"You are the man"

Sermon by Jamie Howison on 2 Samuel 11:26 - 12:13

In our reading from Second Samuel, we pick up the story where things were left off last week. David has abused his power, sexually exploited Bathsheba, and then tried to cover his tracks by arranging to have her husband Uriah killed in battle. Though earlier identified as a man after God’s own heart, David has now been revealed as precisely the sort of king that Samuel had warned of when Israel first called out to have a king appointed. Careful what you ask for, Samuel had warned, for you might just get it…

For all the promise that David had shown as he gradually ascended to the throne, the reader now knows that he is as liable to fall for the lure of unchallenged power and privilege as any other king in that ancient world. Yet as the story opens, David himself has yet to confront what this power has wrought in his own soul.

“When the wife of Uriah heard that her husband was dead, she made lamentation for him. When the mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife, and bore him a son.” You can almost see him knocking the dust and dirt off his own hands here, saying “you see, it is all covered up, I have a beautiful new wife who has given me a son, and nobody outside of my own inner circle will ever be the wiser.”

“But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord,” which as I suggested last week is a powerful counterpoint to David’s own message to Joab in response to receiving word that Uriah had been successfully killed: “Do not let this matter trouble you.” But it troubles and displeases the Lord, who now sends the prophet Nathan to speak to David.

Nathan stands in the prophetic-covenantal line, which means his calling is to speak truthfully and critically. To use a contemporary term, he is called to speak truth to power, which can be a very dangerous thing. A prophet is not authorized by royal power, nor ordained or consecrated in the manner of priests. No. The prophet’s authority is organic, innate, and spirit-inspired, and the prophet’s role is to speak into the halls of power, be that in the palace or—as will later be true—in the courts of the grand temple Solomon will build. Whether in temple or palace, whenever Israel forgets its core identity as a covenant people bound to a God who both loves them and calls them to truthfulness, justice, and righteousness, a prophet’s voice will begin to thunder.

Nathan knows that to confront David in his sin is risky, so he tells his parable of the two men—one rich, one poor; one with many flocks and one with only one little ewe lamb.

Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was loath to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb, and prepared that for the guest who had come to him.

“What?” David responds. “For such a crime that man deserves to die! He will now need to repay the poor man with four lambs for doing such a heartless thing!”

“You are the man,” replies Nathan, now fairly certain that his parable has walked David toward an unavoidable conclusion.

But press pause here for a moment and note a couple of things. Firstly, nowhere in this reading is Bathsheba identified by her own name. She is instead twice called simply, “the wife of Uriah.” Secondly, it would appear that Nathan is drawing a parallel between the poor man’s “little ewe lamb”—property—and Uriah’s wife Bathsheba. Is she also considered property? Is the prophet suggesting that it is actually Uriah who has been wronged in this whole sordid episode and not Bathsheba, who was merely property the same way that the lamb was the property of the poor man in the parable?

There is no doubt that in these stories we are peering into a patriarchal culture, and one in which a woman’s rights, status, and identity were tightly bound to those of her husband. Yet it strikes me that there is more going on in the text than might be evident at first glance. The narrator’s intent in identifying Bathsheba simply as “the wife of Uriah” may in a sense be to haunt the stories with the appalling nature of Uriah’s murder. Don’t ever forget, David, that to cover your own iniquity you arranged the death of an innocent man. The remainder of your reign, your marriage, even your legacy, will always have a shadow cast across it by the memory of Uriah the Hittite. In fact, even in the long genealogy with which the Gospel according to Matthew begins, it reads, “And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” Even in the gospels, David’s crime is not forgotten.

But what about drawing a parallel between Bathsheba and the poor man’s lamb? Well, look again at what is said about that lamb in Nathan’s little parable:

The poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. He brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his meagre fare, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him.

The ewe lamb grew up with him and with his children, sharing their food, drinking from his cup, snuggling up with him, This is not something anyone would expect of a sheep owner. The man has essentially adopted this lamb as one of his own children, treating her with kindness and tenderness. She is not “owned” simply for the utility of her wool and milk but is rather “like a daughter to him.”

Is Nathan suggesting something about the nature of Uriah and Bathsheba’s marriage? About tenderness, kindness, and warmth? About the depths of the violation of that marriage rendered by David in his exploitation of her and murder of him? Is Nathan saying something about the paucity of David’s own understanding of marriage and intimacy? I believe so, as why else would he have characterized the man’s love for the ewe lamb in such unexpected terms.

“Nathan said to David, ‘You are the man!’” And having declared his hand in telling the parable, the prophet winds up and goes hard at his king, delivering a judgement of almost unimaginable force. God has been faithful to you David, but you have shown yourself faithless to God’s covenant. Your decision to see the sword used to murder Uriah will come back upon your household, which will now always live under the sword. What you thought you were doing in secret has been revealed, and all will come to see violence and exploitation in your own home, your own life.

There is fire in the prophet’s eyes, and as he brings his judgement to an end it will be David’s turn to speak. Here I cite Walter Brueggemann regarding David’s reply:

David’s response in verse 13 is remarkable: “I have sinned.” We might conclude David has no option; he was caught red-handed and had to confess. But in fact he did not have to confess. A lesser man—perhaps his son Solomon—would not have confessed but would have eliminated the prophet instead. The elimination of Nathan could have been easily done, but David did not move against Nathan. David’s confession comes very late, but at least David has submitted. In the eleventh hour, David acknowledges himself to be a child of the torah.

The prophet has called him back to his foundational identity as a covenant-bound person, and David has heard that call and repented.

“Nathan said to David, ‘Now the Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die.’” The Lord has put away your sin and forgiven you David, but it isn’t all sunshine and roses. You are indeed forgiven, but the consequences of this act and of the way you have run your household—or maybe failed to do real justice to your family—remain. So much of that will have very little to do with punishment per se, but instead will have more to do with the raw consequences that fall out from the sort of husband and father David has been. And of course, David’s family will indeed be haunted by division, abuse, and even the sword, and we’ll tell some of those stories as the weeks move forward.

We’ve been spending a fair bit of time with this David character over these summer months, and maybe you’re beginning to wonder why. Sure, these are biblical stories, and so it is probably good to be familiar with them… but for week after week after week?

But that’s actually the point. Ancient Israel’s faith and imagination was shaped by the stories it told. The tradition reveres David, positively delighting in the story of how the shepherd boy becomes the shepherd king. It is one of the many instances in which the unlikely one, the hesitant one, the seemingly weak one, is called upon as a vessel of God’s work; almost a “last shall be first” sort of a dynamic embedded in Israel’s identity. But these ancient scribes insisted on following the stories right through the darkest chapters, because in showing a character like David in his entirety, something critical about human nature is revealed. We are invited, as the listening, story-telling community, to ponder the extremes of what humans can be, and to then confess our own stumbling fragility in response.

I would love to be able to say that with his confession—“I have sinned against the Lord”—David completely reclaimed his identity as a child of the torah and then lived an untroubled, uncomplicated life as a fully restored king. Yet there is a quality of lostness to David by this point, and as much as he remembers that he is meant to be a covenant king, he will never entirely untangle himself and his family from the legacy of the mess he has made. His son Solomon will always be the child he fathered “by the wife of Uriah the Hittite.”

And yet still he is forgiven, and still he is beloved of God. David’s path will not be easy, and he will live with the consequences of his choices, yet still does he stumble along in the light of gracious forgiveness.

As do we, a people with a faith and imaginations formed by the stories we tell. For all our failings and foibles, we are forgiven and reconciled again and again and again, limping our way to the promised New Jerusalem; to the One who proclaimed, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”