A Word from Joel August 7, 2024

“When the wife of Uriah heard that her husband was dead, she made lamentation for him. When the mourning was over, David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” 2 Samuel 11:26-27

Everyone knows Lord Acton’s famous quote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” but few of us know the very next sentence in that quote, “Great men are almost always bad men.” Acton wrote these words as a Roman Catholic who was opposed the newly created doctrine of Papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council. He rightly saw that as power increases, so do abuses of power, and that’s exactly what happens with King David. I used to think of the story of David and Bathsheba as adultery, but adultery is a consensual act. It’s hard to know what consent means when dealing with a power differential as wide as that between David and Bathsheba, which is why many consider this a rape story. There are some scholars who understand Bathsheba as intentionally welcoming David’s advance, and perhaps that’s true. Perhaps it’s not. In either case, the power differential between these two is so vast that naming it adultery is inadequate. If there’s anything the #MeToo movement taught us, it’s that sexual harassment and assault are about power. The awful truth is that women and girls in our world endure far too many unwanted sexual advances from men who use their power to take what they want, which is exactly what David does.

By the end of our passage, David thinks he’s covered his tracks, but there’s one person he hasn’t fooled, “The thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” You can lie to yourself and others, but God will not be fooled. God was displeased with David and expresses no displeasure toward Bathsheba, which speaks volumes. The awful truth is that David is a user and abuser of women, and he is a murderer. Though his eventual repentance is admirable, it in no way makes restitution for what he’s done. He remains an antihero, an example of what not to do. Dorothy Sayers writes of why so many women followed Jesus during his ministry, saying: Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus than there was anything “funny” about woman’s nature. But we might easily deduce it from His contemporaries, and from His prophets before Him, and from His Church to this day. That was written in 1947, and though we’ve made progress since then, we still have a long walk to freedom. The time has long since passed for the Church to take our cues on how to treat women not from our tradition, our culture or from politicians, but from Jesus, not as objects of desire, nor as baby makers, but as fully human, made in God’s image and worthy of respect and dignity. May that time be now.