Proper 13, Year B | II Samuel 11:26-12:13a
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
August 4, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
Last week our Hebrew Bible reading left us in the middle of the tragic tale of David and Bathsheba. King David’s rape of his friend Uriah’s wife has resulted in pregnancy. David tries to cover up his crime by making Uriah appear to be the father, even though he’s been deployed in a military siege for some time. Uriah, although a foreigner to Israel, proves himself more loyal to both his military comrades and the Hebrew God than the king has been, refusing to spend time at his house while “the ark and Israel and Judah remain in booths; and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field.”[1] Having failed in his scheme, David cooks up a new plan, returning Uriah to the battlefield carrying instructions outlining his own suicide mission.
I ended last week’s sermon by having us sit with Bathsheba in her distress, hoping we might accompany her throughout this week in her completely undeserved shame, loss, grief, and despair. I asked that we consider our own complicity in rewriting and perpetuating stories wherein the victim carries the blame for someone else’s crime and that we rethink the way we tend to ignore or even try to erase our heroes’ flaws rather than face the reality and complexity that “good” people are sometimes responsible for truly horrific actions.
We pick up the story several months later, well after Uriah’s death and David’s magnanimous marriage to Bathsheba, whereby he would have honored his friend’s memory by rescuing his wife from shame and stoning for “her” crime of adultery. Everything’s going great for David. He remains on his throne. Other than the skirmish where Uriah died, his war appears to be going well. The whole situation even handed him yet another wife and a brand new baby.
Up to this point, the Bible hasn’t made any reference to the moral aspects of David’s actions. The king doesn’t seem to realize he’s done anything wrong. No one from his court or among his commanders appears to have addressed what happened. Even the servants seem to have taken it all in stride. That makes me wonder, as someone pointed out after the service last week, just how common this kind of behavior may have been under David’s rule. How long and in what ways might the people around him simply have been enabling this kind of abuse? Was Bathsheba alone among the women of Jerusalem, or is this the only time David got caught? These are questions we can never answer.
Finally, 27 verses into the story, we see our first hint that someone has been paying attention: “the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.”[2]
Enter Nathan the prophet, who we first met a few weeks ago when David decided to build a temple for the Lord. After initially encouraging David in the endeavor, Nathan returned to David with a message from God that he would not be allowed to construct this sacred space but that his son would receive that opportunity instead. Instead of David building God a house, God promised to build David’s house, maintaining his throne and family throughout the generations.[3]
I imagine Nathan was pretty nervous as he approached David this time. This is a king who’s just proven he’ll do whatever he wants with no thought for long-term consequences, and a challenge to his person would likely be met as treason. But Nathan still chooses to go and speak, although he approaches David’s behavior from a side angle.
David grew up tending sheep, so Nathan’s tale likely would have played to his nostalgia for the good old days. And David’s response the story of this stolen and slaughtered lamb is telling. Enraged, he condemns the perpetrator as worthy of death but tempers the sentence, revealing his knowledge of the law Moses had established for the Hebrew people centuries earlier: “When someone steals an ox or a sheep, and slaughters it or sells it, the thief shall pay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep.”[4] Facing doom, Nathan grits his teeth, points his finger, and declares, “You are the man!”[5]
And here we find the first glimmer of hope in our otherwise grim tale: David listens. He takes the first step toward repentance and confesses. And while it might not sound like much by our standards, it is at least something of a start.
This moment might just be why David remains amongst our Bible heroes. Despite lying to himself for months, when Nathan finally challenges his behavior, David accepts the critique. He recognizes his desperate failures and begins taking steps along the path of repentance, of returning to the God he had formerly followed. Our Psalm today, which you might also recognize from our Ash Wednesday service, is actually born from this event. The header, a line included at the beginning of many Psalms that we don’t generally include in worship, says, “A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.”[6]
Immediately after our reading ends, Nathan tells David, “the Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die.”[7] While God put away David’s sin, note that God’s forgiveness didn’t eliminate the consequences of David’s actions. From this point on, the promise of God building and sustaining David’s house becomes entwined with a curse: not only will “the sword…never depart from your house,”[8] but the Lord “will raise up trouble against you from within your own house.”[9] David’s actions, though not counted against him, carry with them a terrible aftermath, not only for him but for those around him as well. His children will suffer. His wives will suffer. The people of Israel will suffer. All because of him.
Sin begets sin. We’ll miss most of the story, but one of his sons, Absalom, will very nearly succeed in usurping David’s throne, chasing his father into hiding like Saul had so many years ago and publicly displaying his power by doing to some of David’s wives what David had done to Bathsheba in private.
Although it pardons an offense, forgiveness—even forgiveness directly from God!—does not and will not eliminate repercussions. An action sown will reap its harvest, and one sin’s aftereffects often spread harm far beyond the guilty party. God may have put away David’s sin, but despite his confession and turn toward God, everyone with any connection to the king—from royal family to the nameless slave laboring in the kingdom’s farthest reaches—will be forced to bear aspects of David’s curse.
Forgiveness does not cancel an action’s outcome. Nor does it alleviate the burden of responsibility. Coming from the other direction, forgiveness also does not demand that a victim ever again trust their abuser. The sin may be absolved, but that doesn’t somehow magically restore relationships. Repentance takes time to prove itself, and reconciliation after injury may never be complete, despite either party’s desire. Facing the consequences of our actions and humbly accepting their results—while doing what we can to alleviate their effects on others—is a far greater evidence of repentance than confession alone can ever be.
So ends our text, and so ends our tale. As I said last week, let us all take warning. I once again leave us with a portion of the Exhortation from our Book of Common Prayer:
“Judge yourselves…lest you be judged by the Lord. Examine your lives and conduct by the rule of God’s commandments, that you may perceive wherein you have offended in what you have done or left undone, whether in thought, word, or deed. And acknowledge your sins before Almighty God, with full purpose of amendment of life, being ready to make restitution for all injuries and wrongs done by you to others; and also being ready to forgive those who have offended you, in order that you yourselves may be forgiven. And then, being reconciled with one another, come to the banquet of that most heavenly Food”[10]
—join in the unity found as the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.
[1] II Samuel 11:11 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] II Samuel 11:27
[3] II Samuel 7:11-16
[4] Exodus 22:1
[5] II Samuel 12:7
[6] Psalm 51:0
[7] II Samuel 12:13
[8] II Samuel 12:10
[9] II Samuel 12:11
[10] 1979 Book of Common Prayer, “An Exhortation,” pg. 316-317