Sermons

Second Sunday after Trinty

Sunday 17th June at 10am

Simon Cowling
Readings: 2 Samuel 11.26 - 12.10 & 13-15; Luke 7.36 - 8.3

If you have read Thomas Hardy's novel Far from the Madding Crowd, you will know that its heroine is the strong-willed Bathsheba Everdene: beautiful, rather vain, financially independent and the object of three men's affections. Two of her suitors come to bad ends and it is only in the final pages of the novel that Bathsheba's emotional turbulence finds some resolution in the person of the solid and reliable Gabriel Oak, whom she had impetuously rejected years before.

I am no expert on the work of Thomas Hardy, but I can't think that it's a coincidence he calls his heroine Bathsheba. Sexual passion and sexual tension underlie much of the narrative of Far from the Madding Crowd, just as they underlie the story of David and Bathsheba in the Second Book of Samuel. Overall, however, the biblical Bathsheba and the Bathsheba of the novel could not be more different. Hardy's heroine is independent and convention-defying, and has a measure of control over her life even if she does make some disastrous decisions. The Bathsheba of the biblical narrative, on the other hand, is subject to the whim and fancy of a powerful king who abuses his position and abuses her. She is unable to assert any independence or enjoy any control over the forces that determine the course of her life.

We join the biblical story this morning at rather a late stage. Previously, so to speak, the ageing King David has spotted Bathsheba having a bath after his afternoon nap and is captured by her beauty. Too old to fight with his army any more, he decides to assert his power and virility in other ways and summons Bathsheba to the royal presence. As a result of the subsequent liaison she falls pregnant. Her husband, Uriah, is away fighting for David in the spring campaigns, so David arranges for him to be called back in the hope that he will sleep with Bathsheba, thereby concealing the paternity of the child. Uriah, an austere and sexually continent soldier anxious to get back to his men, does not oblige. Thwarted, the king then arranges for Uriah to be killed in battle and, after a decent interval, marries Bathsheba who bears him a son. Ominously, as we hear at the start of this morning's reading, 'the Lord was not pleased with what David had done'.

It falls to the prophet, Nathan, to confront David with his sinful actions. He does this by means of a parable, a traditional method of teaching in the Jewish tradition. Nathan's parable is of a man, rich in cattle and sheep, killing the only lamb owned by a poor man because he was too mean to offer a guest one of his own animals. The prophet Nathan is doing what prophets do in the Old Testament, what prophets have always done down the centuries: he is speaking truth to power. The measure of his success in achieving this is to be found precisely in David's angry outburst when Nathan finishes the parable. The King condemns himself, and at the same time his abuse of his powerful position, with his own words. He says of the wealthy man who took the poor man's only lamb: 'I swear by the living Lord that the man who did this ought to die.' David is angry, of course, because of the manifestly unfair and unjust actions of the wealthier man. But just as David's anger peaks, Nathan delivers his damning interpretation of the parable: You are that man. David's sin is uncovered.

Before we go on to think about the end of the encounter between David and Nathan, I want to pick up a remark I made earlier about the contrast between Hardy's feisty and independent heroine Bathsheba Everdene and the Bathsheba of the biblical narrative. The principal actor in the story of the seduction in 2 Samuel 11 is the King, and it is on him that our interest is focused rather than on the nobodies, as they have been called. So Bathsheba is a passive figure, brought to David like a commodity and treated as such by him, unable to protest her married status and without any control over what happens to her. Her husband Uriah fares no better in the narrative. He is unwittingly manipulated by his unscrupulous monarch and meets an untimely, if convenient, end. In the parable, on the other hand, our interest is focused on the poor man: we learn in close detail about his care for the lamb even to the extent of his feeding regime and his father-like treatment of it. The rich man, by contrast, is described in a single phrase: he had 'many cattle and sheep'. So we have what the American Methodist theologian William Willimon has called "a collision of two narratives: the story of how power is gained, used, and inevitably abused in the 'real world' and a second narrative about (God's) counter plans for the world."

It's in the light of this clash of narratives that we must see the end of the story. Having confronted the King with the truth that the parable is, in fact, about him, Nathan goes on to recount in deliberate detail the many blessings that God has bestowed on David: he anointed him king of Israel, rescued him from Saul and gave him Saul's possessions - including his wives; he made him king over an expanded kingdom of Israel and Judah and would have given him even more had this not been enough. Far from showing gratitude, David has disobeyed God's commandments and, in doing so, has arrogantly assumed that he has a right to live his own life free from covenant restraint, a right to create his own story, if you like, rather than answer God's call to live as his anointed king and become part of God's story for his chosen people.

How often do we experience a collision of narratives, our Nathan moment, when we are confronted with an awareness that the life we are living does not measure up to the life to which God calls us? Or how often do we, like David, seek to live, indeed to create, our story without any reference to the God without whom we would not be part of a story at all? Creating our own story might not involve us in the kind of blatant abuse of power by means of which David seduced Bathsheba, but it might well involve other forms of ethical egoism in which maximising our self-interest is all that matters. That way lies spiritual death.

For Christians, the corrective to any attempt to create our own story is to inhabit fully the story of Jesus Christ, to focus on his faithfulness to God and to make that faithfulness the measure by which our own lives are judged. The Letter to the Hebrews call Jesus Christ the mediator of the new covenant. It is this covenant which we celebrate each time we gather to share bread and wine; it is this covenant within which we are called to rejoice in God's forgiveness; and it is this covenant through which we become part of God's story, the story which gives meaning to all that we do and all that we are. Amen.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay