David and Bathsheba

Church of the Incarnation

Nov. 7, 2010

Text: II Samuel 11-12

Gospel Reading: Luke 8:42b-48

In II Samuel 11, David has a complete breakdown.  His success as a leader and politician ruins him as a human being.  He is so out of control sexually he abducts and rapes an innocent woman.  He attempts to cover up the crime by murdering the woman’s husband.  He has become a cynical politician who uses people without conscience, who smiles at others while plotting to kill them, who says what he knows is not true so that he can control the public perception of who he is.  You might call to mind the attempted cover-up by Richard Nixon or the outsized sexual appetites of Bill Clinton.  But David’s descent is far darker.  Only Shakespeare could write a script like this.  And yet it’s not Shakespeare.  It’s the artfully told story of God’s people wrestling with how to tell the story of their first and greatest King.

The writings of the Jewish people and the writings of the early Christians offer us a fresh perspective on how to live with faith in God.  We can be glad to be among God’s people.  And we can have confidence that God’s love for us is real and true.  Yet this spirit ought to be combined with modesty and humility.  To be self-critical is part of our tradition.  Jews had no problem confessing that their greatest King was a moral disaster.  Christians wrote the gospels and pictured the disciples as constantly getting it all wrong.  So let us not be caught patting ourselves on the back for our religion.  Let’s not be prickly when others criticize all that’s wrong with Christians and Christian communities.  Instead, let’s beat them to it!

This story is written for people like us.  We are too often drawn to what looks shiny, what glitters, what looks big and important and successful.  It is almost impossible for people who rack up win after win, for people given great influence over others, for people highly compensated and culturally esteemed -- NOT to wind up like David.  Yet David’s story can liberate us from our anxious and frenetic project of trying to make our lives matter.  We can find the face of Jesus Christ in this debauched story.  But not in the figure of David.  We will have to look elsewhere.

The story’s beginning is saturated with psychological complexity.  In the Spring - when kings “go out to battle” - all of David’s military officials and soldiers go off to fight.  But King David stays home.  He used to fight.  From his very beginnings, David was a warrior King just like Saul before him.  He would always be remembered as the courageous teenager who took down Goliath.  For ten years prior to becoming King David was the wily and brave leader of a guerilla militia in the wilderness.  But things have changed. This is now a bureaucracy, and for organizational purposes there has been a division of labor.  The fighting is done by military officials and by soldiers.  David is now a Near Eastern Prince.

So the fighting men go off to battle.  For them, bravery and courage and adrenaline and comeradery and blood and death.  For David, a palace, a comfortable couch, leisurely nap, and a stroll around the roof.  In John Updike’s Rabbit, Run series, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is a high school basketball star who doesn’t know what to do with himself after he’s done being a star athlete.  It’s a fictional account of the psychological complexity of not knowing how to adjust to the next phase of life.  David, once a warrior, a guy’s guy, now wears a robe and takes naps.  When you see a man well into his 30’s still wearing a baseball cap backwards, you will know that the transition from adolescence to adulthood is not going so well.  Many men, not sure what to do with themselves after a period of youthful vigor, resort to inhabiting their office space like it’s still a locker room, relating to their colleagues like competitors in a never ending quest for that old rush.  

The problem is not confined to men of course.  All of us deal with transitions into new phases of life.  Sometimes the new phase feels less energizing.  Less challenging or interesting.  What do you do when you feel like your best days are behind you?  David chooses a path of selfishness.  He re-creates the world as a play in which he is the star, the only protagonist that matters.  All others become props in his show.  David will get ahead and seek his own interests. And he will sacrifice anyone around him for his own, anxious, fragile, ego.

So David stays behind.  It’s late in the afternoon, and David has just gotten up from an afternoon nap.  He’s walking on the roof of his palace.  And he sees is a beautiful woman bathing.  Now we know where this story is going.  We know that David has some issues with women.  Since becoming King, he’s been collecting wives and girl friends like he’s Hugh Heffner.  

The narrator tells us that “the woman was very beautiful” - At the risk of stating the obvious, this is a story about the sexual energy produced in a moment of attraction to another person.  So this is a story about desire.  I have always found the Bible fairly clear-eyed about the beauty of human bodies and the pleasures of desire.  Of course the Bible also pictures sexual desire as a potentially dangerous force between persons.  Like all good gifts, it can be used to harm others.   God created us to take delight in others, to recognize and be attracted to others -- others beautiful to us either physically or emotionally or in terms of energy or talent or leadership.  This is a healthy kind of desire.  A non-repressed sexuality.

In a book on architecture (Alain de Botton) I came across this observation:  Most of us have had the experience of looking at unattainably expensive houses in magazines, and then feeling sad, “as one does on passing an attractive stranger in a crowded street” (12).  He compares seeing but not having a beautiful home to the experience of seeing but not having the beautiful strangers we pass on the street.  Perhaps this makes us sad on some level.  But it is also very normal and healthy to notice beautiful people on crowded streets.  

So David sees a beautiful woman bathing.  And something dark in him will not allow her to remain a beautiful stranger.  His first response is to send someone to find out who this woman is.  Her name is Bathsheba.  Bat-sheba, in Hebrew, means “daughter of Sheba.”  She is the daughter to a father named Eliam.  She is the wife to a husband named Uriah.  She is presented to us in the story not as an independent woman.  She is already defined by other men.  She belongs to others, but that does not stop David.

The next sentence comes at us rapid fire.  “So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her.  Then she returned to her house” (v. 4).  It’s all verbs.  All action.  And David is in complete control.  The tone is matter of fact.  It registers no emotion.  This is the way power functions.  It exercises control.  One commentator (Brugemann) writes: “The action is quick.  The verbs rush as the passion of David rushed.  He sent; he took; he lay (v. 4).  The royal deed of self-indulgence does not take very long.  There is no adornment to the action. . . . There is nothing but action.  There is no conversation.  There is no hint of caring, of affection, of love - only lust.  David does not call her by name, does not even speak to her.”

You may have noticed that the rushing narrative pace is blocked by a parenthetical remark about Bathsheba’s menstrual cycle.  This is probably a later insertion by editors.  

1) Perhaps it is meant to de-sexualize the scene.  From David’s perspective, Bathsheba’s bathing is a very sensual scene.  We might be tempted to  blame beautiful Bathsheba for sponge bathing herself on a visible roof.  Maybe the editor is trying to block this misreading.  NO! she was a good Jewish woman ritually cleansing herself just after her period.  

2) Or maybe the editor was disgusted by David’s behavior and wanted to ratchet up the horror of the crime.  David had sexual relations with a woman when she was ritually unclean.  

Regardless, in the next verse the story takes a sharp turn.  “The woman conceived; and she sent and told David, ‘I’m pregnant’.” (11:5).  Here Bathsheba speaks for the first time.  It’s just two words in Hebrew.  She makes no demands or threats, just “I’m pregnant.”  With Bathsheba’s pregnancy, the whole story shifts.  What David wanted “hidden” and “secret” will now be “visible” and “public.”  We often want to hide the ways we harm others and enlarge ourselves.  This is a particular problem for those who are powerful.  But David’s sin wasn’t private.  It has already pulled Bathsheba into the dark orbit of David’s life.  She is only the first of many who will be harmed by David.

Bathsheba speaks: “I’m pregnant”  And the succinctness of her speech suggests that she is more capable than we may at first have imagined.   With these simple words David’s control begins to slip.  He has been, up til now, the powerful King who speaks and controls all others.  Now Bathsheba speaks, and the situation begins slipping away from him.  This is one of the reasons Jesus warns us about pursuing success and power, influence and visible prestige.  The desire to be on top always carries within it a readiness for violence, a willingness to fight to keep what we’ve gained.

David cannot control Bathsheba.  But maybe he can still control the damage another way.  If David can get her husband Uriah back from battle to sleep with his wife, the pregnancy can be safely reassigned.  So David sends word for Joab, his military commander, to send Uriah back to Jerusalem.  The conversation between David and Uriah plumbs the darkest depths of David’s capacity for cruelty.  Of course to become a powerful Prince you have to know how to spin a little, how to manage people and get them into positions valuable to you.  So David does not say anything close to the truth.  He does not say, “While you were fighting for me I raped and impregnated your wife Bathsheba,” Instead, David smiles and makes small talk.  He asks for news about Joab, the soldiers, and the war effort.  

He encourages Uriah to “go down” to his house and enjoy the company of his wife.  But Uriah didn’t go home.  He slept with David’s servants at the entrance to David’s palace.  When David hears Uriah didn’t “go down” to his house, he calls Uriah again.  “Uriah, you’ve been fighting a war, you’ve made the long journey back, you deserve to celebrate.  Why didn’t you go down to your house, to your lovely wife?”  Uriah’s response is devastating.  “The ark of God and the armies of Israel are living in tents.  Joab and my fellow soldiers are camping in the open field.  How could I go down to my house, to eat and drink and enjoy the company of my wife?  I will not do such a thing!”  Uriah’s sense of honor and fidelity to his people serves as a judgment on David’s shameful use of power.  Uriah is no King.  But he looks more Kingly than David.  It is Uriah who refuses to abandon his people.

The situation is getting away from David.  And he is running out of options.  David writes a note to Joab his military commander: “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.”   He seals the note.  And he places it in Uriah’s hands and asks him to deliver it personally.

David got what he wanted: Uriah - and several others - are killed, and now the pregnancy can be safely reassigned without any questions.  So David - like any decent politician or CEO - issues a press release, spins the story and covers his tracks.  And it looks as if David will get away with his treachery.  He brings Bathsheba into his palace and makes her his wife, and she bears him a son.

David’s life was filled with God - he was chosen by God, loved and protected by God.  He trusted God in the wilderness, relied on God for life and hope.  And yet, God is conspicuously absent from this episode in David’s life.  But there is a prophet named Nathan, and God sends Nathan to confront and judge David’s wickedness.  Two surprising things happen at this point in the story -- David repents and God forgives.  But here are Nathan’s piercing words: “You will not die.  Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child that is born to you shall die.”  Bathsheba gives birth to a son who is not named.  God strikes the child because of David’s sin and the child dies seven days later.  

We can find JC in David’s story, but not in David’s face.  Rather, Jesus appears to us here in the faces of Bathsheba, Uriah, and the cursed, dying child.  David uses women sexually in order to express his sense of entitlement.  Bathsheba and others are simply pawns in the dramatic game of his life.  Jesus blesses and heals women in order to express his commitment to God’s way of “peace” or shalom.  For Jesus, the hemorrhaging woman is not an object beneath him.  She is not a convenient way for him to shore up his fragile and anxious and needy self.  She is the creature whom God loves, and whom Jesus gladly serves.  She is not crushed by his royal power.  “Power has gone out from me,” says Jesus.  She receives power from him, and in that power she receives healing, and dignity.

Like Bathsheba, Jesus is pulled into our stories and suffers greatly.  Like Uriah, Jesus lives with fidelity to others.  And like the unnamed baby, Jesus is the innocent one who dies as one cursed.  It may be hard to hear, but God loves David.  God forgives David.  This is the good news for all of us.  God loves even those who have twisted their lives out of shape and harmed others in the process.  God forgives us when we use others so that we can get ahead.  Jesus Christ frees us from the prison of getting, grasping, having, possessing, winning, and controlling.  God offers us a chance for a new way forward.