and dialogue to draw them out. Through drama, the Kingdom of God is shown to be arriving and accessible now. Sayers picks up a clearly biblical theme and goes beyond it with her summary of the rule of the Kingdom: “to love and be ruled by love.” This theme is all the more extraordinary when it is noted that this is the primary way characters are shown by Sayers to enter the Kingdom of God. There is not a single scene, for instance, where Jesus’ death is shown to be the substitutionary sacrifice that enables entrance to the kingdom. Since Sayers was using the Gospels and not Paul for her source material, this is not surprising, though a more evangelistic approach would perhaps have taken that route.35 Finally, Sayers presents the Kingdom of God as a place where all are welcome: the common Jewish people like Mary Magdalen and Matthew along with an even wider array of characters who “come from the east and the west and sit in the Kingdom of God,” like Proclus the centurion, Eunice the Syro-Phoenician woman, and maybe even Pilate’s wife, Claudia Procula.
The clash of kingdoms plotline shows Roman despotism and Jewish nationalism in intense conflict when the Kingdom of God arrives in Jesus. The Incarnation of Jesus is the first battle, the Resurrection reveals the victor, while the final victory over Rome is projected by Sayers into the future, when Rome is brought “into the fold of Israel.” This by no means suggests that Sayers believed the Kingdom of God fully arrived when Rome was Christianized in the fourth century, but simply that at that time the Kingdom of God was finally revealed as the true victor over Rome. Sayers’s eschatological vision of the Kingdom of God did what no one else had done before: made that theology come to life for millions of people through the medium of radio.
Notes:
1 Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 1937–1943: From Novelist to Playwright. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 171-172. Hereafter “Letters Vol. 2.”
2 Dorothy L. Sayers, The Man Born to be King: Wade Annotated Edition, ed., Kathryn Wehr (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2023), 37. Citations to the plays will hereafter be in-text citations from this edition.
3 Letter to Dr James Welch. 23 July 1940. Letters Vol. 2, 172.
4 Alzina Stone Dale, “Best Mystery Plot,” in As Her Whimsey Took Her, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent: Kent State University Press), 82.
5 Dorothy L. Sayers, Begin Here (London: Gollancz, 1940), 151.
6 Letter To Derek McCulloch, 11 October 1940. Letters Vol. 2, 182.
7 Letter to Dr James Welch, 23 July 1940. Letters Vol. 2, 172.
8 Letter to Father Herbert Kelly, 24 May 1938. Letters Vol. 2, 80.
9 John A. Thurmer, Reluctant Evangelist: Papers on the Christian Thought of Dorothy L. Sayers (Hurstpierpoint: The Dorothy L. Sayers Society), 18.
10 See Letter to Derek McCulloch, 5 November 1940. Letters Vol. 2, 189-193. Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, Book II 1.2. Sayers likely read Josephus through her source: A. H. M. Jones, The Herods of Judaea (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 148–150.
11 Letter To Derek McCulloch, 5 November 1940. Letters Vol. 2, 190.
12 Dorothy L. Sayers, “Nativity Play,” Radio Times, December 1938, 13.
13 See Kathryn Wehr, “Sayers’s Use of Secondary Sources in The Man Born to be King,” VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center 35, (2018): 63.
14 Clemson, “Dorothy L. Sayers’s Portrayal of Judas” in Theology in Action A Study Day, 19th September 2011 (Hurstpierpoint: The Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 2011), 58.
15 Letter to James Welch, 21 Dec 1940, Marion E.Wade Center Unpublished Document 433/70–73.
16 Letter to Paymaster Commander A.D. Duckworth, R.N., 15 December 1943, Marion E. Wade Center Unpublished Document 22/41.
17 Mitzi Brunsdale, Dorothy L. Sayers: Solving the Mystery of Wickedness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 161.
18 To Derek McCulloch, 5 November 1940, Letters Vol. 2, 193.
19 William B. Temple, Readings in Saint John’s Gospel (London: MacMillan, 1939-40), 23.
20 This again bears a strong resemblance to Temple, who writes: “What we find is power in complete subordination to love; and that is something like a definition of the Kingdom of God.” Sayers’s “to love and be ruled by love . . . is the Kingdom” is more memorably worded, but the idea it expresses seems to come from Temple, which, in turn, bears no direct scriptural parallel. Temple, Readings, xxviii. See similar wording on xxvii, 83, 6, 219, 353.
21 Janice Brown, The Seven Deadly Sins in the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1998), 267, 263.
22 Brown, The Seven Deadly Sins, 266.
23 See Kathryn Wehr’s discussion of this character in the editor’s introduction to Play 7 of Sayers, The Man Born to be King: Wade Annotated Edition, 236-237.
24 R. A. Edwards, The Upper Room (London: Methuen, 1941), 173.
25 Sayers always uses the plural form Sanhedrim instead of Sanhedrin.
26 “He’s just a crank. He reminds me of my old Greek tutor . . . Philosophy bores me stiff” (361).
27 See Kathryn Wehr, “Disambiguation: Sayers as a Catholic.” VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center 33 (2016): 7-17.
28 Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace also has Balthazar reappearing at the Crucifixion.
29 Letter to James Welch, 30 August 1940, Letters, Vol. 2, 179.
30 Edwyn Clement Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel (London: Faber and Faber, 1940), 520.
31 Temple, Readings, 354.
32 Ronald Gurner, We Crucify! (London: J. M. Dent & Sins, 1939).
33 Letter to Marjorie Barber, 22 September 1942, Letters, Vol. 2, 374.
34 The Emperor Constantine; A Chronicle (London: Gollancz, 1951), first performed for the 1951 Colchester Cathedral Festival.
35 Sayers explores themes of redemption much more explicitly in her later plays The Just Vengeance (1946) and The Emperor Constantine (1951).
