The Failed King

Midweek Worship

Eleventh Week after Pentecost

Semicontinous Reading: 2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33

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.

“Absalom, Absalom! My son, my son!”

There might be more heartbreaking verses somewhere in the Bible, but not many.

When last we left David, he was being taken to task by the prophet of God, called out for his sins and betrayals, for his seizing of Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah. David thought that as king, as God’s chosen anointed representative on earth, he was surely above the Law, above the petty concerns of bourgeois morality. But he could not have been more wrong. And David’s punishment is the judgment he has passed upon himself: the logical results, the awful playing out, of his inhumanity toward those who trusted him as their king to shepherd and to protect them.

Now it’s been a while since then, a while since David’s sins were brought to light. And rather a lot has happened, sad to say. One of David’s daughters, Tamar, was raped by her half-brother Amnon, who further abused her and cast her aside. And David doesn’t seem to do much of anything about it. Is it perhaps that he cannot bring himself to punish his son, punish Amnon, for a crime he himself had committed—the rape of Tamar reminding David of his own rape of Bathsheba?

So Tamar’s brother, Absalom, takes matters into his own hands, and murders Amnon, his half-brother, after getting him good and drunk. So to recap: a royal prince raped a royal princess, and was then murdered by another prince. And they’re all siblings. Could you find a more messed-up family? After this, Absalom flees into exile, where he remains for three years, until David is finally convinced to welcome home the son who murdered his other son.

As you can imagine, this entire tawdry tale—rape, murder, exile—somewhat soured their relationship. Keep in mind that Absalom had been his father’s favorite. He was handsome, charismatic, and more than a little vain, especially proud of his hair. And with Amnon out of the way, Absalom also appears to have been the heir apparent, assuming primogeniture. Later on, however, we will learn that David has sworn an oath to Bathsheba that her younger son Solomon should inherit the crown.

Was this again David’s guilt, placing Bathsheba’s blood upon the throne to make up for his killing of her first husband? Was it done at the insistence of the prophet Nathan? And more importantly—was it well known? Did Absalom know? This is an important question, because Absalom, disillusioned with his aging father’s feckless rule, sets about to usurp the throne. This would seem foolish, if he were next in line. All he would need do is be patient; all he would need do is to wait.

But perhaps Absalom knew of David’s plans for Solomon. Or perhaps the rape of Tamar, the murder of Amnon, and his own subsequent years of exile were simply wounds he could not heal, pains the prince could never get himself over. So Absalom undermines his father, proclaims himself king in the old capital of Hebron, and drives David from Jerusalem, exiling the father who once exiled him. Absalom appears to have won the day. Absalom appears to have won the crown.

But the fight is not quite out of David just yet, and a civil war ensues, ultimately leading to Absalom’s defeat. And David orders his generals, his loyal coterie of killers, not to harm his son, not to add Absalom’s blood to that already staining his hands. They find Absalom stuck fast in an oak, hanging betwixt heaven and earth, because that long, luscious hair of which he was so proud got tangled inextricably into the branches as he tried to flee from the battle on a mule. How very ignominious.

And Joab, David’s hitman of choice, runs no less than three javelins through Absalom’s beating heart. For as far as Joab is concerned, there is no redemption for this treasonous prince. So long as Absalom lives, he is a threat to David’s throne, which Joab here decisively ends. And when David hears that his rule is restored, and that all it cost him was one more son in the grave, one more splash of prince’s blood, he breaks down and weeps: “O Absalom, my son, my son! Would that I had died instead of you!”

What is a throne worth, really? What do wealth and power all amount to in the end? I cannot help but recall the words of King Osric in Conan the Barbarian: “There comes a time,” he said, “when the jewels cease to sparkle, when the gold loses its luster, when the throne room becomes a prison, and all that is left is a father’s love for his child.” David has won his kingdom, by losing all that he had.

It is impossible not to feel sympathy for the man, not to mourn with a father’s broken heart. “My son, my son!” David is no innocent. He brought all this upon himself, by the choices he made, the blood he shed, and the paths he took. But in some ways that just makes it all the worse, doesn’t it? Not only are David’s sons dead, but he’s the one who caused it. It’s his fault. He had succeeded as a king by failing as a father. All he can do now is weep, and wish that he had died instead.

His story isn’t over yet. Believe it or not, there will be another rebellion, and yet another son to bury. But here is where David’s sins have finally caught up with him, come to fruition, as it were. Here he is confronted by the magnitude of his failures. It amazes me that this is all in the Bible, that it could not be whitewashed or explained away. The greatest of Israel’s kings was a sinner, his flaws on full display. The most successful of them all was a failure, and catastrophically so.

There were Ancient Near Eastern tyrants who wouldn’t bat an eye at killing their upstart sons. But there’s enough of that shepherd boy still left in David to weep over the loss of his little lambs. Failure. Pain. Guilt. Is David really so different from you and I? Is his family as far removed as all that from ours? Don’t we too know what it is to grow old, to mourn, to regret?

This is Jesus’ family, mind you. This is the royal line that He chooses for His own. And yes it’s true that Jesus is born a thousand years after David, but it’s David’s throne He claims for His own; and everyone knows Him as the promised Son of David. Besides that, the kings that came between them—the generations of rotten royalty throughout the history of Judah, punctuated only occasionally by a bright spot here and there—they were worse than David, often much worse.

For centuries, the people of Israel and Judah looked back on David’s dysfunctional dynasty and said, “Oh, man. Those were the good old days.”

Jesus claims us in our brokenness. Jesus claims us with our baggage. Jesus claims our guilt, our sins, our sorrows, and how royally we’ve screwed things up for ourselves and for those whom we love. He hasn’t come for perfect people, for the healthy and the holy. He’s come to meet us in our mess, to join us in the beds that we’ve made and the graves that we’ve dug. And He will take that all upon Himself, within Himself, all our violence, our stupidity, our selfishness, our pride, the blood dried thick upon our hands—and He will drown it in the ocean of His love.

He will pull us up from the depths of hell, from the loam of the earth, from the stench of our graves. And He will raise us unto life eternal, joy forever, grace without end. And He will do all this for love of us. He will pay the price we make Him pay. And in return, He will give to us everything He has, everything He is. He will give us God Himself: His Body as our body, His Spirit as our breath.

Only Christ could set this right. Only Christ could return Absalom to David, Uriah to Bathsheba. Only Christ could undo the Gordian knot of our sins: to heal our wounds and smooth our scars and raise our dead. God isn’t here for the healthy. God isn’t here for the saintly. God is here for the Davids, for the monsters, for the failures. He’s here to redeem the irredeemable and to forgive the unforgivable; because only He can, and only He does.

There is no evil Christ cannot redeem, no wrong He cannot right. For if God still loves David—then we all must be redeemed in His sight.

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