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Pathos and Progeny
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis May 13, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill II Samuel 18:24-33 Romans 8:31-39
The 18th chapter of II Samuel is not the text most preachers would choose if left to their own devices on this Hallmark Sunday. Nevertheless we would do well to do business with the text that, by luck of the draw, is before those of us reading the Old Testament together, a text that now invites us all to dare the pathos as well as the promise inherent in the relation of parent to child. We last left David lying with Bathsheba. Some say the story marks the beginning of the succession narrative, a story told to answer the question: Who will succeed David on the throne? Son after son is knocked off until, at the beginning of I Kings, only two come forward to vie for the position. But others say the narrative is concerned with so much more, concerned with “a man, a public man, a man who happens to be king, a man with enormous power…but…nonetheless a man” says Walter Brueggemann, a human being whose life is “marked by pathos, by a sense of incongruity, a wistfulness, a lingering regret about all that cannot be recalled.” In just this sense, the sense of all that cannot be recalled, you might say David fits the modern profile of a “do over dad”: men who leave the mother of a first family to try fatherhood again, this time pushing strollers, changing diapers, helping with homework. Though David’s do over involved turning from his six previous wives—Ahinoam the Jezreelite, mother of Amnon; Abigail the Carmelite, mother of Daniel; Maacah, daughter of King Talmai of Geshur, mother of Absalom; Haggith, mother of Adonijah; Abital, mother of Shephatiah; Eglah, mother of Ithream; not to mention, of course, the unnamed sons born to David’s various concubines and his daughter born to the mother of Absalom whose name was Tamar. David turned from the mothers of his children, perhaps hoping that the seventh wife would be the charm. Apparently Bathsheba was a destined indiscretion, for she would be the woman to bear Israel’s future king, Solomon. Of all of David’s sons, we read, Solomon was the son God loved. The detail should leave us in no doubt as to David’s successor! What rather seems to be in doubt throughout this story is David’s ability to govern Israel while fathering a family whose dysfunction is legendary. Following on the heels of David’s adultery and murder, the king begins to reap the whirlwind his now winded reign has sown. The scenes read like last season’s Sopranos. The son of his first wife rapes his third wife’s daughter; the daughter’s brother, also son of the third wife, murders the son of the first wife to avenge the rape of his sister; the same son of the third wife, exiled from his father’s presence for the murder of his half-brother, returns to David feigning obeisance before rallying an army to overthrow his father; finally the third son who settled the score of his sister’s rape and staged a coup against his father takes three spears to the heart while caught in a thicket between heaven and earth, spears that might as well have pierced David’s heart too. “Absalom, Absalom my son, my son,” he cries: “Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son.” Time and time again, when the king ought to have acted against his own for the sake of the nation, the pathos of parenthood trumped his every royal prerogative. Hidden in the narrative, I do believe, is the reason why. Return in your mind to the day after David danced naked before the Ark of the Covenant, parading God’s presence into David’s city. David’s first instinct is to build a permanent dwelling place for God. God instead vows to make David a house, to make a name, a dynasty for David. “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors,” says the Lord, “I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish [your offspring’s] kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.” The cynic may read this speech as royal propaganda after the fact. I have done the same except that presently I am taken with the next word coming out of God’s mouth. The word marks the moment when, according to Jack Miles, “a fateful change in [God’s] self-understanding begins to occur.” “I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me,” says the Lord of God’s relationship to David’s heir. “When he commits iniquity, I will punish him with a rod such as mortals use, with blows inflicted by human beings. But I will not take my steadfast love from him…Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever.” More than a word about the invulnerability of David’s dynasty in human history, God’s words reveal a relationship between God and God’s children that is at once vulnerable and inviolable. The consequences are astounding! Whereas before the relationship was covenantal--promises made, kept, broken on the human end--such that divorce always lurked on the horizon as a live option, now God is more than the God of our fathers and mothers. In fact, an enormous leap is involved in addressing God not simply as the God of our fathers but praying “God our Father.” To paraphrase Miles, now “Parenthood is an absolute, not a conditional, state. The parent of a child cannot, in the nature of things, cease to be such. If the mother disinherits the child, she is the mother of a disinherited child. If a father slays the child, he is the father of a slain child. If the mother denies the child, she is the mother of a denied child….But once in the Lord’s mouth, once on the page,” Miles goes on, “fatherhood…begins to take on a life of its own.” Irrevocability would be one aspect of that life. As long as God was a covenant partner, God could play the part of an aggrieved party when Israel did what was wrong in the Lord’s sight. Now God will be to Israel a strict parent. Hence we still will read of a relationship characterized by consequences—if you do this, then God will do that; except that here God has placed a limit on those consequences. God will never remove God’s steadfast love from God’s children. Nothing can be imagined that could end this relationship. But, says Miles, irrevocability is just the beginning. I think of the latter prophets and especially Hosea who lets us in on the pathos of God’s parenthood with images that bring to mind God’s motherhood: “When Israel was a child,” says the Lord, “I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me….Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them….How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.” The vulnerability, the pathos is the pathos of the God who has chosen to love without condition. No doubt David’s pathos over Absalom’s death is a pale echo of the same. Absalom who had raped David’s only daughter, had killed his firstborn son and had set out to defeat David in the battle to be king is no less David’s son at the end of the day. The scene of David waiting for word from the front brings to mind the father of the prodigal: a father deeply wronged by the son and yet a father who cannot contain his joy at the son’s return…even as David cannot contain his grief at the report of Absalom’s death. Why? Deeply flawed as he is, David loves in this way because David has known himself so loved by God. Therefore David loves his own deeply flawed son no less. Is this not also the case with us? Those who have known the vulnerable and inviolable love of God are those who have glimpsed the love between parent and child of which their own pathos and patience and compassion is but a dim reflection. So over the years of tantrums and real betrayals, of narcissism and neurotic misunderstandings, of hearts tried and souls tested to the limit, those who have glimpsed the love that does not quit in the face of Jesus Christ, whether parent or child, are those who bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things, until the gift of reconciliation be given…sometimes on this side of the grave and sometimes on the other side. Though what strikes me most about the story before us are the words of David that name the love we long to give to our children and, for the most part, cannot: “Would that I had died instead of you!” David laments. It is the lament of parents whispered or shouted down the dark corridors of human history, this helpless longing to bear the disease or the divorce, the depression or the senseless fears, the dangers of the battlefield or the days spent behind bars, the addictions, the darkness, the recriminations, the cruelties that have broken the spirit or taken the life of the child whose rebellion and brokenness and sin and stupidity have made them no less our own. Yet the God who said of David’s son, “I will be his father” is the same God who has loved us in this way: has died in our place, suffered in our stead, borne the judgment we deserved, descended into hell because without him, that is where we dwell! God our father who will never remove God’s steadfast love is God our mother who cannot give us up, who will not hand us over, who will let nothing, neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creature separate us from God’s love. All of which leads me to say, in the end, that I am grateful this story has been before us today. The culture’s kitsch cannot bear the weight of our freighted relationships, of our dysfunctional dynasties, of the pain we would gladly bear, of the humiliation we would willingly take upon ourselves, of the death we have wished were ours to die for those we once lifted to our cheeks or bent down to feed. Only God in Christ can bear these things, has borne these things, will yet bear these things for the sake of those God loves no less than we. “I am thinking again of my mother,” writes author James Carroll, “Of the embrace that taught me heaven. Of the farewell that sent me off to manhood. I am thinking of her temper, her pushing, her anger, her pique. Of the silence she could inflict on us in her moods. But through it all there was the consistent act of love, teaching us in the morning that the day and its dangers were not too much for us…” teaching us in the evening that we were loved by a God who had gone before us in the darkness. Thanks be to God. Amen. |