Our
passage this morning begins with David going against the accepted social norm
of staying home when the rest of Israel went to war. Although I am not a huge
proponent of war and all that it involves, I do have to admit that, David, in
choosing to stay home when he should have been going to war, was a poor choice.
It was culturally and politically bad form, at the time, for a King to not lead
his troops into battle. It was his first mistake in a serious of very bad
mistakes.
And
then what do we do with what happens next? David, the ideal king, the king by
whom all other Biblical kings are measure, the one whom scripture tells us was
a man after God’s own heart, does this thing with Bathsheba: takes advantage of, forces himself upon,
puts her in a position where she is unable to say, “No.” And as if that is
not enough then causes her husband to die in battle, in other words has Uriah murdered
and then marries her. Meanwhile the identity of Bathsheba is deleted from the
Biblical account of these events. That is to say that her name is only
mentioned once when she is “brought to” but for the rest of the account that
she is called “the woman”, or “the wife of Uriah.”
***From Nazarenes4Peace: "To dehumanize is the work in direct opposition to the incarnation of God in Christ. Be wary of anyone who claims to follow Christ but devalues and dehumanizes others." ***
But so that we can truly get the impact of how it feels for Bathsheba to loose her name (and in many ways looses her humanity as so many woman who find themselves used and abused by men in power and position so often do) I will follow the example of scripture as I talk about her, so we can have compassion for the one who is "lost" in this story.
WHAT CAN I SAY???? This woman is
forced to do something she probably would not otherwise do, her husband is
killed and then she is married to the man who uses his power to take advantage
of her!!!
So
once he has acquired “this woman” to be his wife and has added her and her
unborn child into household, David breathes a sigh of relief; this nonsense is
over, let’s get on with the business of being Israel’s greatest king. All is
well.
But
all is not well. He has committed a
serious of very sinful things. He
watched a married woman bath, he called her to him, he used his power to have is way with her. He got her pregnant. He attempted to trick Uriah, her husband into
believing the child was his, when that did not work, he orchestrated Uriah’s
murder via battle. When Uriah’s murder
is reported to him by Joab, he actually tells Joab to not let this seem like
evil in Joab’s sight. It is almost as if,
if he declares that it is not evil, it will not be evil. Then when the dust has settled and the
mourning period is over, David takes Uriah’s wife as his wife! And he goes on with his life.
All
is good. And he might have gone on with
his life, thinking that the whole thing worked out pretty well, but then God
interrupts David’s sense of security by speaking into the situation via Nathan the
prophet, using a story. And as most pastors know, a good story can make the
hardest lesson to easier to swallow. So, Nathan comes to David with a story to
teach David a lesson. And since David
spent his early years with sheep, the story is about a beloved lamb.
When
I was a teenager, my mother had a friend who had a small family farm. They had horses, which the mother used to
teach horse riding lessons to earn money.
They also had a cow, once a year, a lamb, once a year and several goats
that reproduced twice year. The children
would play with these animals, feed them, clean up after them take care of them
watch them grow.
All
their animals had names and all of their food had matching names. They always knew who they sold and who they
ate. As a young teen it was the first
time I was really confronted with the fact that meat did not naturally grow in
Styrofoam packaging with cellophane wrappings.
It might sound cruel to eat an animal who has a name, but these children
understood that animals were raised for meat and were fun while they were alive
and were yummy when they died.
In
the story that Nathan tells, there is a man and his family who have a ewe
lamb. This little lamb, this family had,
was not just another lamb among a large herd they were preparing to eat or sell
to be eaten. This is the only lamb of a poor family and was treated as one of
the family. It was a pet lamb that was
apparently, unlike the “pets” the family I knew, was not meant to be eaten. It was kept, and cherished.
Well
this family had a rich neighbor who one day, when a visitor came to town
decided that he did not want to kill one of the many sheep in his large herd
for dinner for his guest, but would instead steal the beloved lamb of this
family, kill it and eat it. What a
horrible thing to do! It was unfair,
unkind and just wrong!
I
can understand how this family and this man felt. When I was 5 years old we had a stray kitten
who came to live in our yard. It was
beautiful. It was orange and it was
fluffy. She was friendly and sweet
tempered. She let me pick her up and
play with her, and you know do all the things a 5 year old wants to do with a
kitten that most kittens won’t let children do to them. My mom gave me permission to feed her and
take care of her. I named her
Cattie. Soon she took up residence in
our dog’s house. Our dog refused to
ever go in her dog house, but the cat seemed to love it in there. She and the dog would play together in the yard. In fact she rarely left our yard, she was our
cat and we were her family.
She was the kind of cat who would cuddle with
me and play with me. She was loved by
everyone in the family. At this time my
mother had just recently had my baby sister and was busy with the new baby, but
she intended when things settled down to get the cat her shots and bring her in
the house, but until then she wanted the cat to stay outside so as to not bring
her potential germs into the house with the new baby.
Before
my mother could do this though our neighbor’s parents came to visit. They kept
their RV in the neighbor’s drive for about a week. We would often see them talking to Cattie
through the fence, and reaching over to pet her. And then one morning the RV was gone and the
cat was gone as well. We inquired of our
neighbors and they told us that their parents took her home with them because
she needed a home. WHAT? She had a home! She was ours.
They had to reach over our fence to take her. We were devastated. They took our cat. They took my cat. I loved that cat. And someone just decided to take her home
with them without even asking.
I
guess from David’s reaction to Nathan’s story that he had loved a lamb or two
in his days as a shepherd. He probably
knew what it was like to nurture and care for an animal in such a way that it
became more than just another animal but became a beloved pet. When told this story David declares that not
only should the rich man have to pay fourfold back to the poor man and his
family but he should be put to death!
You don’t take another man’s beloved animal!
And
then Nathan goes in for the punch and tells David that he is the rich man in
this story. He took Uriah’s wife for his
own and David may think he has gotten away with it but God knows what he has
done. In fact God is taking this as
personal offense. God does not simply
see this action as a sin against Uriah, which most certainly it is, but God
sees this as an offense against God. God
had anointed David king, saved him from the hand of Saul who wanted to kill
him, gave him a kingdom, a house and many (6) wives and God would have
continued to bless David. But David has
returned God’s kindness and provision with evil. Where God has worked to spare David’s life,
David has murdered Uriah, where God has blessed David with wives; David goes
and takes another man’s wife for himself.
The consequences for David’s actions will match the sins committed,
David has killed Uriah with the swords of the Ammonites and therefore there
will be killing in his own household, David has taken his neighbor’s wife and
therefore his wives will be taken by his neighbor; seems just and fair.
When
confronted with his own sin, David realizes the extent of his own sins and
repents before God of all that he has done.
He realizes that he has not merely sinned against Uriah or Uriah’s wife,
but he has sinned against God. And he
seems to truly be repentant of what he has done, so God forgives him.
That
is it. David repents and God forgives
him; nothing more nothing less. Our
modern sense of justice is almost offended by how easy it is. David says, he has sinned and God puts
David’s sin away. We can only assume
that David seeks to remedy the problems in his life, in how he is living and
his ways of thinking that have brought him to this place. That this repentance
resulted in a transformation in his life, his view of women perhaps, his
understanding of what it means to be the holy person God was calling him to be.
Those are all assumptions. We do know
after the death of the child the wife of Uriah bore to him, he once again did
as a good king should and lead the armies in battle when they went out against
the ammonites. So there is a change in
his actions following his repentance. After the conclusion of these events in
his life, David works to be a better person, a better king and to do what is
right and good in the sight of the God. Perhaps we can even say that the man
who is a “man after God’s own heart” was the man who emerged from this sinful
period in David’s life.
The
death of the child and many of the issues David has within his family are seen
as part of the consequences of David’s sinful actions. The natural consequences of David’s sin aside
and the ongoing issues we see in his family life notwithstanding. The amazing
thing about this passage is that David repents and God forgives him and then
both he and God move on from there.
David had done so much. He had
failed God, he had failed Uriah, he had disrespected Uriah’s wife, he had
allowed his power and privileged to blind his judgment and give him the idea
that he had rights that were not his, allowed him to see himself above other
men and beyond the taint of evil, even himself in the position of God, able to
declare what is evil and what is good.
But when confronted with the reality of his sin and the extent to which
he had fallen into evil, he repented, he turned to God and God forgave him.
This
is good news! Good news for me and for
you. Many of us will probably never
commit adultery in our lives, most of us will probably never murder somebody,
we may look lustfully at someone
else’s spouse, we may misuse those
around us, we may allow power and
prestige to blind our judgment or any number of other sins, failings, and wrong
doings. The fact of the matter is that
most of us in our lives, in our Christian walks will be less than God’s best
for us, we will not love God with our whole hearts, we will not always love our
neighbors, in fact we might even treat any number of the people we encounter
from day to day, people we meet in passing as well as those we hold dear, with
something less than the respect and loving kindness they deserve. We will fail God and one another in many ways
between now and when we find ourselves on the other side of eternity. We will sin; we will do evil in the sight of
the Lord. But the good news is that God
forgives! And God does not expect much
from us. God simply expects repentance and
then allows us to start fresh, anew to work with God to live right, to love God
to love one another as we should. We
will have to deal with the consequences of the poor and sinful choices we have
made, but with God we can start over. Our relationship with God can be
restored. We can repent and we will be
forgiven! This is a glorious thing.
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