Melt it Down
David and the Ring
Today our journey continues through 1 and 2 Samuel with a focus on David’s darkest hour in 2 Samuel 11, which begins thus:
In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.
It happened, late one afternoon when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, “This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. The woman conceived, and she sent and told David, “I am pregnant.”
2 Samuel 11:1-5
While I’ll return to focus on this in a moment, the lectionary also offers a reading from John 6 of the feeding of the five thousand and walking on water with a surprising connection. It has an apt verse we could easily overlook: “When Jesus realized that [the crowd was] about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.”1
To be sure, it is not that Jesus doesn’t use power. All his miracles use it, whether feeding the masses, calming the storm, or much more. But it is how he uses that power that matters: to feed, to reassure, to protect, to liberate, always a power that empowers, never power that imposes power to dominate others. So when the crowd wants to “make him king by force,” it is an irony and impossibility: they want to impose their power over the Son of God by forcing him to be a king (to then force his power over others for their sake). While Jesus would eventually be the king of kings from David’s line, David could not resist the same temptations to dominate.
David’s Concentric Abuse
There are so many compounding sins within this sin of David, so many nested details that they could scarcely be covered.2 But the heart of the matter is as the old saying goes, “Everything in life is about sex, except sex, which is about power.” And while this is a story about David’s sexual abuse, it is even more fundamentally about the abuse of his power. After Bathsheba tells David she’s pregnant, David panics to conceal what happened from her husband Uriah through manipulation:
So David sent word to Joab, “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” And Joab sent Uriah to David. When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab and the people fared and how the war was going. Then David said to Uriah, “Go down to your house and wash your feet.” Uriah went out of the king’s house, and there followed him a present from the king. But Uriah slept at the entrance of the king’s house with all the servants of his lord and did not go down to his house. When they told David, “Uriah did not go down to his house,” David said to Uriah, “You have just come from a journey. Why did you not go down to your house?” Uriah said to David, “The ark and Israel and Judah remain in booths, and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field; shall I then go to my house to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife? As you live and as your soul lives, I will not do such a thing.” Then David said to Uriah, “Remain here today also, and tomorrow I will send you back.” So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day. On the next day, David invited him to eat and drink in his presence and made him drunk, and in the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his lord, but he did not go down to his house.
In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by the hand of Uriah. In the letter he wrote, “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting, and then draw back from him, so that he may be struck down and die.”
2 Samuel 11:6-15
To highlight a few things, the reason David was on the roof in the first place was that he was no longer the young selfless warrior contra Goliath, putting himself in harm’s way for his people, but a king avoiding battle out of self-protection. While he selfishly slacked on this duty, he used his elevated perch to be a voyeur on Bathsheba. While translations usually translate that she was “beautiful,” the Hebrew word here is tov—not merely beautiful, but a wholesome “good,” “life-giving,” attached to the goodness of God—and her name means “daughter of an oath,” signifying a special bond with God, as she bathed herself for ritual purity before the Lord. Despite this sanctity, David reenacts the Garden of Eden in selfishly taking what was tov for his own purposes. He then abuses his authority with someone who could not say “no” to his advances. When the pregnancy shows the consequences of his actions that can’t be hidden, David tries to manipulate Uriah into covering up David’s sin. But Uriah, the outsider, won’t sleep with his wife during this period because he is more faithful than David, you know, the guy after God’s own heart. To punish this good deed, David then gets him drunk and tries to manipulate him again. When that doesn’t work, and because David is too much a coward to kill Uriah himself, he makes Uriah deliver new battle orders to the commander which puts Uriah in death’s way…in other words, David makes Uriah deliver his own death sentence.
For a time, David thinks he has gotten away with it. He is gravely mistaken.
I believe God preserves this story in Scripture for us to learn from all these layers of David’s abuse. Another lesson might be from David’s hubris. What was going on in his head? We don’t know, but some kind of rationalization about how it wasn’t that big a deal, he was the king after all, her husband wouldn’t find out. But Scripture tries to warn us against sins that seem consequence-free because the next thing we know, chickens are home roosting, and we’re covering up our sin with more sin. And it’s not just a matter of moral corruption, but making us act dumb and dumber. David’s schemes get increasingly desperate, with more and more people realizing what’s happening. Silent selfish sins aren’t harmless but often have invisible costs. Eventually, they’re not just hurting us but everyone around us. Every now and then, we are forced to face it.
The King and the Ring
This week I rewatched the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. For those unfamiliar or who have forgotten, the One Ring is a literal ring forged by a dark lord that gives the person who wears it all kinds of power. It’s also much more than that. The trilogy has no perfect 1:1 allegories but is nevertheless suffused with theological meaning from J.R.R. Tolkien’s deeply Catholic worldview. The Ring is not just about power, but sin; not just power, but the power that seeks domination, the power that seeks power for the wearer’s power. And the story of the series is how one unlikely, ruddy little hobbit Frodo (and Elijah Wood kinda resembles how we might imagine young David), is called to take the Ring to the fires of the mountain where it was forged in order to destroy it.
Without too many spoilers here, Frodo discovers over the course of his journey how much this ring corrupts him physically, mentally, and spiritually. This seems to be just what David experiences through his kingship. Frodo first puts on the ring almost by accident, panicking in fear of impending harm. So much power is first wielded for the same reasons. But as time goes on, even when he’s not wearing the Ring, it’s impacting everyone around him, tempting them to power and warping their character, with some resisting better than others. Eventually, not even he can resist the lure of its power.
Frodo is innocent but not perfect. David wasn’t perfect up to the story of Bathsheba either, but to that point, most of his sins were ignorance, like not knowing how to properly handle the ark of God. Like Frodo, when he first puts on the Ring of his own kingly power, he doesn’t know everything it does. Now, he can no longer claim ignorance.
When we were children and we first touched the Ring of our own power over others—the first lie, the first dishonest action, the first attempt to get an edge up when nobody was looking—we didn’t know what we were holding. So we wore it. Wegrasped it. But as we age, we gradually lose excuses. As I heard basketball coach Jeff Van Gundy say once, “If you know better, but don’t do better, you’re no better.” It turns out David is no better.
Scripture remembers glorious young David as selfless, earnest, and overall godly. But as he learns, the Ring of Power works on you in ways you can’t see. As I discovered in places like hedge funds, Harvard, and Hollywood, you don’t have to hold much power to be warped by it; even the mere proximity, the taste, the aura of it starts changing you. If you’ve ever spent time in any moderately powerful institution, surely you’ve felt it change you too if you were to look back in honest retrospect.
And maybe this is why Christ resists power over and over and over.
Melt it Down
While power is used throughout Lord of the Rings to protect, defend, and otherwise empower others, Frodo is called to melt his dominant ring of power down.3 The best any of us with earthly power can do is use it to empower others as we also own our sins, our temptation to power, and our desire to control and repent of it all. The only king who can actually carry the weight of such power, Jesus Christ, is one who doesn’t want it for himself and, in fact, wants it destroyed.
Christians worship Christ the King because he is an anti-king, the only king who can carry the full, heavy weight of sin’s power. Only he can take kingship itself and foist it into the fires. Only he knows how to perfectly use power in a way that liberates, restores, and redeems. While some leaders are better at following Christ in this way than others, woe to us if we assume that every time we think we’re using power in a liberating way we’re not actually just wielding a dominating power with the false aesthetics of freedom. This is, of course, classic to the point of trite, but it’s perennial because the Ring reliably deceives us to ourselves. Christ alone can carry the cross straight into the hells here on earth, straight into the powers that rule this world and the powers that “rule the air” without the Ring blemishing his fingers, for his yoke is easy.
As David learns, it doesn’t matter how much God has blessed you, we must beware the lie of the Ring that whispers that our transgressions of power are no big deal. Because David didn’t have the power to melt the Ring down, soon he was melting down everyone around him. Since this the Lord does not abide, woe to those who wear the Ring, because one day or another and one way or another, the Lord shall take injustice and melt it down to its core.
Where is the Redemption?
As Phillippians 2 says, Christ shows us another way from what David chooses.
Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.Phil 2:3-8
But where is redemption in David’s story? A preacher must tread lightly. There are many bad shortcuts to false happy endings and Bonhoefferian “cheap grace.”
One place I find redemption is in the very fact that the Word of God preserves this story. It is unusual that our sacred text would hold onto an unabashedly evil episode about the holiest human king meant to bring glory. There are untold numbers of such abuses of power in our modern times that are denied, denied, denied with lies, lies, lies. I find the first drops of redemption in this story with the sheer fact God doesn’t let us do that because the story preserves it. Instead, full accountability is sanctified. The Word will not let history or God’s people forget, ignore, and look away from a hero’s evil like we want to look away from our sins and our tribe’s. We seem to mistakenly believe redemption is found in ignoring the unflattering because that’s easy. But if we read it long enough, Scripture forces us to recognize that is not the path to redemption.
Back in March, I wrote about the bronze snake in the wilderness in Numbers, Nehushtan. Refresher: the wayward Israelites are rebelling over and over and eventually are punished with snakes. Afterward, God tells Moses to erect a bronze snake that heals those who come before it. In other words, God uses the memory of their sin as a site of healing. In 2 Kings, when they eventually only worship the healing and forget their sin, its deformation into an idol renders it no longer sacred to God, and it’s destroyed. It’s no accident that John 3:14 (you know, the one right before the famous one) says Christ will be lifted up on the cross just as Nehushtan was lifted up as evidence that “God so loved the world.”
I don’t know if you’ve done something as bad as David or worse. But I am grateful Scripture preserves this chapter for us to face. When we look at the cross, we must see our sin, too, knowing that our healing in Christ comes not because Jesus ignored evil but because he loved us enough to confront it. Our hope is not in power, neither rings nor kings, but in him alone.
John 6:15
The podcasts At Home with the Lectionary, Lectionary Lab Live, and Bible Talk were among the resources used for the Davidic section of this piece.
Spoiler: in the end, he failed…read or watch more to find out how!
So, so good. Thank you, Joe.