2 Samuel 11
David &
Bathsheeba
"You can get a large audience together for a
strip-tease act-that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose
you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a
covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to
let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a
mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country
something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone
who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally
queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?"
C. S. Lewis, of course.Who
else could parody so well the rather incomprehensible nature of human (or
at least ‘male’) sexuality?
According to the good people
of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources in the U.S though, it is
not only human beings that regularly get themselves into trouble through
their sexuality. According to these good folk, they can predict entirely
accurately when the most road kills of deer are going to take place on
their state highways. Of the 17,000 or so deer that die each year in their
area after being struck by motorists, the majority of those deaths take
place in late autumn. Why? ‘Because the males are concentrating almost
exclusively on reproductive activities’, they say ‘and are a lot
less wary than they normally would be.’
It would be interesting to see if there were similar
statistics for roo’s and wombats over here.
From Frederick Buechner I
get this powerful, if somewhat lurid, quote:
Lust is the ape that gibbers in our loins. Tame
him as we will by day, he rages all the wilder in our dreams by night.
Just when we think we're safe from him, he raises up his ugly head and
smirks, and there's no river in the world flows cold and strong enough to
strike him down. Almighty God, why dost thou deck men with such a
loathsome toy?
In a survey in
Discipleship Journal, readers ranked what they believed to be the
most effective means of dealing with their ‘loathsome toys’ (ie. resisting
temptation):
Prayer (84 percent), avoiding compromising
situations (76 percent), Bible study (66 percent), and being accountable
to someone (52 percent).
If you want a rather
left-of-field indicator as to the power of lust in our world, take hold of
this statistic, again from the U.S.:
In 1994,the U.S. State Department spent US $200,000
to purchase condoms for U.S. troops that were being deployed in Haiti.
That strikes me as a rather grim statistic, and I
trust that it has not been mirrored in any Australian government policy
concerning our troops in East Timor.
Let me conclude this grim
compilation though with a quote from Martin Luther who, surprisingly
perhaps, saw a more positive role for lust:
‘God uses lust’ says
Luther ‘to impel man to marriage, as He uses ambition to impel people
to office, avarice to earning, and fear to impel people to
faith.’.
Maybe so, but most of us, I
think, would consider it a rather sad faith that is based solely on fear,
just as we would expect a marriage based on lust to be an unhappy
marriage.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...
but then perhaps our Bible story today will upset our settled theories for
us here, for it tells us about a marriage that was based on lust, and
which indeed was developed through lies, deceit and murder, and yet... a
relationship that became one of the great relationships – a relationship
through which the two persons concerned become the mother and father of a
great line of kings that culminates in the person of the Lord Jesus
Himself – the son of David, and equally, we might say, the son of
Bathsheeba.
But we get ahead of
ourselves. For while our story ends in Jesus, it begins on the rooftop of
a palace in Jerusalem, with King David going for an innocent stroll around
his roof.
It is spring, we are also
told, and the rest of the men of Israel have gone off to war. Why has
David not gone with them we might ask? Perhaps quite a lot of the
men at the front were asking the same question. Indeed, David’s key role
as a leader for most of his life had been as a military leader. Now
though, it seemed that David had decided to let somebody else fight his
battles for him!
It is spring, we are told,
at any rate. And this was not just a good time to go to war, but also a
good time to go for a stroll about your roof, and indeed, so it would
seem, it was a good time of year to have a bath on your roof.
Was Bathsheeba deliberately
flirting with David by deciding to take a bath on her roof? We don’t know.
If it was the middle of winter and she was deciding to take a bath on the
roof, then that would be a pretty clear indication, but it was spring and
it was hot, and possibly it had never clicked with her that you could see
her rooftop from the roof of the palace.
If you walk about the rectory roof at night, you can
see the rooftops of many of our neighbouring houses, and I suspect that
many of their residents have never thought about their visibility from the
rectory rooftop. Mind you, I’ve never seen anybody bathing on any of the
other rooftops. Mind you, I probably don’t really walk around on the
rectory roof often enough to really gauge whether there are any rooftop
bathers in this vicinity, which is probably just as well if we follow the
course of this story.
David notices Bathsheeba,
and he evidently watches her, and then he tries to find out more about
her, and then he sends for her, and then he sleeps with her, and she
becomes pregnant, and then things really start to become interesting –
from the reader’s point of view at any rate. Certainly not from the point
of view of David or Bathsheeba, nor certainly from the point of view of
her husband Uriah the Hittite.
David’s attempt to deal with
his problem has been compared to the ancient Pharaoh’s attempt
(back in Moses’ day) to deal with his problem – namely the problem
that the Israelites had become too powerful. Pharaoh made three different
attempts to solve that problem, if you remember – each one being
increasingly more brutal. First he attempted to subdue the Israelites by
enslaving them, then the midwives were told to kill the newly born male
Hebrew children, and finally all Egyptians were told to throw Hebrew males
into the river.
David similarly makes three
attempts to deal with Bathsheeba’s pregnancy, each one increasingly more
violent and unprincipled. First he sends Uriah home for some ‘R & R’.
When that doesn’t work, he gets Uriah drunk, and hopes that in his
inebriation he’ll forget his principles. When that doesn’t work, he has
Uriah killed.
There is very little that
can be said in defence of David in all these proceedings. Indeed, I don’t
think I’ve ever read of anybody trying to say something in defence of
David in this whole affair. It’s one long slimy tale of lies and usury and
violence that begins with what was supposed to be a harmless
one-night-stand.
Is that where the problem
really begins? Perhaps we’d be better to say that the problem begins with
David staring a little too long and hard at the wrong rooftop. Or perhaps
it all begins when David asks his servant as to the identity of the
bather. Or perhaps the problem really began when David decided to stay
home while he sent all his men off to war. Presumably if David had taken
responsibility for fighting his own battles, instead of letting Joab do
his fighting for him, this whole sordid affair never would have
happened.
Of course, it’s easy to be
wise in retrospect. And yet it would be useful, I think, if we could
isolate at exactly what point David ‘stepped over the line’ – where a bit
of harmless voyeurism started to turn into adultery and murder.
The comparison that seems to fit best for me is with
the Profumo affair in Britain, which ultimately brought down the MacMillan
government.
Those who remember the story
will remember the character of Christine Keeler – the high-class call-girl
who became sexually involved with both John Profumo, the British Minister
of War, and with Soviet Naval attaché Eugene Ivanov.
I was there when the story
broke in 1963, living in Britain. Unfortunately, I don’t remember a great
deal of it, as I was only 1 year old.
But the thing I remember
about the story, and the reason I find it relevant to today’s story, is
what has been related to me about how the whole ‘Profumo Affair’ began.
Apparently the Ministers were taking a break from a rather intense cabinet
meeting of some sort, and Profumo and others were standing out on a
balcony overlooking a swimming pool. Profumo saw a girl bathing in the
pool and asked an attaché ‘who is that’? The attaché
replied ‘I don’t know... but I’ll find out.’
That’s where the problem
starts. It’s when it all still seems quite harmless. It’s when you just
seem to be playing with the edge of the flame. It’s when you decide to
just take it one step further. It’s when someone says ‘I’ll find out’ and
you just nod your head, or just remain silent – do nothing, because what
could be more harmless than doing nothing!
This is how it all began for
John Profumo, and how it all began for David – a sordid, bloody mess that
would end up in death and murder and threaten the collapse of David’s
entire kingdom – all beginning with David’s simple question ‘who is that
bathing on the rooftop?’, and his aide saying something like ‘I don’t
know, but I’ll find out’.
There’s a punch line in this whole story of course –
this story of treachery, deceit, adultery and murder. The punch line is
that the chief villain in the story is David - God’s own guy!
And we don’t just mean that
David was God’s own guy before this all happened. Nor that he was
God’s own guy after he repented of everything that happened. The
fact that he repented might have reflected the fact that he was God’s own
guy, but the truth of the matter is that he was God’s own guy before and
after, and therefore also in the middle of all this mess. Even while he
was busy lying, stealing, fornicating and murdering, he was still God’s
own guy – ‘the man after God’s own heart’.
Nobody in the history of the
Bible, apart from the Lord Himself, is remembered so affectionately, so
lovingly and so idealistically as David. ‘Son of David’ they called Jesus,
and no higher title could be accorded a person. ‘Son of David’ in the
Hebrew mind was indeed almost synonymous with ‘Son of God’.
How can this be? Saul,
David’s predecessor, was also a man with problems, but his failings, we
would surely think, pale into insignificance alongside this adulterous and
murderous rampage. And yet we’re told that Saul was not God’s own
guy, but that David was! One the one hand this has me thinking ‘Thank God,
there’s hope for us all’. But on the other hand I’m thinking ‘If
David can do all this and still be God’s own guy, how are we supposed to
distinguish the good guys from the bad guys?’
I’m not going to try and
offer any simple platitude to solve that dilemma today, but it does make
me recall some words penned by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, shortly before his
death at the hands of the Nazi’s. ‘Far worse’ says Bonhoeffer
‘are the good deeds of evil persons, then the evil deeds of good
persons.’ Maybe that is a clue to our solving of this question. Maybe
'goodness' and 'evil' are things that take hold of persons at deeper
levels than that of our thoughts and deeds. Maybe our salvation is
something that takes place at that deeper level. Maybe .....
Maybe the goal should not be
to ‘solve the question’ at all, at an intellectual level, but to recognise
through this the need to be ‘God’s own people’ at that deeper
level, even if we aren’t lying stealing and fornicating, and through
this to behold something of the mystery of the deep and boundless grace of
God.
Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill, July 30th,
2000
Stop the Extramarital Affair
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