In
part two, we see David – that sure-house prediction going to his head – lusting after Bathsheba, raping her and engaging in an
hilariously inept cover-up, trying to get her husband Uriah to be with his
wife, so they could plausibly claim that the baby – did I forget to mention
there was a baby? – so they could plausibly claim that the baby was Uriah’s, at
least to Israelites who couldn’t count.
But than, Uriah – foreigner though he is – is more obedient to the Torah
than David, and he won’t go down to
“wash his feet,” if you know what I mean, and so the King just has him killed. And there’s another elaborate cover-up – this one involving code words and
secret messages.
And
now we’re in a bare, cell-like room, and settles on Bathsheba, beautiful even
in sackcloth and ashes, and the light from a window illuminates her
tear-stained face, and we know she is in mourning, and after the mandatory
number of mourning-days, David sends a henchman to gather her, and then the
royal ceremony and bingo, it’s finished, we can see that it’s all over, that David has gotten his way, as, might I
remind the audience, the king always does . . . the deed is done, the king is
married, all legal-like, and nobody will be the wiser, nobody will question the
king doing kingly deeds, especially since his army is winning, especially since he’s beaten all the neighbors. And as the camera lingers on David’s smug
face, we cut to a flashback where David tells his chief flunky Joab “the sword
devours now one and now another . . . Do not let the matter trouble you . . .”
And subtitles give a literal translation “Do not let it be evil in your eyes . . .”
But
there’s problem with all of this, one
great big fly in the ointment . . . “but the thing that David did is evil in God’s eyes” . . . and it’s a turning point in the narrative, a
hinge upon which the story hangs . . . up until now, it’s pretty-much been all
David, all the time . . . David sent for Bathsheba and took her and lay with her, he sent for
Joab who sent for Uriah and finally he sent
for Bathsheba, who became his wife . . . David’s done the sending, and the
taking, as kings are wont to do, but now all of a sudden the tables are turned
. . . the thing David did was evil in God’s eyes, and now it’s God who’s doing
the sending, and it’s God who will do the taking.
Specifically,
God sends for his mouthpiece, and we can see ol’ Nathan as he walks toward the
camera, looking like he’s right out of Central Casting – which he probably is,
he looks like the Una-bomber on the Adkins diet – and he tells the king a story
. . . “There was this rich man and this poor man, see,
and the rich man had many sheep and many
cattle, but the poor man had only one, measly, little lamb . . .” And anyone hearing this can figure out who
the measly little lamb is, and notice that she’s a commodity. A possession.
A thing to be stolen from her husband.
Indeed, Bathsheba’s put on par with a sheep.
Anyway,
Nathan continues to lay it on thick – and here’s where it gets kind of
funny. “This lamb grew up with this poor
guy’s children, it ate with them, drank with them, and lay in his
bosom. She was like a daughter to
him.” Get it? Daughter?
Bath-sheba, daughter of sheba? And the rich man, faced with an unexpected
visitor, doesn’t want to slaughter one of his own multitude of sheep or
cattle, so he takes the poor man’s only, beloved lamb. And we can see the poor man, tears running
down his cheek, as the lamb is torn,
bleating weakly, from his arms.
Immediately
David is incensed – “As the lord lives,” he says, “This man must die,” and ironically
pronounces the sentence prescribed by Torah – “he shall restore the lamb
fourfold, because he did this
thing, and because he had no pity.” And
Nathan springs his trap: “You are the man!” and the full force of David’s guilt
comes crashing down upon him. “You are the man.”
For the
first time David realizes that all the time, and all the effort God put into
him, all the good he’s done for
the Lord, aren’t going to get him out of his punishment, and as if God had read
his mind, God says through Nathan, “Look what I’ve done for you: I appointed
you ruler and delivered you from Saul’s hand.
I gave you Saul’s house, and Saul’s wives, and the house of Israel and the house of Judah. And look how you repay me – you’ve killed
Uriah and taken his wife as your own!”
And
then, judgment: Because David betrayed Uriah by the sword, the sword would
never leave his house. Never would there
be peace in David’s family. Violence
would mark all that they did. Because
David took Uriah’s wife, God would take David’s wives and give them to
another, who will lie with them openly, for all to see. And though David did his deeds in secret, probably
for national security reasons, God would do his “before all Israel, before
the sun.”
At
last, David acknowledges his actions: “I have sinned before the Lord.” And
Nathan delivers one last judgment: “The Lord has put away your sin – you will
not die. But because you have scorned
me, the child born to you shall surely die.” And the word we translate as “put
away” is pass over, as in “pass over” the houses where the blood of the lamb is
smeared, and so we immediately get
the allusion to the freeing of the Israelites from Pharaoh’s clutches . . .
we’re meant to associate the two, to see the Israelites’ freedom from slavery
and David’s freedom from sin as cut from the same cloth . . .
And everything happens as God says: David’s
house is torn by strife and violence. His
son Amnon rapes his sister Tamar – rape ran in the family – and Absalom kills
Amnon for it. Absalom lay with his
fathers wives – before all Israel,
under the sun – before being killed himself.
But before it all, the first thing to come true was the death of
Bathsheba’s child, the death of rape’s fruit.
And as the boy weakens, as he fights for life, David prostrates himself
before the Lord. He fasts and prays and
pleads with God to save his son. But to
no avail – the child is doomed. And as
the closing credits roll, the camera pulls, back, back until David is revealed
to be alone in the realization of the enormity of what he has done.
The story of
Nathan’s oracle, and its aftermath, highlights the bald, inescapable fact that
what we do has consequences. Walter
Brueggemmann likens the story to Chappaquidick – one night of pleasure, a fleeting
plunge over a bridge, and a career is broken.
After Ted Kennedy drove over that bridge, he never got near the
presidency again. And so it was for
David – a fleeting night of lust spun things out of control, and led to more
murder, more rape, and the deaths of innocents
within his own family.
And
so it is with our own sin – the more we try to forget it, the more we try to
keep it secret, the easier it is to spin out of control, and affect lives
beyond our own. They don’t have to be
spectacular sins, like adultery or murder, either. Have you ever noticed how a single, little
lie can branch out so that, pretty soon, you’re telling more and more, just to
counteract the effect of the first? Just
so it seems like you never told a lie in the first place? Pretty soon, you’re asking yourself “Now, what did I tell Bob? What did I tell Wanda – was it what I told
Bob?” And on and on and on.
Sin
has consequences, not just for the sinner but often for others innocent of the
deed. We are all enmeshed in a web of
relationships – in a church, in a family, in a community – and what we do
affects every other member of that group, whether we like it or not, whether we
believe it or not. In the West,
where individualism has been taken to pathological heights, many of us have
forgotten this. We do what is good for
us to do, and to heck with everyone else . . . and our culture, of course,
creates this, it magnifies it and multiplies it thousands of times . . . people
who think “me first” make the best consumers, they buy the most stuff, “You
deserve a steak today,” “Be all that you can be” “You’ve got a life to
live . . .” Our selfishness is created
in us – or at least greatly magnified and encouraged – by the society in which
we are embedded.
And
this brings us back to our original question – what happened to David? How did he get to be this way? Why are many kings and presidents and CEOs
corrupt? Could it be – in part – the
nature of the beast, the beast by which they find themselves embraced? Look at all the Corporate scandals – Enron,
Tyco, WorldCom – the people at the top, with the power, surrounded by lawyers
and PR flacks and yes-men, you can almost interchange them, you can almost
exchange Ken Lay with Sam Waskal, Bernie Ebbers with Dennis Kozlowski, it’s
like each of them are cogs in the machine . . .
the CEO of Boeing or IBM or Intel lays off thousands of people, ships
their jobs overseas, and they can’t put food on the table, and if the CEO
didn’t do it the board would replace him, it’s the nature of the beast, the
nature of the economic beast . . .
And
David, caught in a full-court press of sycophants, people ready to tell him
what he wants to hear, people completely willing to do whatever he
wants, dependent on advisors with their own agendas, and with responsibilities,
mouths to feed, embedded in a system that won’t let him go . . . and pretty
soon you start believing the press, start thinking you can do anything. You do something bad – you commit a little
adultery, take a little graft, bilk the people out of their retirement money –
and you cover it up, you can’t do anything else, you’re trapped . . .
But
there’s another character in this morality play, another actor, and it’s
Nathan, a godly, prophetic man who literally flies in the face of the
system. Because if David was in a sense created
by court, created by the powers-that-be, he also embodied them. He was the House, the Senate, the Supreme
Court and the President, all rolled into one.
He was the man! And when Nathan said that, when he said to David
“You the Man!” he walked on dangerous ground.
He was telling a king he’d acted disgracefully. He was telling a king he’d dishonored
his God.
And
look how he does it . . .he doesn’t do it directly, he doesn’t confront him
directly . . . he tells a story, a parable, not unlike that other
prophet that we sing about every Sunday. He tells him a story, a fable if you like, and
it’s powerful, it convicts David of his sin . . . words, thin and
fragile, lost on the wind as soon as they are uttered, yet strong enough to
bring the powerful to their knees . . . and Nathan is a model for us. What we have to offer is the Word, in all its
ephemeral beauty . . . what we have to stand up to fallen creation with is the
Good News, the Word confronting the world.
The Word spoken, the Word heard, the Word lived by the Word
incarnate himself, Jesus Christ.
And
that’s the grace here, folks – you remember last week I promised you grace –
the grace is the Word of God, incarnate in the life and death and resurrection
of Jesus Christ. We have the
words of eternal life, and they are words that can shake us out of our
enthrallment to the world, our enslavement to the powers of death. Look what happened to David . . . he was
confronted by the Word, and he repented . . . he was able, for the first time
in a long time, to admit his bondage to sin.
The word of God freed him from bondage to evil, it gave him the means to
throw off the yoke. And of course, it
gives us that power as well . . . we have the words of eternal
life, life that starts right now, right here, not some
pie-in-the-sky by-and-by. We may not
believe it, we may not feel it, it may not look like it, but we
have the means to resist the world and its death-giving ways. And if that ain’t grace, I don’t know what
is. Amen.
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