It might seem strange that the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee should lead to a rereading of the Old Testament and much of history, but I have just been through that adjustment and want to share it.

The Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, reveal the Jews as a special nation. Their formation from the time of Abraham is outlined, and they are people beyond mere biology into God’s purposes. Their exodus from Egypt is a triumphal formation of the nation. They enter into the lands their forebears had occupied and become the children of Israel living as a nation. Gradually they move towards an heroic king, David, the people of Israel is established and its kings are chronicled and they become the people who have a special relationship with God, living in God’s law, with awesome prophets who give us the greatest narrative in early human history by far. They are a special people, helping form Judaism, Christianity and Islam, perhaps half the world’s population. They are described as God’s chosen people, and, of course, they produce Jesus of Nazareth, whom I and some two billion others look to as our Rabbi and Lord.

Without denying that history at all, let us chart a different story namely of the failures of the children of Israel. As you will see, this is in no way anti-Jewish. The failures (in bronze and iron age people) are many and they are carefully recorded. Soon after the children of Israel leave Egypt, they worship the golden calf in an act of paganism. They then fail in following Moses, in obedience to the law and fall into the tribalism recorded in the book of Judges. Their great King, David, aside his failures of adultery and murder also produces a catastrophic succession of rulers who fail to obey the law, abuse rule, undertake oppression and have the wrong kind of relationships with other nations. Eventually this leads the Israelites into a national split North and South and then into exile in Babylon. On any sober reading of the Old Testament the Israelites are a failure and surrounded by a good deal of tragedy. This is recorded in depth in books like Lamentations and Jeremiah’s reflections on the state of his country.

I have long been impressed with the searing honesty of this political history. I dwell in it. Everywhere, national histories are self-adulatory, but here is failure after failure and then exile, from exile to exile. I have travelled through the Jewish ethnic problem as my own – the chosen people of God, but exile and then eventually the Holocaust. How before God could the Holocaust happen? Clearly, the Holocaust is Nazi evil, and evil in other states, earlier and later, and the Jews must not carry this ethnically when it came from others. Real good and evil favour none if seen properly. It is also clear that the Jews are not chosen in the sense of being favourites, or preferred by God, or the opposite, under some kind of judgement. Perhaps with greater knowledge comes greater responsibility for all of us.

Turn briefly to the Jubilee Celebrations. They turn out to be mainly sincere gratitude to the Queen for her service, no more. Apart from the Flypast, Trooping of the Colour and a few other bits, it has been free of the triumphalism and self-adulation we get from Boris and old white British history, and with good reason. The Queen’s family has failed in a number of ways. Many of her roles have been reconciling across divisions and basic respect for other nations and she has done a good job mainly in spite of the grandeur of the monarchical establishment and the repeated failures of her governments. And, really, to anyone who is awake and studies colonialism, slavery and war, Britain has often been more parasitic than glorious and is becoming the Disunited Kingdom. This morning I listened to an honest radio programme showing the mental distress caused the Windrush Generation. This celebration is not “Send her victorious, happy and glorious.” Our real history is as messy as the Israelite history of the Old Testament and not just ours. It is not difficult to see Putin, Bush, Ibn Saud and Boris in the same league as Rehoboam, Ahab, Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar. Nor is it difficult to see states – Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Poland, Yugoslavia, Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Libya, DRC, Angola, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ruanda, Argentina, Venezuela, Guatemala, Cuba, Northern Ireland, Algeria and more who have been through it, with millions traumatized. So, suddenly, the Old Testament history is our history, requiring an honesty before God and towards ourselves which has been absent from the triumphalist West.

Really, there was a rhetoric in the last century that we had got rid of Hitler and now things would get better and better, the great modernist hope. It enabled us to interpret even quite big failures as mere problems that need to be overcome. Democratic politicians promised well and may have underperformed, but things will get better. The last thing we would think is that we are evil, that we are the problem, that to use the stick in the throat word, we should repent. But suddenly our history is on a par with the biblical history. There are the wars. We do not see them in the West when it is Vietnam, Congo, Iraq or Afghanistan, but we cannot ignore the Ukraine invasion. It is evil and it devastates a vast nation. Putin is an evil militarist, but so too are we in the West. Through NATO we are complicit and have been in the middle-east and elsewhere. This is military bullying on a par with Syria and Babylon in the Old Testament.

Many nations develop their own heroic history to which they romantically become attached but which do not tell the truth about their lives together and the way they develop. The time has come to be honest, cut out self-promoting, to humble ourselves, to face the past and the present in terms of what is wrong with us and hear those who cry out against us. Christian readers of the Old Testament, should do it normally as part of their faith. We should see the idolatries of Mammon, Militarism and Political Control around on all sides. We should identify the self-justifying untruths. The empire builders in politics, business and finance should be exposed. Equality before the law should win over interests, and the superpowers should eat grass like Nebuchadnezzar. Somewhere this re-formation, this outbreak of facing truth with humility, should break out across the world, and in begins with each of us facing the failures in our personal and national histories, especially in the light of the Old Testament.