The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon at All Saints’, Leminster, 7:00pm service, Trinity IX.
“Thou art the man!”
‘You da man’, Nathan says, at least in contemporary street-talk! But what really is this story all about?
The story of David and Nathan suggests the interplay of two metaphors of understanding that belong to a theology of revelation. Scripture, we might say, is both a mirror and a window: a mirror in which we are allowed to see the truth of ourselves and a window through which we are privileged to glimpse something of the glory of God. A mirror and a window.
The story of David is not only one of the great narrative sequences in the Scriptures; it is also, as John Donne suggests, the story of Everyman. “His Person includes all states, between a shepherd and a King”, a poet and a warrior, too, we might add, one who sings and one who acts. In a way, David epitomises the whole of Israel and by extension the whole of humanity. That is partly why the Davidic lineage of Jesus is so important in the New Testament. But David epitomises the whole of Israel and the whole of our humanity, not only in its truth but also in its untruth. “His sinne includes all sinne”, Donne remarks, “we need no other Example to discover to us the slippery wayes into sin, or the penitential wayes out of sin, than …. David”.
We do not have windows into one another’s souls, as that wise woman theologian, Queen Elizabeth the First observed long ago. We hardly know ourselves. Those prerogatives belong to God and to God alone. “The Lord sees not as man sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart”, it is famously said. It is actually said about David. In the story of David we are given to see the heart of David which God sees and in it we are given to see something about ourselves. In this lesson from the story of David we are given to see the mirror in which David confronts himself in his sinfulness and the window through which he sees God in his chastening mercy. The mirror which Nathan holds up is the parable which he tells the King, the parable which challenges and convicts. What has David done? Well, everything and more.
He sees the beautiful Bathsheba, the wife of the loyal soldier, Uriah the Hittite, bathing. The lust conceived in his heart leads to an act of adultery with Bathsheba. He lies with her and she conceives a child. He contrives to cover this up by recalling Uriah from battle to go to his home and sleep with his wife, hoping to pass off the child as Uriah’s. But his plan is foiled by Uriah’s loyalty to the warrior’s code; he sleeps not in his bed with Bathsheba, but at the door of the king in solidarity with his soldiers sleeping on the ground. David, then, conspires to have Uriah placed in the forefront of the battle “that he may be struck down and die”, which is what happens. With Uriah out of the way, David is free to take Bathsheba as his wife and she bears him a son.
In a phrase that is almost breath-taking in its power of understatement, we are told, “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord”. You bet it did! Just consider. He coveted another man’s wife – violating the tenth commandment; he committed adultery – violating the seventh commandment; and he engineered the death of Uriah – thereby violating the sixth commandment. The Ten Commandments, it is worth noting, are all included in the first, “I am the Lord thy God; Thou shalt have none other gods but me”. David’s act is a denial of the first and, in a way, a denial of all the commandments. The sequence itself is instructive about the progress of sin, moving from desires within to acts of illicit sex and murder involving greater and greater degrees of deceit and treachery.
We are given a window into the soul of David. But it is a window through which God gives us to look.
Do we look through this window in voyeuristic delight at the evil deeds of David, perhaps with the thought that if he can do it, then so can we? Is that the purpose of the telling of this story? By no means. We are meant to confront the possibilities and the realities of our own sins in the story of David’s sin. But there is something more. There is the mirror in which David confronts his sin and what he does as a result.
“Thou art the man”, Nathan the prophet, the voice of conscience, says to King David who has convicted and judged himself by his response to the story, “as the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die”. The parable is the mirror that Nathan holds up for David to see himself. Does David try to justify himself with protestations and excuses? No. He simply repents. Indeed, the great psalm of repentance, psalm 51, can be understood to be rooted in David’s deep awareness of his sin. “Against thee only have I sinned , and done that which is evil in thy sight”.
“Thou art the man” at once convicts and convinces us, convicts us of our sins and convinces us of the grace of God. As John Bramhall observes, “nothing is more hidden than true grace: we understand it not certainly in another, hardly in ourselves”, but we are given by God’s good grace a mirror and a window. Look and see if ‘you da man’, the man of conscience who turns and repents.
“Thou art the man.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity IX
Evening Prayer
All Saints’, Leminster
August 9th, 2009