Sermons
October 25, 2026 (Proper 25)
A man after God’s own heart?
2 Samuel 11:1-5, 26—12:9
Before we begin we need to clarify a few things, because they get in the way of us hearing the story as it’s actually written. There have been movies made about this incident, and there is art, and there is music, and they mostly assume facts not in evidence—they’ve put things in the story that do not actually appear there.
First of all, Bathsheba was not bathing on her roof. She certainly wasn’t putting herself somewhere for the purpose of being seen by and seducing the king. She was performing a rite of purification required in the Law for a woman at a particular point in her monthly cycle, at the place where she was required to perform it—the public mikvah. It was not she who was where she shouldn’t have been.
In those days it was expected that the king would go out with the army to fight the nation’s enemies. In fact, this was one of the reasons the Israelites originally asked Samuel to set a king over them: “to go out before us and fight our battles.”[1]
David’s army was out fighting the Ammonites. He was the one who was where he shouldn’t have been.
Second, there is nothing in the text that indicates David and Uriah were friends, much less “best friends,” as they’ve been portrayed in some recent retellings of the story. Uriah was a soldier in David’s army, but there is no indication he had ever met David; if he had, don’t you think David would have at least recognized Bathsheba as his wife? It certainly doesn’t look like he did; he had to ask his servant to find out who she was.
Third, there is no conversation whatsoever in this passage between David and Bathsheba. There sure wasn’t a whole speech made by David about how he never would have considered hooking up (because that is surely what this is, just a hookup) with Bathsheba “until I learned there is no love in your marriage,” as Gregory Peck’s David says in the movie. During the encounter with Bathsheba, David isn’t recorded as saying anything, and neither is she—until she sends David the fateful two-word message some time later: “Harah ’anoki,” I am pregnant.
We have to make these things clear before we start because there has been a great deal of misinformation injected into this story, which tends to paint Bathsheba as the villain—or at the very least as a willing participant in the situation. There is nothing in the text that should lead us to that conclusion.
And even if she was in some sense willing, it doesn’t matter because of the power differential between the two of them. David was the king. Bathsheba was the wife of a Hittite soldier.
Would it have mattered one iota if she had said yes or no?
I don’t think so. If David sent for her and took her into his chamber and she said, “No, I won’t betray my husband like that,” would David have respected her “no”? He sure wouldn’t have to! He was the king; who would stop him?
A “yes” means nothing if “no” isn’t an option! And if she complained afterward, it would be a case of her word against his, the king versus this random woman.
I really struggle with David. It’s not just because of Bathsheba, but I just don’t like him. I can’t put him on the pedestal as the greatest king, the man after God’s own heart.[2] Frankly I would not be heartbroken if I never had to hear about King David ever again.
This isn’t the first time that David took another man’s wife; the first one was Abigail, the wife of Nabal—who, admittedly, was kind of a jerk; and at least that time he waited until Nabal was dead before running off with Abigail.[3]
Then there was the whole business with David’s first wife Michal, daughter of Saul. Saul gave Michal to him in an attempt to ensure his loyalty. Michal seemed agreeable to this arrangement.
But then once there was enmity between Saul and David, leading to a civil war, Saul took her back and gave her to a man named Palti, or Paltiel.[4] Then after David becomes king, he snatches Michal back from Paltiel, who loved her and followed her, weeping, until he was ordered to go home.[5]
This one isn’t entirely on David; Saul was the one who started the whole mess, but nobody ever really took Michal’s opinion into consideration after the very beginning when she agreed to be married off to David in the first place. This was, unfortunately, how it was for women in the ancient world.
It’s no wonder she was a tad peevish when she watched him dancing naked in the street as the ark was brought into Jerusalem.[6]
No, I just plain don’t like David.
I’m over the pretty stories of the handsome boy watching the sheep, harp in hand. I’m not all that excited about the Sunday school story of him striking down the giant Goliath with his slingshot—although it is sort of funny imagining him stumbling around in the ill-fitting armor Saul gave him.[7] Martin Luther would have thrown out the book of James if he’d thought he had the authority; if I thought I did, there are times when I’d be perfectly happy to toss everything to do with David.
But there is a problem.
Every king that reigned in Jerusalem up until Babylon destroyed that city in 586 bce was a descendant of David, as was the first governor of the Jewish province after the Persians let them go home, Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel. Without David, there wouldn’t be a whole lot in the historical books of First and Second Kings.
The historical books of Kings and Samuel are pretty ambivalent about kings. Early in 1 Samuel when Israel demands a king, God tells Samuel to warn the people what they would be in for.[8] God intended for the people to be governed by God alone; this ended up being mediated through a series of judges, a mixed bag of leaders of whom Samuel was the last.
God let them have a king against God’s better judgment, it seems; if they were going to have a king that king had better rule according to God’s commandments. A few did, at least to some extent; most did not.
When the kingdom divided after the death of Solomon, David’s son, the historians evaluated the rulers of the northern kingdom as uniformly wicked. But First Kings 12 is pretty clear that there was some justification for the split.
The historians didn’t think having a king was the best idea, any more than Samuel did; but they were also laboring under no illusion that the people would have behaved any better without a king. The book of Judges makes that plain with its relentless downward spiral toward degradation and violence.
After the last Davidic king was deposed by the Babylonians, there came to be a belief that one day there would be another son of David who would reign from Jerusalem. He became known as moshiach, or Messiah. During the Roman occupation of the Jewish homelands of Judea and Galilee, some people came to believe a Nazarene named Joshua, or Yeshua, or Jesus, depending on what language you spoke, who was a distant descendant of David’s, was that Messiah—translated into Greek Messiah is Christ.
That is one of the reasons why we can’t just cancel David, much as I would like to. We have to wrestle with David, with his life, with his misdeeds, and with the fallout of this worst misdeed of all.
It wasn’t just that David knocked up[9] another man’s wife. That was bad enough, but it went further—although today’s reading skips that part.
David liked to have things under his control, but Bathsheba’s pregnancy threatened that. Her husband was away fighting, so it would be very obvious that he was not the father. So David arranges to get Uriah back home. He tells him to go home, relax, take some time off, sleep with his wife…but Uriah proves to have quite a bit more principle than the king. “How could I go home in comfort when your whole army is in harm’s way?”
David then gets Uriah drunk, thinking maybe that would drown his principles. No such luck.
So he sends a message to the commander of the army, telling him to order Uriah to the front, where he would surely be killed. And just to put an exclamation point on the whole thing, he sends that message back with Uriah himself, no doubt knowing that such a principled man would not open mail addressed to someone else.
Between that and some of the stuff that’s been in the news this week, my stomach is in knots just thinking about that.
Why do we revere someone who is that casual about ending an innocent person’s life?
Uriah, of course, dies in battle; after an appropriate period of mourning, David marries Bathsheba.[10]
That’s where we pick the story back up and find out what happens next. We learn that while David might have been chosen as a king “after God’s own heart,” God found this action thoroughly disgusting. And so the prophet Nathan goes to David to tell him what God thought about it.
“I gave you everything, and would have given you more had you but asked. Why would you then reach out and take something”—someone—“that didn’t belong to you?”
Nathan pronounces consequences. “Your life is going to fall apart because of this.
You will be constantly in battle, and you’ll die by the sword as your enemies take your wives from you and mock you.”
David then says, “I have sinned,” and asks God’s forgiveness. And God might have forgiven him, but that didn’t erase the consequences of his actions, not completely. The baby conceived on that terrible day died in infancy. And yes, David’s whole family was torn apart as his children’s misdeeds rivaled his own. One of his sons turns and makes war on him, and is killed—and David mourns for him in words that make up a favorite song in the shape note singing tradition.[11]
There is more drama when David eventually dies of old age and Bathsheba, seeking to bring something good out of the situation she got dragged into, schemes to have her second son, Solomon, made king instead of David’s eldest surviving son Adonijah, who had assumed he would be taking the throne and had begun acting accordingly.[12]
The thing is, you can be forgiven for your sin, but that doesn’t necessarily stop consequences that have been set in motion.
I’m not a huge fan of the idea that God punished David by killing the baby he had with Bathsheba—after all, that also punishes her, and I don’t think she deserved that any more than she deserved what David did to her and her husband. But all the stuff that came after, clear down to the end of David’s life? I don’t think it’s too difficult to see that as the fulfillment of Nathan’s prophecy, minus the prediction that David would himself die by the sword, which God took back when he confessed his sin.
And a whole lot of the rebellion among David’s sons—some of which was sparked when one of them assaulted his own half-sister—can be seen as the possible outcome of a bunch of people raised without ever having heard the word “no.” (We might make a case that David, as king, didn’t hear that word too often, either, which could be a source of his own sinful act with Bathsheba.)
It’s tough to hear, but one thing David’s story tells us is that even though we receive God’s forgiveness when we sin, that doesn’t automatically cancel the earthly consequences of our actions. God forgives you, yes, and you have the chance to make a new start going forward, but you’d have been better off not doing the thing in the first place.
And that is why all of us—especially we who are in positions of leadership—need to have people around us who will tell us “no,” and why one of the jobs of church is to support one another as we do the right thing.
By that I don’t mean we need to get all up in one another’s business, or gossip about one another, or set up a rigid list of rules everyone is required to obey or get put out on the sidewalk. But it does mean that if we’re being tempted to do something we know we shouldn’t, the church ought to be the kind of place we can come and say, “I’m struggling,” and somebody comes alongside us to help us stay on the right track.
[1] 1 Samuel 8:20
[2] This phrase was used by Samuel in 1 Samuel 13:14 as he informed Saul that God had rejected him as king over Israel and was looking for someone to take his place. There is an echo in Jeremiah 3:15 as well.
[3] 1 Samuel 25:1-42 tells the story of Nabal and Abigail.
[4] 1 Samuel 25:44. He is called Palti here, and then Paltiel in 2 Samuel 3:15.
[5] 2 Samuel 3:12-16
[6] 2 Samuel 6:12-23
[7] 1 Samuel 17:38-40
[8] 1 Samuel 8
[9] Did you know that “knocked up” has a totally different meaning in England than it does here? There “knocking someone up” just means knocking on their door. Back before people had alarm clocks, there were supposedly people called “knockers-up” who went around town tapping on people’s windows to get them up in time for work!
[10] David at this point has half a dozen wives, including the childless Michal and Nabal’s widow Abigail.
[11] David’s Lamentation (#268 in The Sacred Harp) by William Billings, which I actually first heard not at a Sacred Harp singing but during a performance by the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus at an awards banquet the Council of Churches where I worked put on to honor people in the community who were caring for people with HIV/AIDS. A Sacred Harp version can be heard at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwcAs0wIrik.
[12] 1 Kings 1. David had promised Bathsheba that Solomon would be king; evidently that promise didn’t get communicated to Adonijah or his supporters.