Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

You are the man...I have sinned against the LORD.

+ In the Name of God the holy and Undivided Trinity

Last week, we beheld the stinking abomination of human power at its worst, as depicted by the Apostolic community under imperial persecution. The picture was as unflattering as possible ~ Babylon, the Great Whore, burning forever before the throne of the Lamb, Whom she had tortured to death, Human power as cruelty and injustice is an offense to God: filthy and intolerable.

Today, we see another kind of prostitute and another kind of confrontation with human power gone bad: But the thing that David has done displeased the LORD, and the LORD sent Nathan to David. David could have behaved like the Whore of Babylon, and he could easily have ended up like Rome; cursed and destroyed. Instead, he repented and was spared. This remarkable story is the paradigm of the proper relationship between God and government, priest and king, church and state. The holy Prophet Nathan has no earthly power, only spiritual authority. King David has all the power, and he could easily have caused Nathan to “disappear”. But David ~ in spite of his numerous faults ~ actually believed in God and he genuinely acknowledged his debt to divine patronage. He was convicted by Nathan’s words, and he admitted it.

Imagine the powerful young man ~ Jesus’ age, about thirty ~ furious at the pitiless injustice of the fictitious rich man. Think how his handsome lips curled in rage, and then how his face paled as his emotion changed from anger to desperate guilt and horror, as he realized that he had just condemned himself. You are the man. With those words, Nathan might have uttered his own death sentence, but in the King’s response lies all of David’s unique greatness: I have sinned against the LORD.

I can’t really think of anything comparable in history. And this was 1000 years before Christ! 1000 years before the Roman Empire, Before Buddha and Zoroaster, before the Greek tragedians, before Homer even! Maybe it never happened, but many scholars think the whole David saga is pretty reliable history ~ much of it recorded by an eyewitness or a court historian shortly thereafter. And the fact that it shows the King as a human being with lots of faults adds to its credibility. II Samuel is anything but propaganda intended to make the King look good.

Although he does look good, in the end, because he is a sinner who repents. That is what makes him a righteous ruler. He is not some oriental demigod, who can do no wrong, no a ruler above the law, not a Nixonian who thinks that if the president does it can’t be illegal, by definition. David was a ruler who actually subjected himself to the law of God, as elucidated by God’s prophet. In this great story, religion is neither a prop for royal power ~ mere ideology spun out to drug the subjects into servility ~ nor is it an implacable enemy of human power per se. In Nathan’s confrontation of David, the Man of God is independent of the King, heedless of his own well-being, powerless before the King, but fearless and faithful in his role as the royal reality-check. And the King appears as a flawed human being, whose saving grace is that he respects the prophetic role and is able to hear the prophet. THAT is the proper relationship between church and state.

David really expected the penalty he had himself pronounced: As the LORD live, that man deserves to die! But David’s repentance brought instant pardon. Now the LORD has put away your sin. You shall not die, David’s throne would survive his great sin but not as secure and happy as before. Because David had slain Uriah the Hittite with the sword of the Ammonites, the sword would never depart from David’s own house, beginning with his love-child. The King was forgiven, but there remained a price to be paid.

We moderns will object that it was paid by an innocent baby. But remember that this was 1000 BCE. People had a very different sense of personal identity from ours: much less individualistic, and much more bound up with tribe and clan and family. Relatives were part of one another much more than our modern self-consciousness can, perhaps, imagine. The death of an infant is a terrible grief for a modern parent, but for David it was beyond even that the death of his child was the death of a big part of himself. Still, it is hard for us to have any sympathy for God in this detail of the story.

But the people of David’s time did not think of human beings ~ least of all newborn infants ~ as bearers of rights. The child the LORD struck has no right to life itself. The child was not even dignified by a personal pronoun. “It became very ill,” you see. And the loss of newborns was so very common. No one saw David and Bathsheba’s loss as a punishment of the infant, but of the family. David had passed the sentence himself. Nathan’s rich man had seized the lamb the poor man loved as his own daughter. David had played the pitiless rich man, and now he would suffer the loss that man had visited on his poor neighbor, in Nathan’s story. No one would have considered it unjust to the child. It’s only identity was as a part of David and Bathsheba.

A thousand years later, consciousness had changed. By Jesus’ time, it was considered just to suffer only for one’s own sin. That was the dilemma of Job. The woman of the alabaster jar (gratuitously and probably erroneously associated with Mary Magdalene by Western tradition) was a big-time sinner. Notorious. A woman of ill repute, and then as now, that meant only one thing. The Whore of Babylon may have been a metaphor, but the Alabaster Jar-lady was not! Here we have another dearly beloved story, this one also showing how God judges us. As with David, our own recognition of our sin is all that the LORD asks.

But unlike David’s sin, the woman has no further cost to pay. For those whose consciousness had not risen quite that far, Jesus was going to die on the Cross to help them believe that God really had forgiven them. But the woman had no need of that. And ~ despite the mutterings of some of the other dinner guests ~ Jesus did NOT forgive her. In the context of the parable he had made of her case for Simon the Pharisee, He simply observed that her sins had already been forgiven. She had experienced this forgiveness before she got her jar and entered the house, and her tears were tears of joy and gratitude. Jesus told her that her trust had saved her.

Forgiveness is there before we ask for it. All we have to do is admit, like David, that we need it and to trust, like the woman, that it is there. Grace envelopes us like the air that surrounds us. All we have to do is breathe.