In the final season of The Crown on Netflix, multiple themes once again come to the fore: unbending tradition vs. adapting ancient rules for a modern era, appearances vs. reality, institutional requirements vs. individual self-expression, and the demands of duty vs. the tug of personal freedom. The Crown plays with all these contrasts, never resolving the tension, sometimes veering too far in one direction over another.
But three scenes in the final season stood out to me, each with lessons that go beyond the monarchy and apply to the church. “Worship” is a royal term, after all, from the old English worth-ship. We’re to recognize worth when we see it and give honor where it’s due.
Magic and the Mystery
In the first scene, Queen Elizabeth discusses the future with several members of the royal family. After Prince Charles proposes to run the monarchy on more rational and democratic lines, she responds,
But monarchy isn’t rational or democratic or logical or fair. . . . People don’t want to come to a royal palace and get what they could have at home. . . . They want the magic and the mystery. And the arcane and the symbolic and the eccentric. And the transcendent. They want to feel like they’ve entered another world. That is our duty. To lift people up and transport them into another realm, not bring them down to earth and remind them what they already have.
Were these words spoken by anyone else, they’d crumble under the weight of self-importance and self-exaltation. But delivered by Queen Elizabeth, known for her selflessness in carrying out her duties even if it meant sidelining her personal desires, the words carry weight. She intuits something significant: the magic of the monarchy is in the mystery. As queen, her role is to lift the heads of her subjects, to point them to another realm, something beyond the ordinary.
Genuine worship with God’s people should share this aim. We lift our heads and hearts to our Creator. We enter another world. We’re given a taste of heaven on earth. We’re transported into another realm.
It’s good when we seek God in the ordinary, see the sacred behind the common, open our eyes to the beauty of the world, and meet God in the everyday rhythms of life. There’s something right in the impulse to emphasize God’s nearness. But not at the expense of his transcendence. Nothing is casual or common about encountering God in reverent worship.
To be clear, I’m not referring to musical style or dress code or specific liturgies. I’m saying it’s a problem when our church services lean so far in stressing God’s closeness that it becomes unthinkable that we’d tremble before his holiness. We lose the mysterious paradox of being drawn to his goodness and frightened by his glory. We can’t imagine an encounter with God that resembles that of Moses at the burning bush, where the Great I AM compels us to come closer yet commands us to remove our sandals.
Many well-intentioned evangelicals in the previous generation wanted to make non-Christians and nominal Christians so comfortable in church that they recommended we reduce our celebration of the sacraments. The Lord’s Supper is strange to outsiders. It’s off-putting. It creates a dividing line between believer and nonbeliever. To that, we should reply, yes. That’s why it’s powerful. The discomfort is the draw, a combination of God’s majesty and mercy, a touch of the transcendent through elements that may seem weird to the newcomer. This is what lifts us into another world.
Look Back to Look Forward
In another scene, Queen Elizabeth sits across from prime minister Tony Blair after finishing an investigation of positions and practices deemed unnecessary in the modern world. Although initially open to adjusting or eliminating some rituals, she has concluded some of the practices Blair believes to be old-fashioned are essential because of the continuity they establish across generations:
Tradition is our strength. Respect for our forebears, and the preservation of generations of their wisdom and learned experience. Modernity is not always the answer. Sometimes antiquity is, too.
The same is true for the church. It is, of course, possible for human traditions to encumber the mission. Not everything passed down from our forebears is infallible. The church is always to be reforming in light of the Word of God. Many a congregation has fallen for empty traditions and dead traditionalism. Renewal is key.
But renewal doesn’t only come from whatever is new. Wisdom requires us to discern the difference between what’s faithful and what’s faddish. All too often, we believe old is bad and new is better. We must resist the impulse to think innovation is always an improvement. Instead, we must look to the past with gratitude, recognizing our forefathers and mothers have left us treasures that may assist us in the challenges we face today. Sometimes, we find what we need not in modernity but in antiquity.
Miracles and Mystery
There’s one last scene I’ll mention, this one without the queen. Tony Blair tells his wife, Cherie, that surely the royal family is aware of their need to “change in order to survive.” Cherie isn’t convinced the queen thinks along those lines. “They don’t want to change,” she says. Then she compares the monarchy to the Catholic Church. The Church modernized, she says. They got rid of the Latin and the incense and the miracles and the mystery. “And people stopped coming.”
The common sense of our time would have us think the only way to appeal to a modern world is through the elimination of mystery. But this is exactly backward. Mystery is what makes the church stand out. A. W. Tozer wrote,
When the Holy Spirit comes and opens heaven until people stand astonished at what they see, and in astonished wonderment confess His uncreated loveliness in the presence of that most ancient mystery, then you have worship. If it is not mysterious, there can be no worship.
No mystery? No worship.
I must register two caveats here. First, there’s always the temptation to manipulate the mechanics of a worship service to create a sense of artificial awe, insist on the most arcane liturgical details, specify the wording of every possible prayer, or get lost in the minutiae of a program. The mission of the church isn’t to preserve an ancient pattern but to propagate good news both old and fresh. We gather for otherworldly worship that catches us up “in the process of being slain and made alive by the gospel,” as John Webster put it.
Second, there’s the temptation to make worship all about the pursuit not of God but of the feeling of mysterious awe we get in his presence. In harping on mystery, I run the risk of making worship all about something we feel, which ironically turns the church back into something centered on us and what we prefer.
Still, in the end, we do well to remember that worship of the triune God should always bring about the collision of worlds—the kingdom of God into the earthly, the foretaste of the future into the present, the unfathomable God into the patterns of corporate praise. Do away with the mystery of it all, and you miss the whole point.
Evangelism isn’t well served by human-centered worship. We won’t reach more people by eliminating the awe-inspiring elements that follow from an encounter with the living God. We’ll reach fewer, and the ones we do reach will experience less.
Worship is an aid to mission, and worship is mission’s ultimate aim.
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