© 2024 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.
When David heard that Absalom was slain, he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept, and thus he said: O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!
Contemporary composer Eric Whitacre brought those words from 2 Samuel 18 to life in a haunting choral piece that conveys the grief, anger, guilt, and desperation of a father who had lost his son. To express the depths of David’s emotion, Whitacre builds up an 18-part chord, one voice at a time, gradually growing to an anguishing climax of pain and woe before trailing off in a whimper of resignation. (You can listen to all eighteen minutes of the piece here.)
But neither Eric Whitacre nor the chopped-up lectionary text we heard this morning conveys the complexity of King David’s loss. David didn’t just lose a son. He defeated an enemy. The lectionary skips over a lot of the story, and we need at least a quick recap to begin to appreciate what David’s grief might teach us.
A few weeks ago, Lora Walsh mentioned in her sermon that David only learned how to respect the Ark of the Covenant when he was forced to flee the city of Jerusalem and told the priests to carry the Ark back into the city where it belonged. “If I find favor in the eyes of the LORD,” David said to Zadok, “he will bring me back and let me see both it and the place where it remains. But if [God] says, ‘I take no pleasure in you,’ here I am, let him do to me what seems good to him” (2 Sam. 16:25-26). At the time, David and his loyal supporters were running away from Jerusalem because Absalom, one of David’s sons, had declared himself king, and his troops were marching toward the city.
But the seeds of Absalom’s treachery go back further than that. For years, he had sat at the gate of the city and listened to the people’s troubles. Whenever they would come to Jerusalem to seek a judgment or an intervention from the king, the king was always too busy to hear them, but Absalom listened with compassion. Every time a petitioner came and bowed before the prince, Absalom would lift them up and embrace them with a kiss. “If only I were the king,” he said to himself, “then I would give these people justice.” A handsome man with striking locks of hair and a servant’s heart, Absalom stole the hearts of the nation.
But the rift between Absalom and his father didn’t start at the city gate either. Years earlier, Amnon, the heir to the throne and Absalom’s half-brother by another of David’s wives, had developed an obsessive crush on Tamar, Absalom’s sister. Everyone knew about Amnon’s obsession, and everyone knew that nothing could ever come of it, but that didn’t stop David’s oldest son from trying.
One day, Amnon pretended to be ill and asked his father to send Tamar to come and minister to him. The Bible isn’t clear whether David knew why his son made this strange request, but it implies that the king should have known that he was sending Tamar into a dangerous situation. After asking his servants to leave the room, Amnon raped his half-sister. As soon as he had done this wicked thing, Amnon was filled with disgust for her, even more than the lust he had previously felt, and he sent her away, exposing her to a double-shame for his crime. When Absalom saw that his sister had exchanged her royal robes for the mournful garments of a desolate woman, he asked Tamar to confess what had happened. When King David learned of it, we are told, he was very angry, yet “he would not punish his son Amnon, because he loved him, for he was his firstborn.”
Absalom, on the other hand, had no intention of suppressing his anger. For two full years, he waited, speaking neither good nor bad to his half-brother. Then, when the time was right, he hosted a feast for all the king’s sons. Absalom told his servants to wait until Amnon’s heart was merry with wine and then, when the host gave the order, to strike him down. After avenging his sister’s rape with the blood of her rapist, Absalom fled. For three years, he lived in exile while King David mourned the death of his oldest son.
Eventually, David’s feelings shifted, and a spot for Absalom opened up in his heart. Joab, the king’s general, recognized the need to establish a clear line of succession, and he seized upon this emotional shift and orchestrated Absalom’s return to Jerusalem. But grief and guilt are funny things, and David did not know how to be reconciled with his son. Although he allowed Absalom to come back into the city and eventually even offered him a kiss of forgiveness, David was unable to face the embodiment of his own parental failures, and he kept this son at a distance. The king’s inability to confront his own shortcomings as a father quickly grew into a neglect of his royal duties, and, before long, Absalom was sitting at the city gate, wishing that he were the king.
“Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom,” David said to his generals in the hearing of the troops, as he sent them out to risk their lives for his sake in battle. And, when the fighting was over and David heard that Absalom was slain, he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept. But that isn’t the end of this story. In its conclusion, which the lectionary leaves out, Joab confronts the king about his problematic grief:
You have today covered with shame the faces of all your servants, who have this day saved your life and the lives of your sons and your daughters and the lives of your wives and your concubines, because you love those who hate you and hate those who love you. For you have made it clear today that commanders and servants are nothing to you, for today I know that if Absalom were alive and all of us were dead today, then you would be pleased. Now therefore arise, go out and speak kindly to your servants, for I swear by the LORD, if you do not go, not a man will stay with you this night, and this will be worse for you than all the evil that has come upon you from your youth until now. (2 Samuel 19:5-7)
David’s side may have won the battle, and his grief may be easy for us to understand, but his inability to sort through the conflicting demands upon his heart almost cost him his kingship even after his generals had given him the victory. That imperfect leader and imperfect father is the man whom the Bible asks us to remember.
The words of sacred scripture do not preserve for us an unblemished hagiography of Israel’s greatest king because a portrayal of David as perfect would have no power to help us. Instead, the story of David’s life that we are given includes horrible moments of lust, deceit, selfishness, and injustice. And it also includes heart-rending moments of struggle, fear, failure, and grief. As such, it is the story of the life of a human being—sinful yet faithful, powerful yet impotent, full of arrogance yet desperate for affection.
David was only a boy when the prophet Samuel anointed him to be king. The youngest of eight sons, David was called in from the field, an afterthought of his own father, the least likely in his family to be chosen to lead God’s people. Later on, when his father sent him with supplies for his brothers to the battleline where Goliath and the Philistines threatened the army of Saul, his siblings scoffed at him and accused him of showing up just to gawk at the violence. Although it's not an excuse for David’s moral or political failures, his childhood, which Joab invoked in his reprimand of the king, helps us understand why David had such a hard time within his own family. He did not grow up learning how to be a leader, but God chose him and thrusted him into that role.
Too often preachers have lauded David as the man after God’s own heart without giving voice to the victims of his negligence and wickedness even though the pages of holy scripture refuse to cover them up. But we would compound their mistake if we excised the stories of David’s life from our lectionary or declined to preach on them when they come up. The Bible does not present David as a man to be imitated but as an example of a flawed human being whose flaws did not prevent God from using him for the good of God’s people.
None of us is perfect. We are all plagued by the same shortcomings as King David, which is to say we are all human. Like David, we are desperate to be loved, and, like him, when we are conscious of our belovedness, our lives become mirrors of God’s love. When we realize that God has not chosen us because we are perfect but simply because, in God’s goodness, God chooses to love us, we are set free from those forces that compel us to seek affection in sinful ways. In other words, when we recognize that God loves us unconditionally, that love begins to shape our lives into patterns of holiness.
You don’t have to be perfect in order to be God’s beloved child. And you don’t need to love perfectly in order to be loved by God. But God’s love will not allow you to stay put in your imperfections. That unconditional love will find you cand call you, along with all your shortcomings, into a new life of holiness. It’s okay if that transformation takes a lifetime. God didn’t give up on David, and God won’t give up on you.
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