Every once in a while, the stories we read in the Bible sound to me like God is saying, “See, I told you so!” (accompanied, occasionally, by a head-shaking sigh, “Will they ever learn…?”)
And this is one of those days.
There’s a lot of evidence for the people of Israel that God has chosen and blessed David as their king. He wins his battles, he’s brought God home to Jerusalem (or at least the ark, the physical symbol of God’s presence), and there are oracles and promises appearing around him that proclaim God’s love for David.
Things are going well.
So well that you couldn’t blame either the people of Israel or David himself for forgetting what God used to say about kings:
They’re dangerous.
A generation or so ago, when the people of Israel got together and demanded that God choose them a king — so that they could keep up with all the other nations — God warned them.
“You know,” God said, “Kings are oppressive, greedy, and power-happy. They take your kids - for soldiers and court servants. Kings take your money, or your produce, the best of what you have, and then still require you to obey them without question. I’m telling you people, kings are dangerous.”
But the people insisted, so God gave them a king.
God chose Saul, and then God chose David, (and then God decided, I’m going to get out of the choosing business; we’ll just run with David and his kids as long as you need a king.)
And now years of civil war have been peacefully settled, David and his army are winning their foreign battles, God’s home is established in David’s city; things seem to be working well.
Which is where today’s story starts:
In the spring. The “time when kings go out to war.”
(Hm, ancient Israel, like contemporary America, seems to have gotten pretty used to being at war in foreign countries)
But this time David’s home, wandering his palace, while his army lays siege to Rabbah.
He goes up to his roof which gives him a good view, spots a woman having a bath, and with little further ado he sends for her and takes her.
The text is spare and full of abrupt verbs - smoothed over a bit in our English translation - and it might intentionally echo God’s warning to the last generation of Israel.
David just takes what he sees, takes a woman who belongs to another (who in our contemporary perspective we know should belong only to herself).
He takes what he wants, and then when he realizes he’s about to get caught, he takes an innocent man’s life, which not so incidentally costs David’s army a lot of other lives.
“See?” says God, “I told you so.
Even the best and most lovable of kings are takers.” Dangerous.
There is a whole tangled nest of sin and power and assumptions and harm in this story, a lifetime of guilt, murder, manslaughter, rape.
God condemns all that; eventually punishes David, but seems to look out of this story at the people of Israel, and the rest of us, sighing and saying, “Well, I told you so.”
None of that changes God’s love for us, none of it diminishes God’s love - not even for guilty, messy David. But I’m increasingly sure God wonders, sometimes or often, “Will they ever learn???”
Twenty-first century Americans are no strangers to these habits.
We elect politicians - over and over - who take our children to war, spend our taxes in ways we never wanted or approved, fail our moral standards in mild or spectacular ways, and get caught up in their own power and position.
We defend beloved cultural leaders, often treat charges of rape, drugs, cheating, abuse as negligible. When sports and entertainment heroes have lost their integrity to the seductive corruption of power, we find it easy to act as if this mistake doesn’t really matter, until overwhelming evidence forces us to concede their failure and our own.
None of that changes God’s love for us,
not for Bill Cosby, Tom Brady, Lance Armstrong, Ray Rice, Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich,
nothing diminishes God’s love for them or for you or me.
But I’m sure God wonders, “Will they ever learn?”
Will we only see what we are comfortable seeing,
or will we learn, someday, to see as God invites us to see?
That’s the question John is asking us when he tells the most famous Jesus story of all.
Aside from the crucifixion and the empty tomb, the story of how Jesus fed a multitude until they could eat no more is the only story told in every gospel. It’s the one story about Jesus that everyone knew.
And when John tells it, you can hear him wondering, will we ever learn?
He tells us that Jesus tests the disciples: setting them up to imagine and dream for a miracle, setting them up to risk extravagant trust in God,
and then has to work around them when Philip expresses what we all know is true: It’s impossible to feed this many people at once.
So Jesus does it anyway:
does the impossible, produces extravagant abundance from a couple of fish sandwiches, and feeds everyone.
The crowd is awed and delighted, but you can hear that John is disappointed in them, too. They call Jesus a prophet - they know he’s tight with God - but they’re missing the point of God’s vivid, world-changing presence among them, of God’s miraculous assurance that whatever we have is enough and more.
They want God’s miracles more than they want God’s presence or God’s truth, so they decide to try to make Jesus the king - even though we should all know by now that kings are dangerous.
It’s not only politically stupid — since it makes them rebels against the current government (which isn’t at all fond of freedom of expression or of protest movements) — but it’s a massive theological blunder, a big spiritual mistake, to try to turn God’s promise to us; God’s personal care for us into an ordinary government function that we find easier to understand, to imagine that promise and care are under human control.
It can’t diminish God’s love for us, but I have no doubt that God sometimes looks at us, sighing, and says, “Oh, will you ever learn?”
We can.
Taken historically and as a group, we don’t have a terrific track record when it comes to trusting God to lead us, shape us, feed us.
Individually we have our grace-filled moments, but generally and predictably, humans like a government, an identity, an economy, that we’ve shaped for ourselves, run by other human beings, and sort of under human control.
But we can learn.
We can use the betrayals of David and our own politicians, the all-too-human failings of cultural heroes, to remind us by contrast of God’s unpredictable but never-failing grace, God’s care for the marginalized, God’s insistence that we, too, love as God loves and reject the glossy sheen of human success.
Or when the news you follow mentions new accusations or admissions from Bill Cosby; another tragic proclamation of official helplessness in the face of gun violence, or the airwaves fill with political candidates promising to run everything the right way, let our human failings and ambitions remind you that God already feeds us better than we could ever feed ourselves, that God wants to be the one we trust with our most basic needs, not just our spiritual fulfillment.
And if you, too, suspect that sometimes God is looking at our world and saying, “Well, I told you so,” then just imagine - and believe! - God’s joy and satisfaction when we do take God’s good advice; when we receive God’s gifts with trust, when we learn to look for God’s promise instead of making our own plans.
Believe we’ll learn, someday.
But know that God’s ready for us to start today.
God has already told us so!
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