Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, St Peter’s, Poulshot, and Christ Church, Bulkington
2 Samuel 11. 1-15; John 6. 1-21
“David wrote a letter… ‘Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.’”
Our first reading today is a bit of a shocker! But that’s only part why I opted to have the Old Testament reading rather than the Epistle at this service. This reading doesn’t just have a plotline that would put Emmerdale to shame, but it speaks to two important questions about our faith. Firstly, what sort of people does God use to do His will in the world? Secondly, what is the Bible for?
Marc Chagall, David with Bathsheba (1980).
We’ll come to those in a moment, but let’s be clear that the soap opera plot was definitely one of the reasons why I chose this reading. It’s so memorable that I can tell you exactly where I was when I first heard it. I can still remember that it was a particularly beautiful summer morning. I know it was relatively soon after I had started attending St George’s, the church in Belfast which did so much to form me spiritually. Now, because the readings in church run on a three-year cycle, it has to be an exact multiple of three years ago on the nearest Sunday. It was 27th July 1997, in other words twenty-seven years and a day ago, and the day before my twentieth birthday, a time when faith was really coming alive for me.
Now, this isn’t a particularly pleasant reading, but it grabbed my attention forcefully, as I’m sure it did yours. It stoked my already building interest in the Bible. Teenage males are often particularly gripped by the grizzlier bits of the Bible, and I heard it on my very last day as a teenager.
Most people think Christianity is all about being terribly worthy and a little beige, and is therefore something for worthy, rather beige, perhaps rather dull people. The truth is that God works through real human beings; there are a few saints and a few monsters around, but most of us are a mix of light and dark.
Today, we have King David at his absolute worst, at the bottom of a moral pit, a living example of how power corrupts. Shortly after this story, David will, before God, have to face up to what a horror he has become, and try to change.
David was a complex character. He was a wise ruler, a clever and inspirational general, someone with a deep concern for spiritual and moral truth, and a musician and poet, with what might be described as a classically artistic temperament: he could be very volatile. His violence sometimes went beyond what was necessary for any ruler in a small and vulnerable ancient kingdom. Of course, he was a terrible philanderer.
At the same time, this contradictory figure bravely confronted the Philistine champion Goliath, played music so beautiful it assuaged Saul’s mental illness, was capable of deeply loving friendships, and often refused opportunities for violent revenge.
What we see here is God working through human complexity, and we see the Bible comfortable with human complexity in a way that mere propaganda generally isn’t. And the truth is that, while I hope none of us has plotted to have the spouse of someone we were having an affair with killed, we all have our dark sides. Just as God loved and worked through David, He loves and works through us, for all our flaws.
The second big question I said we’d address is what the Bible is for. The Bible isn’t a rule book but a story book. People sometimes think that’s a bit of a cop out, as if you aren’t taking the Bible as inspired seriously by God, or capable of judging human actions. But, remember when God walked the Earth as Jesus Christ, He taught people in parables—in stories. The trouble with rules is that they always have grey areas; people are often good at manipulating rules to suit themselves and do others down. It’s because it is so much more than a collection of laws that the Bible is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. A story can reveal what truly lies in the depths of our hearts in the way a rule never can.
The Bible contains many different kinds of stories—some indeed are stories about collections of rules. They were written in very different circumstances from one another—around a thousand years separates the writing of the oldest stories contained in the Bible from those composed most recently.
Each of these stories comes from a unique perspective, just as each of us sees the world in a slightly different way. Presumably that’s why God inspired the four Gospels, which give us four different perspectives on the life of Jesus Christ. The key elements are the same in all four, but they sometimes disagree on the details. For most of this year, our Sunday Gospel readings are from Mark, but for today and the next four Sundays, we’ll have Gospel readings from John.
Mark is all about the action and doesn’t give much time to reflecting on what it means. He doesn’t even include the collections of sayings of Jesus that form such an important part of Matthew and Luke. Mark jumps from one scene to the next, never giving time even to catch breath. It’s like a Marvel superheroes movie, except Jesus acts like no conventional superhero would—especially at the end. But underestimate Mark, as his stories often have a real emotional depth and an ambiguity that reveals a skilled story-teller confident enough to allow his tale to have a few rough edges.
John is different – he’s all about reflecting on what Jesus’ life means. Indeed, he’ll often rearrange the story a little to suit his theological perspective, and he has Jesus giving lots of long monologues that the other Gospel-writers don’t record. Sometimes, it’s obvious that he has, long after the first draft was completed, just spliced a monologue into the middle of his account of Jesus’ life. John’s Gospel is nothing like a superhero movie; it’s more like one those strange continental post-modern art house films that Channel 4 used to show late at night, in the days when Channel 4 was still good.
Both Mark and John, in their very different styles, report the crowds flocking to Jesus in Galilee, desperate for both healing and wisdom. In fact after this morning’s dramatic miracles of feeding the five thousand and walking on water, even Jesus’ closest followers start thinking He is destined to be King. And so He is, but not in the way they understand it. When the crowds try and seize Him by force to make Him their ruler, he escapes into the hills. Jesus doesn’t offer Himself as a political solution to the political problems of the world; and He proclaims no new rules, but instead summarises all of God’s laws in the law of love. He didn’t come to make everything right, but to undo the consequences of human wrong.
So, we have in our two readings today, a tale of two very different kings. David, often a good ruler but sometimes a terrible human being, a flawed human being groping His way towards God; and Jesus Christ, God come down to us as a human being, who rejects political power and proclaims a kingdom that is not of this world.
The Church, desperate to be ‘useful’, has become captivated by the world, obsessed by visions of how society should work, often political visions, yet terribly divided about which of these comes closest to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
It strikes me that we have missed the point—our job is not to try to make the world work properly, which even Christ Himself couldn’t do, but to point beyond this world to the God who sustains all, and who is love, and who loves us into doing His will in the world, even in all our flaws.
Now glory and honour be to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Father who made us, the Son who redeemed us, the Spirit who sustains us, this day and forevermore. Amen.
Banner image: Jean-François de Troy, Bathsheba at her Bath (1750). Now hangs in the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa.
Good.