Sunday, October 21, 2018

The real king and queen of Israel

2 Samuel 11-12

            There was a king and queen of Israel during the time of David, but it was not at all as the nation of Israel thought.
I’ll get to them in a minute.
            You might recall, deep in the recesses of your memories, that God didn’t want to give the people of Israel a king. God was supposed to be their king, and anybody else was going to be a shallow imitation. But they asked and asked and asked, and God, being the parent that he was, unable to say “No” forever, eventually said, “Ask your mother,” which was also him, so that was confusing, but eventually he relented.
            “Fine!” God said, “You can have a king.”
            And much like that rare occasion when a child gets rewarded after hearing “No” from their parents a thousand times, the result of the children of Israel getting what they want is a disaster. The line of kings leads Israel through the Promised Land and out of it before you know it.
            David was supposed to be the greatest king. He’s the subject of our reading today, but by the time we pick up with the story, we should realize it may have been better if he would have been killed by Goliath long before, because when David falls, he falls hard. The hero-David becomes the villain-David, who uses his power to have an affair with a married woman named Bathsheba, and afterwards, unable to coerce Uriah, her husband, into covering his tracks, he goes and has him killed instead. It’s the kind of thing we would hardly be surprised to hear on the news today, as everybody expects their politicians to abuse their power.
Not everybody! You might say. Surely there are those in power who don’t abuse it, and there are—absolutely—but there are only two paths with power: You either use it and abuse it, or you give it away. Neutrality is not an option—not in this game. Any time a person in power gives away power they are starting down that road toward discipleship, following Jesus who told us that to be a disciple we are to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow. The problem is that giving that power away also means giving away your influence. History is littered with anonymous people who had power and gave it away, but we don’t know who they are.
Meanwhile, anybody with power who we consider “good”—our moral leadership, you might call them—has figured out how to work this world of transactions and keep enough power to keep doing “good.” This may well be pragmatic, but it isn’t righteousness. At best, it’s making do in a broken world. The paradox of Christian discipleship is that you can’t follow Jesus and retain any power for yourself whatsoever.
            In our story today, David had the opportunity to give away his power in a variety of ways. He could have not reached out and taken Bathsheba; he could have not sent Uriah the Hittite off to die in war; he could have refused the temptation of what he wanted, but as king he was able to do all those kings, because to be king was to have what he wanted—whatever he wanted. To be king is to have no earthly repercussions for sin.
At least, that’s how it seems until God reappears, throwing a monkey wrench in all this with the prophet Nathan. “You are the man!” Nathan screams in David’s face. You are the one who took the sheep—Bathsheba—from the poorest meager shepherd—Uriah—and then you had the shepherd killed. Not only that, you didn’t fear any repercussions because you believed that, as king, it was within your power to do so. David forgot about God, because power makes us believe we are our own God. Only a person in need of something understands the source of that blessing. The repercussions of David’s action are terrible… but, sadly, they are worst of all for Bathsheba. She was taken by David; her husband is killed and her son dies because of David’s sin. What did Bathsheba do to deserve that?
The sad truth is that sin always disproportionately affects the victims. Victims are victimized again, perpetrators seem to skate by with minimum punishment, offering wisdom like a Virginia Congressman, who this week told inmates at a county jail that, “You think you’re having a hard time—I got $5 million worth of negative ads going at me.”
You see, the kings will never imagine they aren’t the ones under threat.
David thinks he is king, but there can still only be one king, and it surely is not him. Sure, David can wear all the kingly attire—and, yes, he was anointed for the role—but his mistake is in believing that that throne is ultimate. Meanwhile, God does something unexpected—something even the people in the story don’t recognize—something we only know because of Jesus, who allows us to look back, knowing that God meets people not on throne chairs in kingdom halls but on the throne of the cross. So, rather than looking for God in the temple, we have to turn to the most desolate alleys and the most lonesome characters. That’s where God’s mantle rests, and that’s where we find Bathsheba.
Now, it’s tempting to say we are supposed to go and lift up these Bathshebas of the world—that that’s what a Christian is called to do, and it might even be the right thing to do but for the wrong reasons. Bathsheba is not lowly; Bathsheba is not the one in need of saving. Jesus says “Take up your cross and follow.” There are only two people in the story doing this and one is Bathsheba. She’s the worthy queen that David didn’t know, but David’s kingship isn’t what he thought either. After Jesus, who obliterates the distinctions between Jews and Gentiles, the king no longer has anything to do with bloodline. Rather, the king is the one who sacrifices it all for the sake of others. The king is Uriah the Hittite, who only utters a single sentence in all of scripture—a sentence about his duty as a soldier. The real king is the man who gives himself for the sake of a nation and a leader, in David, who wants him dead.
King Uriah. Queen Bathsheba. Neither of them are ever crowned, but who cares? That’s just what the Israelites wanted to do to signify a king, but, after all, as God told Samuel when David was anointed, “Man looks on the outside, but God looks on the heart.”
The true measure of a king or queen is not the power they acquire but how much they give away. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus talks about the poor woman who gives away a couple pennies when he says “Truly… this poor widow has put in more than all” the others (Lk 21:3), because the measure is not how much you have but how much you have left. Bathsheba, who lost nearly everything—her husband, her son, her dignity, her freedom—and Uriah—who lost it all, killed by a king’s greed—were the only ones who approach the standard God levies on kingship.
For us today, who look back on this story, it’s tempting to talk about how much we need to lift up the Bathshebas of the world and how much we need to avenge the deaths of the Uriahs, but we have to be careful. If we speak up for the Bathshebas and the Uriahs it cannot be out of our generosity and power, because they are the true kings and queens we need. Instead, if we are to speak up it should be to point to the real examples of faithful living, because they are so much better than the fake imitations we have installed on the thrones before us. Through all of this, we walk the way of the cross, where power is perfected in humility and self-sacrifice, where judgment meets grace, and where the proud and haughty are brought to their knees.
I want to close by talking a little about royal blood, since we get hung up on this stuff, and it certainly plays a role in how we view David and Bathsheba.
I find one of the most interesting verses in the whole New Testament to be Matthew 1:6. The book of Matthew kicks off the New Testament with a thrilling genealogy, which is every Bible nerd’s favorite and every Sunday morning lector’s worst nightmare—lots of names, devoid of context. There, in Matthew 1:6, in the middle of all those names—from Abraham to Isaac and so on, it says, “and Jesse the father of King David”—now, this is where it gets interesting—“And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.”
The wife of Uriah. She’s only one of four women mentioned in the genealogy—the other three being Tamar, who was raped, Ruth, who was taken in a levirate marriage, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, who had Jesus out of wedlock. Four women—all of whom had relationships that were not “proper,” even as none of these relationships were the woman’s choice. Every one of them is a victim either of an individual or a system, but before we pity them, understand that they are also the ones who show us the way of discipleship—they are some of the first to walk the way of the cross. Think about it for a minute. Why did the Gospel of Matthew use that wording? Why say, “David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.” Why mention not only Bathsheba (and not by name), but also Uriah?
Because Jesus was about to turn the whole world upside down, and those two—Uriah and Bathsheba—alongside Tamar and Ruth and others found in that genealogy—Isaac and Hezekiah and Amos, to name a few—were the footprints we are to follow as we walk that way of the cross. So many of the figures in that genealogy were victims and perpetrators. Yet, in Jesus Christ, victimhood is not the thing that defines us any longer. In fact, victims are made glorious in their weakness, perfected in their imperfection, and made saints by their deaths. The Magnificat lays it bare: The real king and queen of Israel will stand not on the throne of power but on the throne of the cross and what the world sees as weakness will be revealed as strength; where the world remains haughty, those would-be victims know: The path to glory doesn’t lead to the mountain—not at first—because this God, who meets us in despair, raises Bathsheba and Uriah, humbles David, and gives us a promise that there is no depth where God will not find you and no height where God will not raise you.
So, behold the true king and queen of Israel: A dead soldier and his wife, who never had a choice. This is the kind of God we’re dealing with here: A God of grace, who is turning the whole world upside down.

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