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Boy Scout Tr #240

Scripture: 2 Samuel 11

King David was one of the greatest heroes that Israel ever had. He was handsome, the Bible says, ruddy, with beautiful eyes. He was a fearless warrior. He faced Goliath without a single piece of armor on and brought him to the ground with a river rock. He went on to become a brilliant military strategist and city planner. Jerusalem was his idea. It was he who made it the capital of Israel and united the kingdom under his rule. He was artistic too, a musician and a composer of psalms. When David played his lyre, everybody’s headaches went away and smiles stole over their faces

He was God’s anointed one, and in the first book of Kings (chapter 15) you can read how he went down in history. “David did what was right in the sight of the Lord, and did not turn aside from anything that God commanded him all the days of his life, except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite” (vs. 5). Uriah who? Uriah the Hittite. Loyal soldier in David’s army. Unfortunate husband of the beautiful Bathsheba, whom David happened to see bathing one day while he was walking on the roof of his house. He took one look at her and he had to have her. He sent his messengers to bring her to him and before long she sent him back a message of her own. “I am pregnant,” and David’s strategical mind went into high gear.

The first thing he tried was the great cover-up. If he could get Uriah and Bathsheba to spend a romantic weekend together, Uriah might believe the child was his own. The only problem was that Uriah was out of town fighting a battle and like all other soldiers he was sworn to celibacy until the fight was over. David ordered him back to Jerusalem and told him to go see his wife, but Uriah refused. The same thing happened the next day, so the day after that David invited Uriah to dinner and got him drunk, but still Uriah refused to go home to Bathsheba.

Plan A did not work. Neither did plan B. King David was exasperated by Uriah’s loyalty. So, David changed his strategy. He wrote a letter to Uriah’s commander Joab that said, “Send Uriah to the front line of the hardest fighting and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.”

What the King ordered was exactly what happened. Uriah was killed in battle, Bathsheba mourned him, and when her mourning was over she became David’s wife and bore him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased God and very soon, Nathan the prophet was knocking at the front door of the palace, sent by God to confront the King.

The way Nathan did it was genius--he didn’t march in and confront the King head-on with a fire and brimstone sermon. He came at him sideways, with a story. Why did he take such an indirect route? Because he had not come to condemn David. That would have been easy enough to do, given the facts at hand, but Nathan was up to something much more profound than that. He had come to change David’s life, if he could, from the inside out--to help the King see what he had done so that his conscience was revived and his sense of justice restored. Then Israel might have the king Israel was supposed to have instead of this handsome hero who used his power to look better than he was.

If David could see that--if he could pronounce judgment on himself--the impact would be a hundred times greater than if Nathan did it for him. But it called for real restraint on Nathan’s part. He had to contain his anger and resist the temptation to do David’s work for him. He had to remember why he came to see David--not to demolish the king but to bring him back to God--which in this case called for incredible wisdom.

So Nathan told David a story, knowing good and well how human beings tend to drop their defenses while they are listening to a story about someone else. When words are not aimed right at us, we can listen better. We are free from our own points of view and can try on all the parts, finding out how different things look through different eyes.

That is what happened to David when Nathan told him about the rich man with many flocks and the poor man with nothing but one little lamb. When the rich man stole the poor man’s lamb, David rushed to the poor man’s defense and it was not until he had pronounce a death sentence on the rich man that he found out what he had done.

“You are the man!” Nathan told him, and David’s heart split in two. “I have sinned against the Lord,” he said--not because Nathan had told him so but because he had discovered it for himself, and that was the beginning of his coming back to life again. It shouldn’t have been--he had broken three of the ten commandments in short order-- thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not kill. He had confessed his guilt and he had even condemned himself to death, but that was not what God had in mind for him.

“The Lord has put away your sin,” Nathan told him. “You shall not die.” That was the good news. The bad news was that his child would die, because in conceiving him David had utterly scorned God. This may be the hardest part of the story for me--that a child should die for his father’s sin--and I neither want nor know how to explain it to you--except to say that that was how the author of the biblical story explained it.

There does seem to be an ancient understanding that while God has given us total freedom to decide how we will live, God has also set boundaries on that freedom. So there are moral limits we trespass at our own risk, like those old, old maps that go right to the edge of the known world and then post the warning, “Beyond here lie dragons.” We are free to keep going--people do it all the time--but there are consequences, and consequences are different from punishments. I do not believe that God sits just past the boundaries, deciding whether to hit trespassers with a lightning bolt or a sick child.

Instead, I believe God in all compassion has described for us the way the world works, letting us know that this is not only a material universe we live in but also a moral one, in which ethical acts have consequences just as physical ones do. Drop a stone out a window and it will fall to the ground. Conceive a child, try to pawn it off on another man, then make its mother a widow, and the child will suffer for all of that. Because it is the will of God? I say, no. But we do live in a web of relationship with God, with one another, and with all creation that responds to the choices we make. When we exercise our freedom in life-giving ways, even the trees clap their hands. And when we exercise it in death-dealing ways, the earth quakes or boils beneath our feet. None of us is morally autonomous. There are realities governing our life together that we can not go up against without sooner or later discovering the consequences.

When we do discover them--as individuals, as a community, as a nation--know this--God does not turn away from us. God sends us prophets to wake us up, to tell us stories that show us who we really are. Then, if we are lucky enough to feel our hearts split in two, then we may find that even the death sentences we have pronounced upon ourselves are lifted, because the recognition of sin is the beginning of the end of it. The moment we know we are lost and say so out loud, God can hear us to find us and take us home.

Things were never the same for David after “the matter of Uriah the Hittite.” David buried his first born son. There were lasting consequences to what he had done that he lived with the rest of his life, but the point is that he lived. God took him back, and gave him new opportunities to exercise his God-given freedom. He and Bathsheba had a second son named Solomon who ruled Israel for forty years. David’s line survived to produce a boy named Jesus, who no doubt heard this same story about his ancestors David and Bathsheba.

Was David a good man or a bad man? You decide. I think he was both, as all of us are. If we remember him as a hero, I hope it is not because of Goliath, or the psalms, or the war stories. I hope it is because of that moment with Nathan, when he woke up and saw who he was and said so, so that God could say, “Come home.”

Amen. Notes: Walter Brueggemann’s Interpretation: First and Second Samuel