Fallen King

Lenten Vespers, Week Four

Reading: 2 Samuel 12:1-12

Homily:

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Throughout these Lenten vespers we’ve been following St Augustine’s catechetical method of teaching the story of the Bible through six great ages of the world. There was the age from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, and from Abraham through the Judges. We come now to Augustine’s Fourth Age of the World: from the Age of Heroes to the Age of Kings.

Ever since the breaking of the world, ever since sin shattered the intended harmony of Creation, God has been working to save the cosmos by saving humankind. We saw this when He followed Adam and Eve into exile from the Garden. We saw this in the Great Flood, when He drowned us in our sin and delivered Noah to give the world new birth. And we saw this when He chose Abraham and Sarah, an elderly couple “as good as dead,” to be the parents of a great nation, who would in turn become God’s blessing for all the peoples of the earth.

The first half of God’s promise to Abraham has come now to fruition. God’s people Israel, the family of Abraham, has been delivered from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. They have been united by prophets, defended by heroes, and led by the Spirit and presence of God upon earth. But they look with covetous eyes upon the nations around them—nations that have great temples, great armies, great kings—and they desire such strength for themselves.

At their insistent demands, and despite the warnings of the prophets, God grants His people their prayer. Samuel, last of the Judges, anoints a king over all 12 Tribes of Israel. The first king, Saul, doesn’t work out so well. So Samuel, following the Spirit of God, anoints as Saul’s successor a most unusual choice: a shepherd boy, the youngest of the eight sons of Jesse, named David.

David was bold and passionate for the Lord. As a young man he became famous for confronting and slaying the Philistine giant Goliath, before the collective eyes of the army. And his legend only grew from there. A great warrior, he was beloved by men and women alike, even by the children of Saul. And all that he did, he did for the Lord. When he fought, he fought for the Lord. When he danced, he danced for the Lord. When he built, he built for the Lord. He was as much a priest and a prophet as he was a king—roles that had not been united since Adam, the first of us all, so very long ago.

And it looked for a moment as though Eden might be regained. Here would be a little nation, at the navel of the world, in which the justice and mercies of God would shine forth through the family of Abraham and the royal throne of Israel. David was a great man, a great king, and our great hope. Until, one day, he fell.

He’d begun to grow old, you see, and complacent. He no longer led the armies out to battle; he had generals to do that for him. And one day he saw a beautiful woman, the wife of one of his soldiers—a foreigner, no less, not even an Israelite. And despite having more wives and children than he knew what to do with, David took that man’s wife for his own—in secret, or so he thought. But it’s hard to explain a pregnancy when the husband’s far from home. And so David had her husband killed, and took her for himself.

Such a quiet sin, and so very common among rulers and kings. A little indulgence, a little sex, a little violence. And why not? Wasn’t David God’s own chosen? Wasn’t he the great warrior, the great ruler, the veritable presence of God on earth? Wasn’t he entitled to a bit of the spoils? After all, the king made the law and not the law the king. Such has been the prerogative of Pharaohs and Emperors from time immemorial. And such are still the sins of the rich and the powerful today.

But David was not king of pagans; he was King of Israel. And the great God who had placed him on that throne would not stomach, would never allow, the weak to be taken, the innocent to be murdered, not in His Name. He thundered out judgment upon David, the king’s own sentence passed upon himself! “You did all this in secret,” roared the Lord, “but I shall do this before all Israel and before the sun!”

And David quailed: “I have sinned,” he croaks.

It was all downhill from there, a second Fall from a second Eden. Here had been our last great hope for humankind: a priest-king in the mold of Adam, a good and true and brave man who might’ve led us back into Paradise upon the earth. But he fell as Adam fell, with the fangs of the serpent sunk deep into his heart. The wounds inflicted by David would plague his family for centuries, rending the kingdom asunder, splintered by civil war and eventually carried off into Exile by foreign powers.

Yet there was this one hope: a promise God made to David in his youth, that a child of David’s blood would forever sit upon the throne of God’s people. Yet this anointed one, this Messiah, would not be like all the other kings who had failed so miserably, all the other priests who had fallen into corruption. This Messiah, proclaimed the prophets of the Exile, would look like a human, look like a Son of Man, but would be so much more. This Messiah would come directly from God Himself, might even be God Himself in the flesh!

And when He came, there would be a New Covenant for a New Israel, and Resurrection to new life for all the dead! The fourth age closes, and the fifth begins, with the return of God’s people from their Exile, bearing in their hearts a new and certain hope for a new and certain king.

From the house and line of David would arise the promised Christ.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.