KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 31 March
It happened late one afternoon
And so begins the story of the sin of David. A powerful narrative wonderfully told, it ends with the classic understatement, that what “David had done displeased the Lord.” No kidding!
The story of David is the story of a kind of everyman. Just before the March reading break, we saw David as a hero though not simply in the usual characteristics of physical size and strength. The point was the contrast between how “man looks on the outward appearance but God looks on the heart.” We saw what God sees in the heart of David in terms of his courage – literally, what is in the heart – and his insight and commitment to the truth and power of God. It was that which allowed him to stand up against the formidable figure of Goliath, the champion of the Philistines. What is bigger than Goliath’s physical stature was his ego and presumption in defying God as the author of all creation.
But here, too, in the story of David’s sin, we see the heart which God sees, the heart in its darkness and deceit, the heart in its contradiction and denial of its own truth. David shows us, as John Donne concisely says, “the slippery ways into sin.” This, too, is part of our reality, the reality of our sinfulness, of our doing what in some sense we know is wrong. If I were to ask whether anyone here in Chapel has ever done something wrong or has made serious mistakes, we would all have to raise our hands, at least if we are being honest with ourselves. I would have to raise two hands. We deceive ourselves and one another in claiming to be perfect and good, in protesting that we never lie or fudge the truth. This story awakens us to ourselves in the sad but true fact of our sinfulness; not just mistakes but mistakes which we know to be wrong yet have done anyway.
So what happened “late one afternoon”? First, David sees a beautiful woman bathing. He conceives a lust for her in his heart. He inquires and finds out that she is Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a non-Israelite, but a soldier fighting for David. In other words, he knows that she is the wife of a loyal soldier. But here is the first moment of the slippery slope argument about how sin begets sin begets sin. It provides a wonderful commentary on the logic of the Ten Commandments and of the movement and connection between the commandments. It begins “late one afternoon” with the last of the commandments: “thou shalt not covet.” David covets in his heart another man’s wife. The lust of the eyes leads to the lust in his heart to possess another for himself. It leads to adultery. He takes Bathsheba and has sex with her. “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”