Brunswick Baptist Church

Sermon 27 July 2009

Bible readings: 2 Samuel 11:1-15, John 6:1-15

 

The Bible is one of the world’s most wonderful storybooks, covering the spectrum from children’s stories about little girls who influence great army commanders, to stories about great heroes slaying giants and lions. Some of the stories are decidedly ‘R’ rated for a mature audience, containing violence, sexual references and adult themes. David and Bathsheba should be classified at least MA with parental guidance recommended and not read before 9.30pm.

 

Let’s recall the elements of the story:

·        King David, the mighty warrior king, has slain his giants and defeated the enemies of Israel. It is spring, ‘the time when kings go out to battle’, but David stays in the city while his generals go to war. Was he war-weary? Shell shocked? Injured?

·        He spies the beautiful Bathsheba, played by Angelina Joelie, in her bathtub on the roof of her house, and thinks to himself, ‘this is much more fun than going to war’. Perhaps we now know why David stayed in Jerusalem!

·        The king sends for Bathsheba and they ‘lie together’ ( a delicate euphemism about which we hope the children won’t ask too many questions), by which time David has broken the tenth and the seventh commandments in that order.

·        If it had ended there we would probably think, ‘Well these things happen, lots of people commit adultery, office parties, one night stands, we’re all human’ etc. But it didn’t end there. In the next, much more sinister chapter of the saga, the story moves from ‘Desperate Housewives’ to ‘Underbelly’.

·        David first tries to get Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to go down to his house and sleep with Bathsheba, who by now is pregnant, so that the baby which David has fathered will be thought to be Uriah’s. Uriah is not even an Israelite, yet he is a senior officer in David’s army, and a man of impeccable honour and integrity. David gets Uriah drunk but he still refuses to go to his house and sleep with his wife while the rest of the army is camped in the fields enduring deprivation and risking their lives.

·        And so in a final desperate act David sends Uriah back to the battle zone and orders General Joab to put him in the firing line, and then withdraw the troops and leave him isolated so that he will be killed by the Ammonites. As surely as if he had wielded the sword himself, David murders Uriah. Judy Moran couldn’t have done a better job of it. And so he has now broken the 6th commandment as well as the 7th and 10th.

 

This is an horrific story and it doesn’t end there. David is confronted by Nathan the prophet who tells him that the sword will never depart from his house; he will be plagued by conflict and death within his own family, and his violence will come back to haunt him. Bathsheba’s baby dies, David’s son Absalom rebels against his father and is killed by Joab, David dies a sad old man, separated from Bathsheba, his old, cold bones kept warm by a young Shunammite woman, Abishag, who lies in bed with him like a living hot water bottle.

 

It is a truly tragic and gripping story, right up there with those of the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The Greeks looked at human history and behaviour and they wrote comedies and tragedies. According to Wikipedia, the source of all human knowledge, tragedy means literally ‘goat song’ so perhaps they thought that human beings constantly made real goats of themselves with consequences that were either screamingly funny, or excruciatingly sad. Their interpretation however was that humans were the playthings of the gods, and that it was ‘fate’ that caused the tragic circumstances that characterised so much of human experience. In the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, it was fate, prophesied by the oracle of Delphi, that led Oedipus to kill his father and marry his mother – and where would modern psychology be without Oedipus?

 

But the author of 2 Samuel says, ‘no’. We are responsible for the consequences of our own behaviour when we disobey the will of Yahweh revealed in the Torah. We are created with a capacity to distinguish right from wrong and the Torah makes the difference crystal clear for a faithful Israelite. ‘Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind’ said the author of Hosea, and certainly for some who achieved notoriety in Melbourne’s gangland wars that has been true – jailed, murdered, partners and children killed. But others seem to have ridden the whirlwind very nicely, so it is not an absolute rule that we reap what we sow, even if we would like it to be.

 

The problem with these wonderful stories like David and Bathsheba, and Oedipus and Jocasta, is that they seek to interpret history through the lives of great national heroes, most of them kings, warriors, conquerors, politicians, dictators. Their histories create identities for the nations that they lead and give their citizens guidelines for how to maintain that national identity. We keep looking for great heroes because they give us hope that our lives, and our society can be better than it is. Think back to the elections of Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama, and the excitement and the hope that their decisive political victories engendered. Think further back to Winston Churchill, seen by many as the saviour of the world standing against the villain Adolf Hitler. And yet Churchill was responsible for decisions in both world wars for the deaths of countless thousands of soldiers and civilians. These are all men of power, and we will always long for and need men and women who have the power and the ability to lead communities and nations. It is naïve to think otherwise, but let us never forget that power has the capacity to blind the powerful to their own power. In the words of Lord Acton, Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.

 

I want to link this story of David to the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand through verses 14 and 15 of John chapter 6:

When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world’.

When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

John calls the miracles of Jesus ‘signs’. The healing of the sick was a ‘sign’; the feeding of the 5000 was a ‘sign’, and it was these ‘signs’ that drew the people to Jesus, says John. They recognised that he was a prophet like Moses or Elijah, but they wanted to snatch him away – kidnap him really – and force him to become their king. They weren’t interested in a spiritual king, but a political king like David who would restore the kingdom to Israel and evict the enemy, Rome. Here again we see the link between political power, coercion and violence, and Jesus fled, escaped to the mountain by himself.

 

In the realm of nation building and human society, political power is inevitable, and most likely necessary. But John the Gospel writer wants his readers to know very clearly that there is a better way. The other Gospel writers use the title ‘Son of David’ for Jesus a number of times but John does not use it once. Consciously or unconsciously he shuns the use of that title which is so connected to Jewish nationalism and to violence.

 

The other way is the way of radical non violence. Father John Dear, a famous peace activist, tells a lovely story of meditating on the Beatitudes from Matthew 5 a few months before he entered the Jesuit religious order. He says:

I walked out onto the balcony overlooking the Sea of Galilee and the blue sky above, and it suddenly dawned on me: Jesus is serious.

I looked up at the sky and said to God, "Are you trying to tell me something? Do you want me to hunger and thirst for justice? Do you want me to be a peacemaker? Do you want me to love even my enemies?

Alright," I declared, "I promise to work for peace and justice for the rest of my life--on one condition: if you give me a sign!"

All of a sudden, there were loud explosions and sonic booms as two Israeli jets swooped down from the sky, appearing right over the Sea of Galilee, heading straight at me! They flew directly over me and in a few moments, dropped bombs along the Lebanon border.

Trembling, I looked up. "OK God, I'll work for peace and justice,” I said, “and I'll never ask for a sign again."

 

We don’t all get signs from God like John Dear, but we can all read the Gospel, and we can recognise that, if we are to follow the Jesus of the Gospel, we cannot help to bring the Kingdom of God on earth by emulating the violent methods of the Kingdom of David. Israel is still trying to do that today; Muslim extremists in Indonesia are still trying to do that today. Violence as an instrument of God is the great lie, for violence only breeds violence.

 

What can you and I do in a practical way about this? What can we as a community do about this?

·        First: commit ourselves in the way that we live in our homes, in our place of work, in our church, to radical non violence. This includes how we speak to each other; violence can be verbal as well as physical, and I acknowledge that I am as capable of angry and coercive words as anyone else – ask those who live with me. Let us renounce violence in all its forms, both active and passive.

·        Second: commit ourselves to justice as the way to true peace. The sign of the feeding of the 5000 is a wonderful symbol, or metaphor, for the feeding of all the world’s poor. Violence is not eradicated by more violence, but it is certainly minimised through the alleviation of poverty and the elimination of injustice and oppression. Perhaps you heard on the radio this week, or read in yesterday’s Age, about the remarkable downturn in the crime rate in New York, brought about by a new attitude in the NYPD. The police department is engaging the young hoodlums on the street in the things that interest them, and the police have started cricket and soccer competitions for the young men from the middle east and Pakistan. This police department, which has a history of the ‘Dirty Harry’ way of resolving crime, has turned to non violent means and have shown that it works.

·        Finally: let us commit ourselves to pray for political leaders, for defence force personnel, for law enforcement officers, who are confronted daily with pressure to solve domestic, national and international problems by violent means. To follow the non violence of Jesus is not to ignore the realities of politics and the rule of law. Let us not make the naïve mistake of casting all politicians and soldiers and police officers as the enemy. I have not made any secret of the fact that I did not appreciate John Howard’s policies, but I shall always be grateful to him for the incredibly courageous stand he took on gun control legislation following the Port Arthur massacre. Jesus confronted powerful people and unjust structures and practices, but he did so without resorting to violence, and indeed took upon himself the violence of the powerful who recognised that his message and his signs threatened their hold on power.

 

This is a hard message because it will not allow us to escape the truth of the violence that lies within us all, even good people like King David, the only person in the Bible to be described as ‘the friend of God’.