This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 7/28/24, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: 2 Samuel 11:1-15; 2 Samuel 12:1-7a. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text.)
This is a tough set of scriptures to preach on. Faith was giving me grief about it, actually. She asked me last night, “Why in the world did you pick this passage? I had a terrible time picking out a reflection to share in the church newsletter about it.” (I thought that the selection she made was great, by the way, so check it out if you haven’t already.)
One of the concerns that Faith had about choosing the story of David, Bathsheba, and Uriah is that Bathsheba’s humanity and agency is often ignored. She becomes an accessory, an object, a “lamb” that David steals from Uriah. There are parts in the story, later, where Bathsheba does find her voice and gets to wield some amount of influence. But that’s not in this story we’ve heard this morning.
So Faith encouraged me to make sure that I spoke about this, about the raw deal that Bathsheba in particular, and women in general, get in this story. And it’s true. The sad truth is, this particular story was written by men, from men’s perspective. Women are mostly an afterthought. This is a reflection of ancient near-Eastern civilization, including the people of Israel, who were profoundly patriarchal. From the perspective of the writers of 2 Samuel, the main storyline here was what men did. Women played a supporting role, at best.
Now of course we as Quakers have a different perspective on this. Back three hundred and fifty years ago, when the Quaker movement was getting started in the midst of 17th-century England – which was itself a deeply patriarchal society – our spiritual ancestors insisted that women had an equally important role to play in God’s story as men. The earliest Quakers lifted up the voices of women, recognizing the ministry of women. Some of the most important missionaries, pastors, and apostles of the early Quaker movement – Mary Fischer, Mary Dyer, Margaret Fell – were women.
So our faith as Quaker Christians is not one that makes a distinction between men and women, saying that one is lesser than the other. We say together with Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for [we] are all one in Christ Jesus.”
The story we’ve heard this morning from 2 Samuel does not share this egalitarian perspective. And as I preach this morning, I am not going to try to contort this text into anything resembling a feminist tale – because it simply isn’t. This is a story written from a male perspective, focused on male concerns. That doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from this story – it doesn’t mean that we can’t hear the voice of God here – but we have to come to it with the right expectations. I hope I’ve helped set those expectations in a way that can aid us in hearing what God wants to say to us through this text.
Because there is a lot here. There is so much going on in these passages from 2 Samuel 11 and 12. There is a brutal richness to this story that has captured the imagination of Jewish and Christian thinkers, artists, and theologians for generations.
So let me start from the top. First, a little background on King David. David is the second king to reign over Israel. The first king was Saul. Saul was a bad king, though he started out good. Over time, he descended into madness and violence, and he eventually lost his throne to David.
David, for his part, came out of nowhere. He was a shepherd boy, whom God chose and raised up to become king. The prophet Samuel anointed him and declared him King of Israel. After a long struggle with Saul, he finally came to power. It says that David was “a man after God’s own heart” – which I find confusing after reading this morning’s passage, but that’s what it says.
In our reading this morning, we’re reminded that in the society of Saul and David’s day, violence never really ended. At the beginning of our reading, it says that it was springtime, which we are told is the period of the year when kings go out to battle. It was warfare season. The first odd thing to note here is: David is not out on the front lines. He’s putzing around in his palaces in Jerusalem, while his top commander, Joab is engaged in a siege of the Ammonites in Rabbah.
My first question here is, why is David not with his commanders and troops? Why has he, the king, not gone out to war in warfare season? Here, even before we go any further, we can already see that David is neglecting his duties; even worse, he’s letting others fight his battles for him.
So while David is relaxing back home in Jerusalem, it says that he saw a woman bathing on the roof, doing the ritual cleansing required for a woman who had just had her period. David saw that the woman was very beautiful, and so he inquired of his servants about the woman. It turns out that she was Bathsheba, the wife of his servant, Uriah the Hittite. Knowing this, knowing she was not only a married woman, but the wife of one of his most loyal soldiers, David had her brought to him, and he slept with her.
This is often presented as being a matter of “adultery” – and maybe in the ancient world in which the writers lived, that would be the proper term for what happened here. But I think that we today could quite reasonably say that David raped Bathsheba. It’s not clear that she had any say in what happened here. The king ordered her to his residence. He did what he wanted. It’s hard to see Bathsheba as a guilty party here.
Despite the fact that all this happened while Bathsheba was in the time of purification after her period, it soon becomes clear that she has become pregnant, and Bathsheba sent word to David.
Now David is in a panic. He can’t let his evil actions come to light, so he tries to cover it up. When Uriah comes home from the battlefield, David does everything he can to get Uriah to go home and sleep with his wife, so that Uriah will believe that the child is his. But Uriah is so honorable, so loyal, that he refuses to go home to his wife as long as his commander, Joab, is in the field fighting the Ammonites. The men of Israel and the ark of the covenant are encamped in tents; Uriah is unwilling to relax at home as long as Israel is in danger. It says that instead of returning to his wife, Uriah slept at the entrance of the king’s house.
Totally desperate, David even invites Uriah to dinner and gets him drunk, trying to trick him into going home and being with his wife, but Uriah still doesn’t head home. So finally, David decides to compound his wickedness by having Uriah murdered. He sends a letter to Joab – sealed and delivered by Uriah himself! – telling Joab to arrange it so that Uriah will be left outnumbered and defenseless in the heaviest fighting. Joab obeys, and Uriah is killed in battle.
This section of scripture is amazing to me, because of just how comprehensively David is wrong. I mean, nobody’s perfect, right? We all make mistakes. But wow, David, this is no mistake. This is a methodical breaking of almost every law of God and standard of decency I can imagine. David, how have you sinned? Let me count the ways:
- First of all, David wasn’t out with his commanders. He was idling in luxury, back in Jerusalem, and it was this selfish idleness that became the Devil’s playground.
- David knew that Bathsheba was Uriah’s wife, yet he still approached her. This was no act of passion; it was a premeditated assault.
- David took advantage of Bathsheba; given the power differential, she had no meaningful choice.
- David had sex with Bathsheba while she was ritually unclean from her period. It seems like a minor thing, but according to the Law of Moses, this was a big deal.
- After this premeditated crime, David orchestrated a coverup. Realizing that Bathsheba was pregnant, David did everything he could to trick Uriah into thinking the child was his.
- David couldn’t manage to get Uriah to go home, because Uriah was almost cartoonishly honorable – an enormous contrast to David’s selfish lifestyle as king.
- Having exhausted his attempts at trickery, David resorts to murder.
- Of course, he doesn’t actually murder Uriah himself; he has Uriah deliver a note to Joab, so that Joab will do the dirty work for David. This is par for the course for David, I suppose: If he can’t be bothered to accompany his troops in battle, why should we expect him to handle the murdering he needs done?
I can’t emphasize this enough: David is the chosen one. He is the king of Israel. David is God’s anointed, the one God chose from everyone to lead his people. And this is the kind of man God chose? “A man after God’s own heart” – this guy? What has happened here!?
At the very end of chapter 11 it says, “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” So we know that although David has hidden his evil actions from the world, he has not managed to hide his deeds from God. It’s a good reminder for all of us of what Jesus tells us in Mark 4: “Everything that is hidden will be made clear and every secret thing will be made known.” The truth will come out.
That’s just what happens in the first part of chapter 12. The prophet Nathan comes to David, and tells the king a story about a rich man who stole a poor man’s beloved lamb and slaughtered it to feed to his guests. Nathan tells the story so beautifully, inviting David to render his judgment on the evil rich man, who – though he had everything – was so greedy that he took away the humble joy of the poor man, leaving him with nothing. Then we get to see how David reacts.
I find this part of the story very interesting. Because David is clearly a really terrible person. He’s done things that most of us can’t imagine doing – adultery, rape, murder, government-sponsored coverups. Yet how does he react when he hears a story of injustice? He erupts with anger. He says the scoundrel who stole the poor man’s lamb deserves to die!
How many of us are like this? How easy it is to get furious about the injustice committed by others, forgetting about the seeds of injustice that we harbor within ourselves. How tempting it is to harp on the wrongdoing of “those people” out there, forgetting entirely the ways that we fall short. I can just imagine King David scrolling Facebook and getting into shouting matches about people doing evil things in Tyre and Sidon and Egypt. I can almost hear one of his wives saying, “David, honey, come to bed,” and David’s voice responding from the next room, “I can’t; there’s someone wrong on the internet!”
It gets harder to condemn others when we become aware of the many ways that we ourselves have fallen short. It gets even harder when we contemplate the things we are capable of, even if we haven’t done it. Every one of us has the capacity for deceit, violation, murder, selfishness, and corruption. Each one of us has our own inner David, our inner narcissist who wants what he wants, wants it now, and is willing to kill for it.
It is this inner David, this violently selfish ego, that Jesus came to liberate us from. This is the reason that Jesus, when he is teaching in the Temple in Mark 12, denies that the Messiah is the Son of David – despite this being the traditional title for the Messiah.
Jesus is David’s Lord. He has come, not to fulfill the violent, military-king ambitions of the Davidic tradition, but rather to establish a new kind of kingdom, the original kind of kingdom that God always wanted – a kingdom where God rules his people directly, speaking to us in our hearts, minds, and spirits. This kingdom of God is the one preached by the early Quaker George Fox, who declared that “Christ has arrived to teach his people himself.”
It’s profoundly significant that Jesus is born of Mary and the Holy Spirit. He’s not the biological son of Joseph, which means he’s not a descendent of David. He’s not the spiritual successor of David either; he is the antecedent. Jesus is the Alpha and Omega who spoke through the burning bush to Moses. He’s the still, small voice who taught Elisha. He’s the Holy One of Israel who guided Samuel, who anointed David. Jesus is the author of the Davidic throne, and his ministry has come to correct the failings of Davidism.
The spirit of David in us must be transformed by the Spirit of Jesus, so that we can become healers rather than destroyers, givers rather than takers, servants rather than kings. This is exactly what the Holy Spirit has been sent to accomplish in our lives. If we’ll listen, if we’ll cooperate with the action of the Spirit in our lives, the light of Jesus will reveal our darkness and transform our character, teaching us compassion for others. Christ has arrived to heal the inner David and raise up the inward Jesus in his place.
Here is how George Fox describes this experience of transformation and growing compassion in his Journal:
I was under great temptations sometimes, and my inward sufferings were heavy; but I could find none to open my condition to but the Lord alone, unto whom I cried night and day. And I went back into Nottinghamshire, and there the Lord shewed me that the natures of those things which were hurtful without, were within in the hearts and minds of wicked men…
And I cried to the Lord, saying, ‘Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils?’ And the Lord answered that it was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all conditions; and in this I saw the infinite love of God. I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings.
The Holy Spirit showed George Fox his inner David. He showed Fox that he, too, was capable of every kind of horror and evil. People often say, “there but for the grace of God go I” – but for George Fox and the early Quakers, this wasn’t just a popular saying. They knew it, experientially. The Holy Spirit revealed to them the darkness that lay within. They were shown that they were no better than anyone else; they were just as much in need of God’s love as the worst offenders they could imagine.
Our reading this morning is an invitation to hear the words of Nathan spoken to us: “You are the man!” “You are the woman!” You are the person who has these dark tendencies within. You are the person whose selfishness and fear and violence lurk, ready to strike. You are the person for whom Christ died, and whom the Holy Spirit will transform, if you give yourself over to God’s love.
Jesus is redeeming the David within. He is breaking the self-delusion of our inward narcissist. He is here with us right now, and he wants to heal and transform each one of us – restoring the heavenly image that he gave us in the beginning.
Let’s welcome the Holy Spirit together. Let’s ask Jesus to come and be in our midst right now, to reveal our darkness and show us the path to true freedom, and compassion for everyone around us. Because we all face this same struggle, but Jesus has come so that we might have life.