The tragedy of David’s life is the great promise that comes from the depth of spiritual possibility intersecting with the reverberations of his personal choices. It is therefore a deeply human tragedy.
We are drawn to him because in his person he contains multitudes. He is a skilled warrior who can slay giants with a little slingshot. He tends to sheep and therefore knows the plight of a lowly shepherd. He is an exorcist musician, dispelling evil spirits by playing the lyre for his mortal enemy and father of his best friend, King Saul. He is, according to a somewhat suspect historical attribution, the author of many Psalms.
Perhaps it is this attribution most which makes plausible the description of David as a deeply spiritual man “after God’s own heart.” And yet, the narrative of Samuel more often reveals a man who is confounded by the possession and exercise of power.
Perhaps all people who seek after power become confounded.
The tragedy of his life is that the pain he visits on others eventually comes full circle back to his own family. There are studies that show the hereditary effects of trauma on subsequent generations. In David’s case, the trauma was so severe that it shows up almost immediately.
David’s exploitative marital history begins inauspiciously with his purchase of Saul’s daughter Michal. The absurd and savage “bride-price” is 200 Philistine foreskins. Michal is sparingly narrated. She chastises David for dancing naked before the Ark of the Covenant, and we are left to wander if her punishment is that she remains childless “to the day of her death.” (2 Samuel 7:23). The text is ambiguous.
After Michal helps David escape from her father, Saul gives her away to another man as punishment. Arranged marriage followed by forced divorce. There are no happy endings and no happy beginnings, either. We'll have to look at other stories for that.
A few weeks back I preached about the climactic act of adultery and murder committed by David upon the bodies of Bathsheba and her husband Uriah. This trauma sends a cataclysmic shock wave through the life of God's people. In rapid succession, David and Bathsheba’s child dies after being “struck” by the Lord. “Can I bring him back again?” David asks rhetorically. He cannot. The King with all his power suddenly, and awfully, discovers the limits of such power.
Like a genetic curse, the trauma spreads. David’s daughter Tamar is raped by her half-brother Amnon, who is then murdered in a revenge killing by David’s son Absalom. David, having failed to punish his son Amnon because he was his firstborn, now shows mercy to Absalom. A touching scene of forgiveness is narrated in 2 Samuel 15. As fathers and grace go, this is understandable. We are drawn in sympathetically, expecting redemption. Instead, we get more betrayal. As things continue to spiral out of control, David’s family unravels.
Before we arrive at Sunday’s depiction of the death of beloved Absalom, we are treated to a series of shameful degradations. Absalom first leads a revolt against his father, King David. He then consults with the most trusted counselor in the Kingdom, Ahithophel, who counsels him to visit David’s concubines so as to humiliate his own father and further stoke revolt. Bad advice, as it turns out. No one is to be trusted in this Game of Thrones.
And so we arrive, finally, at Sunday's text: 2 Samuel 18. To put down Absalom’s revolt, David orders a “gentle” pursuit. “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom” he orders. We soon see what gentle looks like. Joab, the very one who had carried out David’s orders to kill Uriah, takes it upon himself to interpret how gentle the dealing will be. He thrusts three spears into Absalom’s heart.
David weeps often in this second half of his life. There will be no more laughing and dancing before the Ark. It is hard to see how the story might end on a more hopeful note. The Bible resists our attempts to confine it to pithy lessons. The three point sermon is no match for the artistry and depth of the Davidic saga. There is forgiveness and redemption. But there is also sin and its traumatic and shattering reverberations. There is personal freedom (a much trumpeted notion in our culture). And yet there is God in God’s sovereignty, striking down children and raising up monarchs. Inscrutable, really.
God takes the long view, one reflected in the curious genealogy of the Gospel of Matthew. In tracing the lineage of Jesus’ family, Matthew makes an interesting creative choice: he describes David as “the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.” Follow the names down the list until you get to the Messiah. It is no mere genealogy. It is theology embedded in the family tree.
Matthew was perhaps constrained by the conventions of patriarchy in that curious phrase, "the wife of Uriah." We’ll say her name for the record: Bathsheba. And yet the Holy Spirit was mischievous enough to remind us that ultimately, even the worst trauma gets redeemed in the life of God.
Daniel Headrick, Associate Pastor
