2 Samuel 11:26-12:14; Psalm 51:1-12
August 15, 2021
- The Wreckage of Human Evil
Today is all about heartache. You have suffered and lost. I have suffered and lost. Every character in this story has suffered and lost. You could even argue that God has suffered and lost, though I know that is harder to understand and express. Specifically here, God has lost the good and godly king. David has lost his standing. In the most traumatic twist in the scandal of David and his abuse of Bathsheba and his assassination of her husband, Uriah, the baby conceived in this violence is also lost. David’s family is cursed; his dignity is devastated; and his peace of mind and comfort as king is forfeit. It is clear David can never go back to the way things were, and his family and the Kingdom will be scarred forever.
It is hard to imagine how one event, one situation, one horrible set of choices can cause such lasting human wreckage, but it often does. When we choose to violate the gift of good and right relationships, the damage can be wide and deep. You would have to wonder how Bathsheba could ever be a real wife to David in our sense of marriage. She had no choice, of course. She had no choice in any of this but was forced to end up as his wife. Even though she does emerge as the mother of the next king, Solomon, there is no justification, no excuse, for what David has done and the damage to so many. It is human nature to look back over the brokenness of things in our lives and try to make sense, to give some explanation, and to try to see God’s hand through our failures. We want to know that there was some meaning to it all.
Certainly, God does bring good, even out of our brokenness. Thankfully, God is the God of redemption and reconciliation and re-creation. Throughout human history, we have known God’s faithfulness, God’s steadfast love, and God’s promise to be our God forever in the grace of Jesus our Christ. Romans 8:28 anchors us in this idea. Joseph told his brothers in Egypt that what they meant for evil, God meant for good. That good provided a home and a hope for all the people. There is a comfort in knowing that God will not leave us or forsake us, but those thoughts might not be of much to help to someone in the middle of the hurt. Ideas can be less comforting than true compassion. Acts of love always trump words of love. And when we have unleashed sin on the lives of others and hurt them, the last thing they may want to have is someone spouting scripture and driving on.
If you have ever read the book, The Shack, it is a challenging and thought-provoking view of God in relationship. It was written by a former pastor whose very beginning was in brokenness. At a year old, his parents took him to Western New Guinea out across the Pacific Ocean for missionary work. The tribe in which they lived still practiced cannibalism, but he lived there until the age of 6. Sadly, in those years, he was repeatedly sexually abused by tribesmen. Then, he went to boarding school where he continued to be abused. You can imagine the hurt that he carried into his adulthood. I mentioned that he went into ministry, himself, but fell into brokenness through an affair. After confessing his sin to the congregation, they responded by firing him. He was able to reconcile with his wife and six children, but the congregation wanted nothing more to do with him except for one church member who showed up at his door with godly love in her heart for him. She told him she was committed to loving him through his brokenness and failure. This was the most perfect picture of God’s love and grace he had ever received, and that women became the model for his character of God the Father in the book who walks with the main character through his struggles with the violent death of a child and his own abusive father. Love was present with the author who left that ministry in the brokenness. Love was present through it all. This is God who loves.
It is incredible what we are capable of inflicting on one another. The reports in Afghanistan right now will bear this out with the Taliban rolling over cities, executing people and stealing whole populations of women. The human wreckage will be significant. This is evil left unchecked. No one gets through this life without being hurt and hurting others. We have all broken relationships and defied God’s love from time to time. Hopefully, none of us has gone to the lengths that David did, but thankfully, we are given hope in a way that he never seemed to receive. This is a distinct quality to this story in which we need to dwell for a moment. The same David who is at the heart of Jewish thought and history, whose star is the symbol of Jewish identity, whose promise is the foundation for the Messiah, whose model provided the ideal king as shepherd: that David is devasted by his violence against Uriah and Bathsheba. And it began with a story.
Nathan or any prophet had a very hard job, a job none of us would ever pick purposefully. Who would want to walk into the king’s court and confront him that he was wrong and had committed evil and God was upset with him? We have seen David react violently to news that troubled him. No king wants to be told how they have failed to be a good king. This was very risky, and moreover, David was supposed to be a godly king. Just wait until Elisha has to prophecy against Ahab and Jezebel. We will get there a little later. Here, however, Nathan needed a plan that would help him get the idea across without drawing the king’s anger against him directly, so he used this parable. It was a brilliant, inspired move. And David bought into the story with his whole heart. He gave the judgment against himself for Nathan. David condemned himself without realizing it. He recognized the severity of the crime in that one moment, seemingly for the first time. He was finally going to understand what he had done.
That’s when the hammer fell and his life was shattered. He woke up to the harshest reality he had ever known. His life, his actions, were on the scale and they were found wanting. He had let down God. This is not a good way to think about it for us, however, and I don’t think this is the way God relates to us. This is how it was expressed back then in the text, though. Of course, people had different ways of viewing God’s feelings toward us. I don’t believe that you or I can let God down in that same sense. We give each other enough shame and disappointment to fill all of our lives. God sees us differently. The God, who already knows everything about us and sees into our hearts and understands our struggles better than we do ourselves, sees us as hurting and broken people in the promise of Christ Jesus. God sees us as struggling children with the possibility to grow and heal and do good. God sees us bearing the pain of this world but also sharing the pain of others. If there is any use to the brokenness that we experience, if there is any good fruit from the sin we commit, it is that it can help us to be more human and more humane toward others. We can identify with others in their brokenness because we have been broken, too, somehow.
To help us understand what to do with the fruit of our sin, I am turning to the exact psalm that David composed about this very time. Usually, we have no idea when and why a psalm might have been written. Psalm 51 is the exception. While it might have been written later that the actual day, it is clearly about the hurt and brokenness and grief and pain that David accepted for his part of stealing Bathsheba and killing Uriah. It is the expression of his feelings from that very time, and this psalm expressly sings the sorrow that his abuse brought about to God. What is striking to me is that he puts his feelings together into this act of worship and gives it to God. He created this spiritual expression of regret and humility and made his brokenness a gift to heal his sin toward God.
Long ago, Native American tribes did something similar when dealing with the worst sin that we inflict on each other. In cases of wrongful death, of murder, or of other violence against another, the tribe addressed the wound together as a community. We still do this today when our connections are hurt, when someone close to our people is killed or shares in violence close to home. It affects everyone, injures everyone, steals goodness from everyone.
But when the spirit of the tribe’s community was abused through murder, the tribes saw the need to address the hole, the missing part, that sin created by filling it with something good but never easy. The tribe that suffered the loss had options for how this injury might be addressed for everyone.
One option was to ceremoniously hold the deceased person’s spirit in significant ceremony to give that spirit rest into eternity. This is something like David’s song, his plea to God to spare the life of the baby who was dying, presumably because of his sin by placing his own life in God’s hands.
An even more interesting response was for the offended tribe to adopt someone from the other tribe of the same age and gender, to replace the person spiritually the community. The new life itself was a gift in that sin. David left Bathsheba in an impossible situation. It is good that he did not throw her away as abused women can often be. He did marry her, and they had another son. While not a good answer, it was better than some.
The last option for the tribe is the most beautiful. The body of the murdered individual would be blanketed by expensive and meaningful gifts by the offending tribe so that the person might become a literal gift, restoring that person and giving that person value, even in their worst state. The spirit can then find peace knowing that the violence has been paid for. This is how David’s story should have ended up. David never honors Uriah or gives anything meaningful as an expression of his love for that family’s life. He destroyed Uriah’s family and its future, and he did nothing to value that life. Better healing is the gift we need for sin.
It should not surprise us that the religious tradition that values these books the most, the Jewish tradition, has at its very core the idea of Tikkun Olam which means the “repair of the world.” We are all born into a hurting, broken, and sinful world, and we all contribute to that with our sin, but God has called us to confront the sin with something else, to heal and mend and repair lives, people, the world itself. It can only be with love. In admitting the truth of our hand and place in the hurt of the world, our responsibility, we should be even more extending the hand of healing through compassion, reconciliation, forgiveness, and grace. This is real love. There is no other hope for tomorrow.
To God be the glory. Amen.