Good News for Bad Parents

2 Samuel 12:24-25

Sermon by Dan Schrock

January 24, 2010

Then David consoled his wife Bathsheba, and went to her, and lay with her; and she bore a son, and he named him Solomon. The L ORD loved him, and sent a message by the prophet Nathan; so he named him Jedidiah, because of the L ORD . (NRSV)

David, the son of Jesse, was a famous king. He had a lot of other things going for him too. He was, for instance, a great slayer of giants and a talented soldier who killed lots of other people but never allowed himself to get killed on the battlefield. He was a gifted musician, especially a gifted harpist and vocalist. He was an inspiring poet. And as I said, he was an excellent king—a more able politician than his predecessor, Saul; and a more just ruler than his son and successor, Solomon.

But David was a terrible father. To put it bluntly, he was a bad dad.

Maybe he was a bad dad partly because he was such a good soldier. Maybe those two things are linked. I once knew a psychologist who worked for the United States Air Force. My friend’s job as a psychologist was to meet regularly with Air Force fighter pilots, to counsel them so they could keep flying fighter jets. That’s what my friend’s superiors told him: your job is to keep our boys flying. Keep their marriages patched together. Keep their families intact. Do what you have to do to ensure that our pilots stay in the air without becoming mentally unglued. My friend did as he was told. He counseled fighter pilots, fighter pilot wives, and fighter pilot children. After a year of doing this for the Air Force, he came back to our community for a visit. I asked him how things were going and said to me, “The job is not what I expected. I’m there just to keep those pilots flying. And I’ve discovered that the personal qualities that make people excellent fighter pilots are precisely the same qualities that make them terrible husbands and fathers. It’s basically a given that if someone is a great fighter pilot, he will be a rotten husband and father. And if he’s a decent husband and father, he will be a third-rate fighter pilot.” After hearing this from my psychologist friend, I wonder if that was part of David’s problem: the qualities that made him a great soldier also made him a bad dad.

Some of the worst fathers I’ve known are the ones who are the most violent—and you don’t have to kill someone in order to be violent. You are acting with violence, for example, if you rape someone. Many years ago my ex-brother-in-law participated in the gang rape of a minor. He ended up in jail for that, and died there in jail. You are acting with violence if you commit incest with one of your children. You are acting with violence if you take advantage of someone and use that person for your own selfish interests. Violence has multiple manifestations.

David was a violent man. Some of his violence is patently obvious. He spent years, possibly decades, fighting Philistines—by the time he ascended the throne of Israel, he had supposedly killed tens of thousands of Philistines (1 Sam. 18:7). And David kept right on fighting after he became king. 2 Samuel 8 and 10 claim that soon after becoming king, David killed 22,000 Arameans in one battle, 18,000 Edomites in another, and 40,000 people in yet another fight, along with 700 chariot teams. Those numbers alone total 81,400 people during perhaps just a few years of fighting, and David reigned for 40 long years. Who knows how many people died in David’s lifetime of killing? How many people did David, or his armies, kill? Was the final tally of the dead 100,000? 140,000? 200,000?

It wasn’t just sheer numbers that made David a man of violence. It was also a certain capriciousness, a streak of meanness, a quality of nastiness, that made David violent. While preparing for this sermon, I re-read a large section of 2 Samuel and discovered a tiny passage I had never paid attention to before: 2 Samuel 8:2. After one battle in which he defeated and captured an army of Moabites, David ordered the captured Moabite soldiers to lie down on the ground next to each other. Then he cut a length of rope and used it to decide which of the captive Moabites would be allowed to live and which would be murdered. As David walked down the line, he measured Moabites with his rope: the Moabites lying under the first length of rope were allowed to live; but the Moabites lying under the second and third lengths of rope were assassinated, and so on down the line: one length lives and the next two lengths die, one length lives and the next two lengths die. It was capricious nastiness. I tell you, this man’s hands were soaked in the blood of other people; and I ask you, what kind of father do you think such a man was?

However, war was not David’s only expression of violence. There was also that infamous incident with Bathsheba. Late one afternoon, while strolling around on the roof of his palace, King David spied down on a beautiful woman taking a bath. His heart beating rapidly, King David sent a servant to find out who she was. “Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah,” came the answer. Notice that detail about her status: she is a wife, she has a husband, she is married, she is in covenant with someone else.

But David is the king, and kings tend to take for themselves. It seemingly does not matter that the man already has 7 wives named Michal, Ahinoam, Abigail, Maacah, Haggith, Abital, and Eglah,¹ plus at least 10 concubines. David is king! He thinks he can do whatever he wants. He believes he can have whatever he wants. So David sets things in motion to get Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah. The text is brief and blunt, to match the brevity of this sexual encounter: “David sent messengers to her, and she came to him, and he lay with her” (11:4).

We normally say that David commits adultery with Bathsheba. But I propose that this act is more evil than simple adultery—it is an act of power and violence shading toward rape. Adultery is an act between two willing people of equal power. By contrast, rape is an act that a more powerful person perpetrates onto a less powerful and unwilling person. To be sure, there is no hint in the text that Bathsheba balks at David’s advances, much less that she actively resists David. But never forget that David is the king, and kings have the power to punish. When the king issues an order, it is very hard for anyone to refuse. How many people, whether female or male, have the fortitude, the courage, to refuse a king? What shades this act toward rape is precisely the massive imbalance of power, and the implied threat of force which lies behind that power. In short, this is yet another act of violence in King David’s long history of violence.

When Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, tells David that she is pregnant, David ultimately looks for a solution to this problem in the place where David often looks for solutions, namely, violence. David orders his military commander to put Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba, into the thick of battle so that he will be killed. David surreptitiously assassinates Uriah, then promptly takes Bathsheba as his 8^th wife.

David’s children are watching. One of the burdens of being a parent is that our children are watching. As you know well, when they are young they actually look up to us and in one way or another come to imitate us. But don’t for a moment assume that the watching ends when they leave home and we become empty nesters. For as long as we live, they will watch us to some greater or lesser degree. Sometimes this is a burden and sometimes a joy, but it’s part of the package deal we get when we agree to be parents. Our children watch us.

David had both sons and daughters, but the text tells us more about the sons—Amnon, Absalom, Adonijah, and several others, including, eventually, the last-born son Solomon. They all watch David, and some of them learn David’s worst habits. Amnon takes his half-sister, Tamar, and rapes her (2 Sam. 13:1-19). In revenge, Absalom murders Amnon (2 Sam. 13:20-29), rapes his father’s concubines (2 Sam. 16:20-22), tries to seize the throne, and is finally killed in an act of violence (2 Sam. 18). Adonijah tries to seize the throne; but is bested by his younger brother Solomon, who eventually murders everyone who might oppose his own rule. These 4 sons learned well the ways of violence from their dad. Part of what made David a poor parent was his involvement in the ways of violence.

In this sordid family tale, where is the good news? Another way of asking the question is this:  Despite David’s sins, failures, and inadequacies, what good did God bring to life? We can see at least 3 things.

First, God led David to repentance. After David’s rape of Bathsheba and murder of her husband Uriah, God sent the prophet Nathan to hold up a mirror in front of David’s sin. To David’s credit, he immediately repented. A lesser parent than he might have denied the truth, bluffed his way into some sort of cover-up, or blamed Bathsheba. David did none of these things. Instead he admitted the truth, asked for forgiveness, and did what he could to make amends.

Second, repentance helps us to change. The text doesn’t say this, but we might imagine that after his moral debacle, David thought twice about walking on the roof of his palace while spying on the neighbors. What we do know is that David never again stole another man’s wife. He never again raped. Indeed, he took no more wives of any kind—Bathsheba was the last one.² And never again did David engage in a cover-up.

You and I don’t have to stay the way we are. We can change. We can recover from acting like bad parents. We can walk away from bad habits and find new habits that will transform us in the long run. These new habits are called spiritual practices.

Third, God can still make a few good things happen in spite of our sin. The child that David caused to grow in Bathsheba died soon after it was born. But the next child born to David and Bathsheba was a boy who had two names. His public name was Solomon, which is associated with the Hebrew word šālôm, meaning “peace.” The child’s private name was Jedidiah, which means “beloved of Yahweh” (2 Sam. 12:24-25). Both names suggest a kind of redemption for David and hope in the future. This is not to say that Solomon grew up to be perfect, but is it to say that as a baby he represents for David new hope and new possibility for the future. David, a man of violence, fathers a son named peace. David, a man who acts in a way repugnant to God, fathers a child beloved by God. This testifies to the endless and inexhaustible ability of God to create good out of very nasty evil.

There is, however, still more good news along these lines. Many long years after the events of 2 Samuel, the gospel of Matthew asserted that David and Bathsheba, through their beloved son Solomon, were the ancestors of Jesus, Messiah of God.

Ponder that: one of David and Bathsheba’s descendants was the Messiah. God can cause some amazing and wonderful things to happen in spite of our flawed parenting.

Notes

1.       Bruce C. Birch, “The First and Second Books of Samuel,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. II (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), 1286.

2.       When he was old, palace advisors did find David a beautiful young woman, Abishag the Shunammite, to keep him warm, but the text carefully clarifies that David never had sex with her. See 1 Kings 1:1-4.