Proper 12, Year B | II Samuel 11:1-15
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
July 28, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
There is, once again, far too much to talk about across all of our texts today. Our Gospel reading has switched from Mark to John for five weeks, offering a much expanded version of the feeding of the five thousand and the discussion and conflict that ensues from that particular miracle. Paul has some complex and difficult things to say in Ephesians as he closes up the first half of his letter. And our Psalm offers some intriguing alternative readings that suggest the complaint about injustice is directed at the gods rather than people.
However, in our day, it seems impossible to avoid looking at the tale of David and Bathsheba. This is a deeply ugly and troubling story, and I’m going to deal with it as honestly and straightforwardly as I can. That means we’re going to have to deal with challenging topics, including sexual assault. If anything I say begins to make you uncomfortable, please know that I will not be offended should anyone need to step out of the service. It is okay to take care of yourself!
As I mentioned with the story of the beheading of John the Baptist a few weeks ago, Western culture has a long history of turning this event into a story of seduction and forbidden love, making Bathsheba yet another of those supposedly wicked women who tempt and corrupt the otherwise noble male hero. Nothing could be further from the truth. The way we in the West have been trained to imagine this story is a result of our own long history of depravity and misogyny.
Bathsheba bears no fault for anything that occurs in this scene. The text tells us that she’s performing a religious cleansing ceremony in the most private place she had available to her. Chances are quite a few other women were performing the same ceremony in the same sort of location at the same time as Bathsheba. It is not her fault that David was looking down from the hilltop palace. It is not her fault that David singled her out. There was nothing seductive or alluring about her actions—for us what she was doing would be the equivalent of undergoing baptism or coming forward to share in communion. She was simply obeying one of the prescribed customs for women found in the Mosaic law. And—no matter what books and movies and preachers have tried to make you believe—that makes this situation entirely and completely David’s fault.
That raises an important question: wasn’t David one of the great heroes of the Bible? From Sunday School onward everyone teaches and encourages us to be like him—daring and brave, faithful and true, committed to God from the depth of his being. And for much of his life, he was those things. Yet it’s also true that David was a monster who acted from a position of pride and power to abuse and kill those he was responsible to protect.
Our reading opens with the statement that David chose to remain in Jerusalem “the time when kings go out to battle.” Some backstory for this particular situation: a nearby king, one of David’s allies, had died. David sent messengers to the son offering his condolences. The new king convinced himself that the messengers were actually spies, so he publicly shamed them and sent them back to Jerusalem. This infuriated David, and war broke out. As the Israelites were besieging the other king’s capitol, I’m guessing that David didn’t want to offer that king the dignity of a personal defeat, so he left it to his subordinates to finish up the job.
From there, David’s wandering the palace, sees Bathsheba in the midst of her private cleansing ceremony and finds out who she is. In line with the customs of the time, she’s identified as a particular man’s daughter and Uriah’s wife. Uriah was one of David’s close associates. He was among those listed as “mighty men” who served in David’s private army.[1] The text notes that Uriah was a Hittite, which made him a foreigner to Israel and a descendent of one of their earliest enemies.[2] Bathsheba’s name, literally translated as “Sheba’s daughter”—Sheba being the name for what we know as Ethiopia—suggests that she may also have come foreign descent and that she was what our modern racial constructs would consider to be Black.
So David takes the time to find out who she is, discovers her relationship to one of his friends, and still chooses to send for her while using the same language as people of the time used for commodities, similar to an off-handed remark like, “Hey, you—go get me a beer.” Bathsheba, likely suspecting nothing—except maybe bad news about her husband from the battlefield—obeys the royal summons.[3] David then rapes her and sends her home. I find it an interesting detail that the Bible records nothing of their conversation, which to me suggests that David took her in, had his “fun,” and tossed her out just as quickly, never giving a second thought to her being, her status, or what might come of her—until, a month or two later, when she sends a message that she’s pregnant.
Suddenly David starts paying attention.
Some people have suggested that there was a perfectly normal, if abhorrent, custom of the time wherein kings could call in whoever they wanted for sexual relations, but Hebrew custom (aka the Mosaic Law) would have forbidden that—not because of any rights that Bathsheba held, but because of her husband and father’s rights regarding her as their shared property. (Again, the joys of “biblical” marriage!)[4] So David hatches an ill-thought plan to make it look like the baby is Uriah’s. Uriah, though, proves himself loyal to his military comrades, denying himself any pleasures while his friends are in danger far from home. Not only that, but note that it isn’t his friends he first mentions but the Ark of the Covenant, meaning that this foreigner, descended from Israel’s historic enemies, proves himself more loyal to the Hebrew God than the very person that God had anointed as king.
Foiled in his plot to cover up Bathsheba’s rape, David devises a new plan, sending his loyal friend back to the front lines carrying a note on which is printed his own suicide mission. This second plan succeeds. Uriah dies (along with quite a few other soldiers), allowing David to magnanimously swoop in and add this woman to his harem, thereby dutifully honoring his friend’s memory by protecting that man’s wife from the death sentence that would have resulted from “her” extramarital affair.
Here ends our reading, leaving us in the midst of a pretty bleak story—one that continues next week.
Such a dark tale leaves us facing the conundrum of what to do with this text—how we might respond. The easy choice would be, like David, to try to cover this story up, turning to common Christian platitudes we use to avoid our own discomfort—skipping over the genuine horror of this situation by offering ourselves platitudes like “all things work together for good,” or “it’s all part of God’s plan,” a statement which is, in truth, not only a way to sweep aside our personal dismay but a subtle attempt to dismiss consequences by diverting them from the responsible party onto something or someone who can never answer for the charges.
I reject that path, choosing instead to have us sit with Bathsheba in her distress, to accompany her throughout this week in her completely undeserved shame, in her loss and grief and despair. In a time when we try to shut our ears against anything even remotely negative that we may learn about our idols,[5] we need to sit with the disturbing and complex reality that people we otherwise look up to and even endeavor to emulate can be responsible for great evil as well. I want us to consider the true darkness possible from each of our hearts, to ask ourselves why we and our society so readily shift blame onto the victim, excusing the perpetrators under “a moment of weakness” and so thoroughly reimagining the plain reality of a situation just to maintain our own idealizations of supposed “heroes of the faith.” We need to sit with these things because, no matter how much we might want it to, the Bible does not offer us fairytale endings. Nor does life. Heroes fall. Futures are ruined. Seemingly good people do terrible things, and it is neither our right as humans nor our job as Christians to simply cover up or excuse the evil found in our own and others’ lives. We all need to take warning—and time—to face these complex realities and consider our own roles in perpetuating them.
So I leave us with the words of our Book of Common Prayer, praying and hoping that we may
“Judge [ourselves]…lest [we] 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.”[6]
[1] II Samuel 23:8-39
[2] Deuteronomy 20:16-18
[3] A summons she would have had no power to defy in the first place.
[4] See https://www.slouchingdog.com/sermons/year-b-july-14-2024-proper10
[5] A fact that should draw greater attention to our own idolatry!
[6] 1979 Book of Common Prayer, “An Exhortation,” pg. 316-317