Strangely Familiar: Accountability and Repentance (2 Samuel 12:1-13)
Ordinary Time
So the Lord sent Nathan to David. When
Nathan arrived he said, “There were two men in the same city, one rich, one
poor. 2 The rich man had a lot of sheep and
cattle, 3 but the poor man had nothing—just one
small ewe lamb that he had bought. He raised that lamb, and it grew up with him
and his children. It would eat from his food and drink from his cup—even sleep
in his arms! It was like a daughter to him.
4 “Now a traveler came to
visit the rich man, but he wasn’t willing to take anything from his own flock
or herd to prepare for the guest who had arrived. Instead, he took the poor
man’s ewe lamb and prepared it for the visitor.”
5 David got very angry
at the man, and he said to Nathan, “As surely as the Lord lives, the
one who did this is demonic! 6 He must restore the
ewe lamb seven times over because he did this and because he had no
compassion.”
7 “You are that man!”
Nathan told David. “This is what the Lord God of Israel says: I
anointed you king over Israel and delivered you from Saul’s power. 8 I
gave your master’s house to you, and gave his wives into your embrace. I
gave you the house of Israel and Judah. If that was too little, I would
have given even more. 9 Why have you despised
the Lord’s word by doing what is evil in his eyes? You have struck down
Uriah the Hittite with the sword and taken his wife as your own. You used the
Ammonites to kill him. 10 Because of that, because
you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite as your own, the sword
will never leave your own house.
11 “This is what
the Lord says: I am making trouble come against you from inside your
own family. Before your very eyes I will take your wives away and give them to
your friend, and he will have sex with your wives in broad daylight. 12 You
did what you did secretly, but I will do what I am doing before all Israel in
the light of day.”
13 “I’ve sinned against
the Lord!” David said to Nathan.
“The Lord has removed your sin,” Nathan
replied to David. “You won’t die.” (CEB)
When I was a
hospital chaplain, I was befriended by one of my colleagues, a man named
Chris. He’s probably 6’5” or so,
towering above me, which is something to which I’m unused. He has a big presence to match with quite a
few animated gestures when he and I get into various arguments about faith or
when he is attempting to explain for the thousandth time why he really is right
about whatever it is that he’s definitely wrong about.
One of the
things for which we chaplains would tease him when we worked together—and
which, to our chagrin, we all ended up picking up ourselves—was his habit of
saying “and.” “This is true—and this
other, seemingly opposite thing is also true.”
He would draw out the word for four or five syllables after a short
pause, so we all knew it was coming:
“that patient was being unkind—and you as the chaplain needed to
remember that he was not in a head space where he could have been anything
else.”
This story of
David and Nathan is full of a lot of “and”s.
It is toward the end of the longer saga of David and Bathsheba: David the king finds Bathsheba attractive and
has her sleep with him. She becomes
pregnant and David tries to trick her husband, a soldier in his army, into sleeping
with her to cover the pregnancy. He
doesn’t, so David sends Uriah to the front lines where he is killed. We enter the tale in today’s verses just
after Bathsheba gets the news that she is now a widow—and, pregnant and
alone, she is married to David after the mourning period.
Enter
Nathan. We briefly met Nathan a few
weeks ago when he cheered on David’s plan to build a temple before God nixed
the idea; Nathan is one of David’s advisors but is first and foremost God’s
prophet. It’s important to have Nathans
in the world; Professor Juliana Claassens points out that, “Nathan emerges as
an incredibly courageous prophet speaking truth to power and doing so in a
quite clever fashion using imagination to draw the king into judging himself.
Noteworthy is the fact that the language used for the rich man taking the lamb
is the same language that was used in 2 Samuel 11:4 when David took Bathsheba.
Moreover, the verb ‘to take’ is the language that is used in 1 Samuel 8:11-19
by the prophet Samuel when he warns the people about the dangers of the royal
office. Kings take whatever they want. In the context of leaders abusing their
power, one truly needs whistle blowers and other upright individuals who stand
up and say ‘No!’ to injustice and the abuse of power.”[1]
This is a story
about a man’s misuse of a woman—Bathsheba, who doesn’t even get to be in this
scene and who is only named by her relationships to Uriah and to David; who is,
per the custom of the day, considered as much property as a sheep. And it is the story of a man being
called to task for the abuse of his position.
It is a parable about greed—and it is a calling to account in the
human relationship to God.
To his credit, David hears Nathan and
Nathan’s rebuke, God’s rebuke of his actions. David has become the kind of king Samuel
warned about when the people of Israel first asked for kings; “These will be
the ways of the king who will reign over you,” God says through Samuel in 1
Samuel 8. “He will take your sons and
appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his
chariots; 12 and he will appoint for himself
commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground
and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of
his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be
perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the
best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his
courtiers. 15 He will take one-tenth of your grain
and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. 16 He
will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and
donkeys, and put them to his work. 17 He will take
one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.”[2]
The king shall take even your beloved
ewe lamb, no matter how many sheep he has of his own. Nathan’s parable is in a long tradition of
the suspicion that power corrupts—a reality we in the 21st century
know is not consigned to the ancient past.
David has
become the worst outcome—and he repents.
His performative outrage over the theft of the ewe in Nathan’s parable
doubles back on himself; “I’ve sinned against God!” he cries in discovered
horror, in understanding the magnitude of wrong everyone else had known for a
while.
This past week
began testimonies in the House of Representatives’ investigation into the
January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. It is, predictably, a partisan mess, losing statements
of fact amidst accusations of political maneuvering, and to be honest I’m not
much interested in debating whether or not it was wrong that people were
literally fighting in hand-to-hand combat, shouting that they had brought
gallows and should use them, prompting some of the police officers on the scene
to think that this was how they were going to die.[3] In one testimony, “Sgt. Aquilino Gonell said
he and other officers from the Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police
Department were ‘punched, pushed, kicked, shoved, sprayed with chemical
irritants, and even blinded with eye-damaging lasers’”.[4] I’m not interested in calling him a liar. What
I am interested in is how there is yet to be anyone in all that mess who
hears the forceful claim you are that man and responds yes, “I have
sinned against God.”
Many people
pride themselves on thinking of the United States as a Christian nation and
that’s not true in the way we usually mean it but the idea of a moral heartbeat
must matter, and morality begins with accountability. It starts—or should start, as I am not fool
enough to say that we do this perfectly—here, in the communities of faith where
we learn that no one should take another’s ewe lamb if he has sheep and cattle
of his own; that no one can hide injustice from the eyes of God; that getting
mad over another’s sin when we have done the same must force us to
acknowledgement. And we go from here,
every week, to live in the world as representatives of a faith that was
horrifyingly misrepresented at that insurrection. Shall we be the Nathans who speak the truth
that everyone, everyone is accountable to the relationship of humanity,
loving our neighbors as we love ourselves?
Or shall we be
the Davids, raving in fury over a story about someone else’s sin while
declaring our own to be acceptable?
And.
I’m not trying
to turn this into a fire and brimstone sermon that says we can never name
anyone else’s wrong unless we are 100% pure ourselves; nothing would get
done. Nothing would change. I am saying that we can and must be David and
we must be Nathan; we can be working on our own things (we should be
working on our own things) and we can expect those in positions of power
to hold themselves to a moral standard that respects all people as deliberate
creations of God. We can demand justice
for the theft of the ewe lamb and we can demand justice for the mistreatment
of Bathsheba. We can listen to the
accounts of what happened on January 6 and we can honor the idea that
could be these United States.
We can recognize
the sins of others and we can repent of our own.
Neat little
thing, that “and.” It calls us back to
the reminder that we are a people of tension, we Christians; we are a people of
this world and of a perfected Kingdom.
We follow the Divine Who is both three and one, Who was both God and
human, Who was born of the line of David and Who called David to
account for his sins, Who calls us to live in the joy of this moment and the
faith of the future.
The
recognition of our own part in injustice; the naming of the injustice done by
others; the true heart of repentance that says I acknowledge this thing I have
done wrong—all of these things are part of how we do this faith. It’s a complicated, difficult mess, as
vitally important things often turn out to be.
And—it
is a holy, wondrous relationship with a God Who loves the ewe lamb, Who loves
the widow turned wife, Who loves the prophet, Who loves the sinner, Who says
let us try this again.
May we have
the courage to speak truth to the powerful who take; may we have the humility
to admit when we have sinned against God; and may we have the creativity to
seek out the “and” where so many things are true at once. Amen.
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