Today we have some really terrific scripture readings
with really important spiritual teaching
and I would love to preach on everything there
but I will restrain myself reluctantly,
even though the feast is so rich.
But before we can get to that
I have to go to the one place in all these readings
that is most likely to hang us up,
the place that jars our sensibilities
and tends to sour our receptivity to all the rest.
It is the matter of the baby.
The words are hard to take.
Nathan tells David:
Now the LORD has put away your sin;
you shall not die.
Nevertheless…
the child … shall die.
One might well ask,
What kind of God is that who will let the adulterer and murderer off
but punish the innocent victim with death?
Let’s look at this first,
so that we can then be able to be with the rest of the lessons
and see the spiritual truth ready to be revealed to hearts open in faith.
Think for a moment about the situation and its political ramifications.
The king has played fast and loose with his royal power.
He has a faithful and trusted servant in his army general Uriah,
a man who is from outside the nation, a Hitite,
but who shows his loyalty by scrupulously following
the customs of the people among whom he has come to live.
Uriah shows his devotion to the king
by staying with his men in their encampment
instead of going home and sleeping with his wife
which would have given the king a covering for his adultery.
And so by his own uprightness Uriah dooms himself
and he sets things up for David to further sin
by deliberately causing his death in battle.
Uriah dies for his adopted country, a war hero, but needlessly.
Well, something like this can’t be kept a secret.
People can count.
Bathsheba produces a son for King David
in an amazingly short time after their marriage.
But no one is going to say anything about it around the king.
No one, that is, except Nathan, the prophet,
who risks his life to bring such a message to the king,
but it is essential to make the king, the Lord’s anointed, accountable,
for David’s sake and for the sake of the nation.
Adultery and murder at the heart of the government
is a travesty to the Covenant between God and the people.
And the great thing in this story is that David sees his sin and repents.
But, the wording of the passage tells us,
“the LORD struck the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David,
and it became very ill.”
The child dies.
It was actually a mercy that the child did die.
Think of it.
This son would always bear the burden of the events surrounding his birth.
His presence would be a continual reminder.
The culture and political climate into which he was born
would not tolerate that, and that is what killed him.
David would spend the days of the child’s illness
in prayer and fasting and weeping.
He saw the death coming and mourned.
And when the baby actually dies,
he gets up and washes his face and eats and resumes his work.
Yes, it is tremendously hard for a parent to lose a child.
That is the worst kind of loss that can happen, I believe.
And David suffered that not once, but twice,
again when his handsome son, Absalom, started a coup
to take over the throne from his father.
David gave explicit instructions to his military generals
that when captured, Absalom’s life should be spared,
but that did not happen,
because it couldn’t happen in that kind of political system.
And again, one might say, David bore the consequences of his sin
in the death of this second son.
It’s a horrible outcome all around.
We know that we have to live with the consequences of our actions
whether we are a king or not.
In our common shared humanity,
there is so much we just cannot get away with
without some kind of repercussion,
most especially in creating alienation in our closest relationships.
Now maybe our hearts can be open
so that we can look at the main issues in all these passages:
repentance, forgiveness, love and faith.
So let’s turn now to the gospel lesson.
Jesus is having dinner at the home of Simon, a Pharisee.
As a Pharisee, Simon would have been a good, upright, law-abiding man.
He probably was also well aware
that Jesus quite frequently had been critical of Pharisees
and quick to point out hypocrisy among them.
Simon was not entirely hospitable then in having Jesus as his guest,
for he had neglected to offer one of the typical services
of water to wash the road filth off the feet as he came in.
That was being taken care of by the tears and kisses of a disreputable woman
who had somehow gotten into Simon’s house.
The parable Jesus told said it all.
This woman knew she was a sinner
and somehow had come to the realization of forgiveness
and that this was directly linked with the person of Jesus.
Now she was showing him great, extravagant love
with the expensive alabaster jar of perfumed ointment –
a huge contrast with the restrained welcome Jesus got from Simon.
And then Jesus says to the woman:
Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.
Your faith has saved you.
Repentance, forgiveness, love and faith.
A very wise person once said to me,
“Faith is too important for God to leave it all to us.”
“Faith is too important for God to leave it all to us.”
That is the point of the epistle reading from Galatians today.
Paul is saying something very important,
and if you don’t hear anything else,
I would hope that you hear this.
The faith that saves us, that makes us justified before God,
is not our own faith produced by our own effort,
but the actual faith of Jesus.
Paul, speaking to us in the first person, states the union he experiences,
which we call our baptismal identity in Christ.
Translating literally from the Greek, Galatians 2:20 reads:
I have been crucified with Christ;
and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.
And the life I now live in the flesh
I live by the faith of the Son of God.
It is his faith in us, the author and source of any faith we claim as our own,
that is the keystone, the linchpin, the cornerstone.
This is Jesus drawing us all to himself from his elevated place on the cross.
This is the gift of repentance, the gift of forgiveness, the gift of faith
in the lavish outpouring of love he shows to us
which draws us all into the outstretched arms of his embrace.
This is what the woman kissing Jesus’ feet had experienced.
This is what David had experienced,
so evident in the psalms he wrote,
the psalms that poured out of him
in response to the forgiveness he knew had been given to him,
a forgiveness that is the removal of alienation among the people.
And this is available for us too,
wherever we are in our realization of our need for being forgiven.
Moral Pharisee or blatant sinner, can we see that any sin is pernicious
and will lead to death – physical death or relational or spiritual death?
The adulterer and murderer gets off
and the innocent victim is put to death,
the holy child, the Lamb of God, no victim as we would think of as victim,
but self giving to the greatest extreme,
that the sinner may live, that we may live.
How much do we love him?
a little or a lot?
Does that say anything about how much we perceive that we are forgiven?
How much do you love Jesus?
