House of David

Midweek Worship

The Eighth Week After the Pentecost

Semicontinous Reading: 2 Samuel 7:1-14a

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

The funny thing about life, about time, is that if we look forward into the future everything seems like wide open possibility. Anything could happen. It’s all up to chance. Whereas if we look backwards, to the past, it all seems fated, set in stone. Each moment in history follows logically and necessarily from the one before it, and in turn leads logically and necessarily to the next. But here in this present moment, in the eternal now, it’s about choice, isn’t it? It’s about the will to do the work we find before us.

And somewhere in this admixture of fate and choice and chance—marbled all throughout it, in fact—we find the mysterious unspooling of the intentions of our God, which we call providence, God acting in history, in time, in life. That’s not to say that God wills or causes bad things to happen, of course. But it does mean that God can extract good even from our darkest days. That’s what redemption is. That’s what resurrection is.

Take, for example, the House of David, a dynasty fraught with fate, chance, and choice, intertwined with God’s ineffable providence, to produce the unlikeliest and loveliest of outcomes: to produce, in fact, the Messiah, the Savior of all worlds.

We’ve been following David and his predecessors for several weeks now, through our semicontinuous readings of the Hebrew Bible. And at this point in the story, his authority is well and truly established. He rules over all Twelve Tribes, north and south, Israel and Judah. He controls major trade routes between Africa, Europe, and Asia. He has a new capital city, loyal exclusively to him, and he is centralizing the cult of Yahweh; that is, identifying his rule with the only legitimate worship of God.

In the passage we read today, David sits securely on his well-defended throne, and has built for himself a fine cedar palace atop Jerusalem. Yet the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred relic of Israelite religion—signifying the very presence of God on this earth—remains in a tent. It’s a lavish tent, I’m sure, an opulent tent; yet hardly, in David’s mind, worthy of the glory of Yahweh, or of Yahweh’s chosen king. God needs a permanent place next to David’s throne. And so the king decides to build for God a house.

Now, in Hebrew the word “house” is every bit as ambiguous as we find it in English. It can mean a domicile, yes. It can also mean a temple, a house of God; or it can mean a dynasty, the House of David. When David inquires of the prophet Nathan, Nathan has a dream, in which God makes it clear that God has no house, and needs no house. As His chosen people have moved from place to place, Yahweh has moved with them, tabernacled with them. Build a house for God, will you? And what next—make a glass to hold the ocean?

And so the Lord through Nathan says to David: “You will not be the one to make for Me a house. But I tell you that I will make for you a house. I will establish My covenant with your offspring after you, and will establish the throne of his kingdom forever, and I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to Me.”

This, in the Bible, is the famous Davidic Covenant, the divine promise that a descendant of David will rule on the throne of God’s people forever. The Son of David will be Son of God, so that kingship itself becomes a sign of Yahweh’s faithfulness. Mind you, the notion that monarchs stand as representatives and even adoptive sons of the gods is relatively common in the Ancient Near East. Kingship is theophany. But what sets David’s line apart is its permanence.

David shall not build a house for God, but his son will, the celebrated Temple of Solomon. And under Solomon’s rule, the people of Israel will know wealth, power, and prosperity greater than anything before or anything since. Yet after David and Solomon, the nation of Israel will split in two. And while in the north dynasties rise and fall seemingly every other day, the south retains Jerusalem, the Temple, and the Davidic line. Centuries go by, yet the House of David stands. That’s really rather something.

A straightforward reading of the Scriptures would say, “Of course! God clearly promises this to David, that his line shall endure forever.” A more skeptical scholarly take might be that the House of David, against all odds, held firm for hundreds of years, and so the tradition arose that it was guaranteed by God. This returns us to that theme of fate, choice, and chance. Looking forward from David it was all up in the air. But looking back from his descendants, it all seems set in stone. Either way, the eyes of faith discern herein the providence of God.

But here’s the thing: 400 years is one heck of a run, but it’s not forever. Eventually the House of David fell, to the great empire of the Chaldeans, Neo-Babylonia. The people, at least anyone who had two coins to rub together, were deported. This is the infamous Babylonian Exile, in which the people of Israel, the people of God, lost everything they knew of their faith: lost the land, lost the Temple, lost the kingship that was the sign of God’s faithfulness, lost even the Holy Ark.

In Exile, then, they had to evolve, the old remade anew. The people of Israel, the people of Judea, became now truly Jewish, became People of the Book, maintaining their identity, their faithfulness, through the story of their people, the story of the Bible. And they realized that God was with them still, that God was faithful in the Exile, so that the promises of the Lord held firm even and especially when all seemed lost. So what then of the king? What about the line of David?

If God was still with them, as He was, and if His promises still held, as they did, then logically, faithfully, the Davidic Covenant must still hold. Somewhere, somehow, there awaited a descendant of David who would claim the throne of his ancestors. Hope begat legend, begat prophecy. The chosen King, God’s anointed—“Messiah” in Hebrew, “Christos” in Greek—would not be like kings of old, who failed.

No, this would be a King sent by God: a Son of David, Son of God, who would appear as though a Son of Man, but who would in fact be so much more. Some thought He would be a prophet, perhaps even a prophet of old returned from heaven, like Enoch or Elijah. Some expected a miracle-worker, a warlord, even an angel. And some even dared to wonder if the Messiah, the Christ, might in fact be God Himself on earth, God Himself as one of us, the Almighty Creator Yahweh made Man.

And so they waited; and so they prayed; for 500 years and more, for this Man, for this Angel, for this God to appear, and to save His people, and to claim His throne, and to fulfill the promises given by God to rule over Israel, rule all the world. Until at last, in the fullness of time, when all the earth was at peace, “Jesus Christ, eternal God, Son of the eternal Father, willing to hallow the world by His coming in mercy, was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judea.”

This, at last, is the true legacy of David, the fulfillment of the promise of his House. David, for all his sins, forged a kingdom, created a people, compiled a book, that would change the course of world events for millennia to come. And all of it culminated in Jesus Christ—Son of David, Son of Man, Son of God—the Paschal Lamb who stands as slain, and takes away the sin of the world.

Oh, how many things occurred, in the thousand years between David and Jesus, betwixt the king and the Christ! How many things that could be chalked up to choice and chance and fate! How many decisions that could have gone the other way!—and often did. Yet through it all God worked His providence, His patient, insistent will for our salvation. And in the end He fulfilled every promise, in ways we could scarcely imagine.

No matter the route that we took, it was always going to end here: in Jesus; in God. He is the source and ground of all, in whom we live and move and have our being. He is the only possible end. And through His wounds, He draws all of us home.

And when thy days be fulfilled, and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee … and I will establish the throne of His Kingdom for ever. I will be His Father, and He shall be My Son.

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