View or print as a PDF

Sunday 19
9/8/2015

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14
Matthew 16:13-23

---

The story of David and Bathsheba and that of David and Goliath are perhaps the best known of all the recorded events of David’s life. And, for that reason, we will not dwell on the details of the obvious: that one should not do as David did: adultery (or here, perhaps, even a rape) is contrary to the law of God, and murder is as well. There is not much to be said for harping on this particular point in a sermon because it’s not that hard: if you are contemplating either adultery or murder, stop it. Enough said. There are more interesting things to consider there.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is this: David has been anointed king. This means that he is a “messiah” (from the Hebrew) or a “christ” (from the Greek), for this is what those words mean both mean: “anointed one.” Jesus is not the first christ; he is the last. Our story today, then, presents us with a strange coming-together: unlike another well-known “religious” figure, not only is David a “very naughty boy”, he is also “the Messiah”. How can this be so?

Up until now we have seen a steady building up of blessing upon blessing for David. There is a sense in which, until this point, God has been setting David in place. Now God waits to see what David will do, and the results are underwhelming. David is set over the people for the people. In his being blessed is Israel promised security and peace from its enemies (2 Samuel 7.10). This is his role: to be a god-like enabler of what is true and gives life.

David’s failure, then, is not simply a personal moral offence. Much more, his failure affects the whole community. Rather than being one who brings life, David takes it. First, of course, is Bathsheba, either encouraged or forced out of her life with Uriah; then comes Uriah himself and then, unintended, Bathsheba’s baby.

More generally, however, there is also the matter of the curse which we will hear God speak next week on the house he has just blessed.

Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, for you have despised me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife. Thus says the Lord: I will raise up trouble against you from within your own house; and I will take your wives before your eyes, and give them to your neighbour, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this very sun. For you did it secretly; but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.”

This curse affects not just David and his family but, through them, on the whole community. It cannot be hidden but will spill out into the open for all to see. The sword which will cut through David’s sons, in doing so, cuts through the security and identity of Israel as a whole.

Instead of being the one who preserves life, David becomes now the one who causes blood to flow. In a way, he has always been this – whether it was the blood of those wild animals which threatened his flock, or the blood of Philistines who were a threat to Israel. But, as we have noted in reflecting on the Goliath story, this is the blood of rather one-dimensional characters in the story. They are, in a sense, outside of what really matters for those who tell this story. They represent disorder and chaos, but specifically from without. What David does to repel these threats is done to protect the sphere of Israel, a kind of bringing of order to the disordered void, to recall the creation narrative (Genesis 1.1).

But what happens within the sphere of the chosen and blessed Israel is a different matter for reflection altogether. And this comes now to its sharpest focus in the person of David himself. For here is Israel – represented in the king – secured by God’s hand, blessed, as a son to God as a father, called to faithfulness, called to be a son. And here also is Israel fallen. And the effect is devastating: the loss of the first and beloved son – God’s and David’s – and the loss of many more to come.

When the blessèd one over-reaches, death is what results. But this is not an occasional failure; it goes to the heart of human being. As we have already noticed a number of times: here is repeated the story of Eden:

And the Lord God commanded [Adam], ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die’ (Genesis 2.16f NRSV)

In effect God says there, “Everything but this”. That story ends with the question to Eve: “What is this that you have done?”, whereupon follows the curse upon the serpent and the man and the woman.

In our story today, Bathsheba is David’s “apple”. The death of Uriah is David’s fig leaf. And the death of the child and the curse of the sword which follow are David’s expulsion from Eden and from all the possibilities of the brotherhood of Cain and Abel. It is a troubled and grey existence David lives from now on – the existence of the children of Adam and Eve.

If the story of Adam and Eve resonates with that of David, the stark scriptural contrast to David’s story is that of Jesus. In response to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am,” (Matthew 16.13) comes Peter’s bold affirmation, “You are the Messiah” or, we might paraphrase, “You are the anointed one, the son of David,.” But then, just because he recognises this link, Peter goes on to reveal that he expects the kind of kingship which David had exercised. As Jesus describes his approaching persecution and death, Peter rebukes him: “This shall never happen to you!” What shall never happen? The kind of exposure which David tried to avoid: being known or seen to have failed in righteousness, to have been unimaginably wrong – David, of all people; Jesus, of all people. David is going to be publically exposed as a sinner – we still read the story even today; Jesus, he says, will be exposed in the same way on the cross.

Or, at least, whereas David is wrong; Jesus looks wrong, to the extent that the cross is interpreted by his executioners as God’s judgement on his proclamation. Peter knows that in every respect Jesus is great David’s greater son, that no prophet Nathan will finger Jesus with the charge, “You are the man” (to anticipate next week’s reading [2 Samuel 12]; consider, however, Pilate’s presentation of Jesus: “Behold the man” [John 19.5]). But the similarities are important.

We have noted many times that David and Adam “refer” to each other, the one (re­)enacting the other’s possibilities and shortcomings. They each embody the story of blessing and over-reaching. Jesus as a figure in the story also “refers” to David and Adam – he invokes them for us and embodies them. This he does, first, in a positive sense as a representative figure who is blessed with life in God’s kingdom. Adam is blessed, David is blessed, Jesus is blessed. But Jesus also invokes and embodies Adam and David in a second, negative sense: as the bearer of the curse of death.

Technically, scholars call Adam and David “types” of each other – and of Jesus. This means that Adam and David lay down a pattern which is seen in Jesus: they are “typical” of each other; it happens to each of them according to the pattern. (The notion comes from Paul, who speaks of Adam as “a type [Greek “tupos” = pattern, model] of one who was to come” (Romans 5. 14).). In this way they are all seen, in their different ways, to be sharing in the same kind of reality, seen to be the same kind of thing.

This way of thinking helps us to see the threads which are woven through the whole of fabric of the biblical story, now above it and visible, now below and hidden, but always the source of its colour and contrast and cohesion.

The crucifixion of Jesus is the rejection of the humanity he embodies, the rejection of his peculiar freedom before God and others. But here is the crucial point: to the extent that Jesus shares in the pattern of blessèd opportunity which is where Adam and David begin, the crucifixion of the innocent Jesus reveals a kind of self-contempt on the part of his executioners – a covering over of what we do not want to see as a possibility for ourselves. The crucifixion is another fig leaf mistaken for the finest of coverings. The humanity of Jesus is a kind of nakedness – an openness before God and those around him – which is found to be unbearable. In a strange kind of way, the murdered Uriah can be reclaimed here as a “type” of Jesus. He dies that the sin of David might be covered – a fig leaf to cover David’s nakedness before the people, if not before God. The days of David happily dancing naked before God and the people are now past (Recalling the under-dressed dancing David of 2 Samuel 6.1-23, especially vv.20ff); a modesty borne of sin is now required.

Jesus dies in order that his remarkable humanity might be covered over – blotted out. But if David’s shame brought modesty, the shame inflicted upon Jesus on the cross becomes by God’s grace the basis of a strange immodesty: the freedom of the forgiven children of God. Now revealed sin brings not the shame of exposure and the darkened existence which comes with that, but rather celebration: God can overcome even this.

I began by suggesting the real question arising from the Bathsheba affair is the question about why David continues to enjoy God’s favour: how the messiah – the anointed one – and the “naughty boy” might be one and the same. There is no good reason for this, so far as most of us are concerned. This is not least because we are, most of us most of the time, interested mainly in ourselves, our mores, our morals. When the failure is of sufficient magnitude the one who failed becomes irredeemable, cast “outside the city gate” (as is said of Jesus: Hebrews 13.12.). These ones cease to matter. Our modern correlates are our fallen idols – celebrities, politicians, sporting heroes – who offend public decency in some way.

But, mercifully, it is not we but God who judges and pronounces sentence where it really matters. God wants this to work – this project we call “life”. This is the point of the promise to David: “Always”; you are mine, always. God so much wants this to work that he sends his Son as the son of one of us, that we might see, and believe, and so have hope, in whatever illicit embrace we might find ourselves, willing or unwilling.

There is no justifying David in his taking of Bathsheba, his murder of Uriah or any other excess we might find in his history, but can be no self-righteous judging of him either. For his story is ours. It is beyond none of us to want more than is given, to cover up what we’ve had to do to get it, and to be in need of being shown that there is a God who sees.

That is the Law. It is the gospel, however, that to know ourselves truly seen by God is to know ourselves forgiven.

Mine. You are mine. Always.

For such a gospel of grace and the love which is its guarantee, all thanks and praise be to God. Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Sunday 18
2/8/2015

2 Samuel 7:1-17
Psalm 89
John 12:12-19

---

A couple of months back I sat in on a short course in the city. It was a philosophy subject: “Free Will and Morality”. I was interested to see what a philosopher would do with those topics, and also whether something constructive could be said (and heard) in such a space from a gospel perspective, which I wanted to bring! I hope that the answer to the latter was found to be “Yes”, because the philosophical treatment of the topic was a little exasperating!

One thing we spent a lot of time on was “determinism” – whether or not our lives and worlds have been determined for us before we make decisions about them. Another key consideration was moral objectivism: whether there are basic moral rules which must be observed, and where these come from. Fundamentally, these are questions about human freedom in relation to “the big picture”: the awareness that some things are not free to be changed, and yet that this awareness is in tension with our thinking ourselves to be free, or thinking that we ought to be free.

Inevitably, God gets invoked in all this. Or, at least, a kind of god is invoked. This god is just enough to serve as a possible basis of an already unsupportable proposition. And because the proposition is already unsupportable, its little god is becomes representative of the uselessness of gods in general when it comes to talking about anything which matters!

An empty idea of god, however, doesn’t make the problem go away. Fundamentally the question remains: are there “set” things about how the world works, which we must observe if we are to prosper in every sense of the word? If there are such set things, are we free to choose them? And what if we don’t? Whenever we wonder What is the “right” thing to do?, whenever we pray for guidance, whenever we encourage each other in one direction and admonish for a choice in the “wrong” direction, we imply that something is set – pre-determined – for us. And happiness is a matter of discovering what that is. In all of this, if we are believers, we imagine God to be a kind of still-point – the thing which does not move or change. God does not change, the Good is fixed, and we are to conform to that changelessness by discovering the Good.

To my mind, the philosophy got us nowhere, and Scripture does it all better.

Our reading this morning is about a “deal” struck between David and God. It is an unexpected deal. David has proposed that he will build for God at a temple. God’s response is No; this will be the responsibility of another. Rather, God proposes that he will build a house for David. David’s name will be made great and the people of Israel will be planted securely in their own place and find peace from their enemies. David is promised that when his days are fulfilled he will lie with his ancestors, having left behind offspring whose own reign will also be established by God. David will be as a son to God as a father, and God’s steadfast love will be never taken from David: his throne “shall be established forever” (v.16). This “deal” or, in biblical language “covenant”, is one of the central turning points of the Old Testament’s account of God’s dealing with the people of Israel. (Strictly speaking, the word “covenant” doesn’t appear in this passage, but later scriptural expositions of it – 2 Samuel 23.5; Psalm 89.35; Psalm 132.12 – see this event as establishment of a covenant with David and his line.)

Deals are generally if-then arrangements: if you do this, I’ll do that. Yet the most striking characteristic of this covenant is that it is unconditional. One commentator likens what God offers here to the writing of a “blank cheque” (W. Brueggemann). God here promises David a future which is not dependent upon what David or his descendants do. It is an extraordinary promise, particularly given the way in which previous covenants between God and the people have been set up in such a way that the fulfilment of the promises are conditional upon what the people do in response to the covenant. We will see as the story unfolds further that the demands of the law of God still cannot be overlooked. But what is now implicit in the relationship between God and his people – the people being signified by the King – is that where failure occurs it becomes the responsibility of God to overcome the failure, if it is truly to be the case that God’s promise to David and his line can be kept.

This is rather a dangerous proposal. It is easy to imagine the onset of a moral complacency in a covenant like this, the abandonment of any moral objectivity. And yet such complacency is not part of what is promised here, nor part of what actually unfolds.

We should also keep in mind that these stories have been pulled together into their current form by religious leaders of Israel during the time of the Babylonian exile. That is, they are written from the perspective of the punishment of Israel and its kings for long-term failure before God. The significance of any punishment, then, is not diminished. But it is the very context of punishment in exile which makes so important the promise to David of an eternal kingship. For this becomes the basis of hope for Israel in exile. The promise of God to the house of David could become the basis of hope for Israel-in-exile in a way in which the covenant from Sinai could not. What David hears is the promise of faithfulness on God’s part regardless of what happens on the part of David and the house of Israel – even that which, in the end, resulted in the loss of the land and the temple.

Unfaithfulness on the part of David and his descendants will meet with the personal or individual loss of the benefits of the kingship, but the long-term promise to the line as a whole, and to Israel through it, will remain in place.

Though they will be punished for extreme failures, they will turn to the promises which are made to David and look towards the fulfilment of those promises in a re-establishment of the line of Davidic Kings. And so, for example, the prophet Isaiah speaks of a “shoot from the stump of Jesse”,[1] or the prophet Jeremiah speaks of God’s raising up for David a righteous Branch, who “shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”[2] The relationship is retained – which is the work of God’s faithfulness – but it will now have a new shape – as a work of forgiveness, the restoration of those who were in exile.

The important thing here is not the risk that we might get it all wrong but the way in which God is, in a sense, intensifying his investment in the world, his association with the world. “Whatever you do, I will stick by you”, is basically what God offers here. There can now be no backing away from the world, if indeed it is the case that God will remain faithful to his promise to David.

This also means, perhaps surprisingly, that there enters here the possibility of “change” in God. For if it is the case that David is trusted by God – by which we mean that he is given his freedom – then there is a sense in which David and the community he represents take the lead in determining what actual shape the relationship will take. That the relationship stays in place is God’s work; what shape it takes, is the work of God’s human creatures.

This dynamic takes final takes definitive form in what happens when, more than 500 years after the exile and 950 years after David, Jesus arrives in an Israel which labours under foreign rule. Here, again – precisely because the world is not as it should be, in that there is no “David” to be seen – the royal language of “Christ” and “son of God” is part of the political and religious atmosphere. Israel continues to look to the promised faithfulness of God expressed in the covenant with David, awaiting the restoration of the throne of David. And so when Jesus begins to look like somebody very special in their midst, he is quite naturally interpreted in those terms, as the words of the people on Palm Sunday show:

‘Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord— the King of Israel!’… ‘Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming…!’ (John 12.13,15)

For indeed, in his own way, Jesus can be interpreted as God’s faithfulness to what was promised to David. Here the identity of Israel is focussed once more in the figure of a “king” although not sufficiently like the kings before, which is why Jesus ends up dying on the cross. The crucifixion is God’s people missing the point, once again. Once more we set an agenda, reshape the basis of the relationship between ourselves and God. And God’s response is both to honour that reshaping – to take seriously our free hand, even if it slays God’s Christ – and at the same time to turn such misguided work into its opposite: the basis not of a reciprocated rejection but of a renewed relationship with God. And so, as we symbolise in our gathering around the communion table today, our disastrous efforts in the world are made the basis of our relationship to God: we have determined the shape of the relationship in the breaking of a body and the spilling of blood, and God makes sure that it remains a relationship.

Last week the readings suggested the metaphor of a dance as a way of speaking about both human existence and divine existence. It is a metaphor which can be extended also to the relationship between God and his human creatures. In the promises to Israel through David God has chosen his partner, and intends to stick with her, for all her left-footedness. For this God, his people’s being unable to dance doesn’t make the relationship impossible. It just changes what the dance actually is, God falling into step with us, always keeping his feet out from under ours, correcting for rhythm and direction, leading as he follows our lead.

The good news of the gospel is that even the disaster of the crucifixion of Jesus cannot stand between God and his people. Here our lead is one of rebellion and rejection. God’s lead is to take our very rejection of his faithfulness to what was promised to David and hoped for ever after, and to make of that rejection the sign of just how far he will go to be faithful.

The shape we give to our relationship to God has its sign in those marks of our rejection of God – the body and blood of Jesus. In his unfathomable faithfulness, God makes of those marks a sign of his inexhaustible grace, returning them to us as that by which we are to be nourished and bound together: here are the signs of your poverty, returned to you as signs of my grace. God can promise to David what he does not because David, his descendants and his people are necessarily capable of getting their part right, but because God intends to set their part right, whatever happens, whatever it takes.

This places us, and God, beyond the simplistic realms of free will and ethics. In the promise to Israel in David, fulfilled in Israel in Jesus, we are promised that we will be his forever, because God is free – free to be God not merely of what we ought to have been but of what we become.

And so the church prays now as it always has:

‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord — the King of Israel!’

For to bless this one is, in all times, places and circumstances, to be blessed ourselves.

[1] Isaiah 11.1.

[2] Jeremiah 23:5-6.