Sermon: David and Bathsheba

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.

Nathan said to David, ‘You are the man'.

God spoke these words and said, ‘You shall not covet'.

The narrative of 2 Samuel 10 and 11 is magnificently crafted.  It was, the narrator tells us, the time of year, the Spring-time, when kings go to war. But King David stayed home. By chance, he saw a woman bathing - she was clearly naked and she was very beautiful. David enquired who she was, and he found out she was married to Uriah the Hittite, who wasn't at home but was fighting the king's battle. David sent for her, she came, and he slept with her. She had no choice; he was, after all, the king. And guess what? She became pregnant.

So now the cover up;  David summoned Uriah from the war. ‘Go and see your wife', he said to him, obviously expecting that they would sleep together. But Uriah was a man of principle and he refused to go to his wife. David's spies reported this, so David asked, ‘Why didn't you go into your house?' And faithful, principled Uriah, who a foreigner, a Hittite not a Hebrew, replied - ‘The Ark of the Lord and all the soldiers are sleeping in booths in the midst of the battle - so how can I go and take pleasure?' David tried to get him drunk with wine, but still Uriah would not go to his wife. So David commanded his henchman Joab to send Uriah into the heart of the battle, where the fighting was severest, and Uriah was slain.

And his wife mourned him; but then, immediately, the King took her as his wife and she bore a son.  Mission accomplished; cover up complete, but there was no hiding from the Lord, who was angry.

So the Lord sent Nathan the prophet and in a stunning parable, he set out the realities of the situation. Two men, one fabulously rich and one pitifully poor: the rich man had everything, many flocks and herds. But note how the author paints the picture of the poor man. He had but one ewe lamb. He reared it, as if one of his own children, he fed it from his meagre provisions, his allowed it to drink from his own cup; he used to cuddle it; it was like a daughter to him. A traveller came one day, and the rich man refused to take one of his many lambs; instead he took the lamb of the poor man, killed it and served it. Note the language, the rich man took it. And David's anger was intense, and he pronounced the sentence, ‘The man who did this deserves to die.' And Nathan said, ‘You are the man'. ‘Thus says, the Lord'.  And what follows is a biting indictment, spelling out God's generosity to David, a generosity that the Lord would have extended if it were deemed not to be enough. ‘Why then have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight. You have struck down the Uriah the Hittite with the sword and you have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife'.

And there was a judgment; the sword would never depart from David during his life-time; the child who was born soon died. And it's interesting - it is only in the final part of this narrative that we are told the woman's name - Bathsheba. Before that, she is simply the woman and more fundamentally, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.  She was treated as a thing to be possessed rather than a person, and the narrative leaves us in no doubt of whose wife she was.

Three of the Ten Commandments are broken in this narrative. You shall not covet, you shall not commit adultery; you shall not kill. It's interesting that the second two flow out of the first. David coveted another man's wife, and that led him first into adultery and then into murder.

At Evensong at present we are reading through Paul's letter to the Romans. Paul was a Pharisee, for whom the commandments were absolutely sacrosanct. For the Pharisees being righteous in the eyes of God depended on total conformity to the Law. Paul was not an adulterer, thief, or liar. He shunned idolatry, he kept the Sabbath, but when he met the Risen Christ, he saw his life in a completely new way. And he realised that the one commandment about which he was deluding himself was the tenth, ‘You shall not covet'.  This was Paul's ‘Achilles heel'. He realised that his heart was deeply covetous. And for Paul, this was the breakthrough - the idea of keeping the commandments was a fantasy and you could never be saved if that was the way of salvation; no, we are sinners, and therefore salvation can only come as a gift of God's grace and mercy through the atoning death of Christ for the sins of the world. You see, coveting is an inward act of desire - it then can lead on to other outward sins, as it did with David. And Jesus himself, of course, stressed in his teaching that inward attitudes are as culpable as outward acts.  Yes, we may not commit outward adultery, but to look lustfully at another is an adultery of the heart; we may not be murderers, but to hate someone, to think in hate, ‘I wish you were dead' is as culpable in the eyes of God as the actual act of homicide. So Paul was clear, ‘All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.'

But the commandment stands; it is good and holy, and covetousness is something we must resist. To covert is to desire something or someone that doesn't belong to you or something you simply can't have. You see, however beautiful Bathsheba was, and however omnipotent David thought he was as King, when he discovered that Bathsheba was covenanted to someone else, it should have been the end of it. After all, she wasn't the only beautiful woman in Jerusalem.  This was raw, insistent lust here on David's part; it didn't see Bathsheba and Uriah as human beings; it didn't recognise Uriah's faithfulness to the king himself as a loyal soldier; it didn't stop to reflect on the love between Uriah and Bathsheba that demanded exclusivity.  Coveting arises out of a lack of contentment; it provokes jealousy; it colludes with the fantasy that the grass is greener on the other side of the street; it is what happens when we forget to be thankful, or to use an old fashioned phrase, when we forget to count our blessings. And unchecked it leads us into other sins; as Paul discovered, it grows. And it can cause havoc - untold hurt and distress.  I well remember when I was at theological college, in an address for leavers about to be ordained, one of the tutors said, and he was mainly addressing males,

And if any of you who are married decide you're going to run away with the organist, I hope you see my face every time you kiss her!

Holy Communion assists us here, because it is our weekly outpouring of thanksgiving for all God's blessings, spiritual and material. It reminds us that we are a blessed people; that God's love and grace are showered upon us.  Everything comes together in thanksgiving, and it is thanksgiving over the bread and wine that makes them holy, that sets them apart as our sacramental food that we receive by faith.  It's also there in the General Thanksgiving where we own God's goodness and loving kindness to us and to all people. We continue,          

            We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life,but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.

You see, thanksgiving lifts us from ourselves to God. Thanksgiving diverts our minds from selfishness to gratitude. Thanksgiving enables to live with contentment, so we know what is and what isn't ours.

In the titles of the Psalter, the greatest of the penitential Psalms, no. 51, is seen as David's response to the words of Nathan the prophet ‘You are the man'. Like St Paul, we do find that sin produces in us all kinds of covetousness, and penitence is our proper response. ‘We have sinned against you in thought' is part of our penitential prayer. But thankful contentment is the other preventative virtue we can seek, and we can pray for the help of the Holy Spirit to turn us from self to God, from selfishness to gratitude. For we see such contented thankfulness most clearly in the person of Jesus, our teacher and our Lord.