Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost, August 4, 2024 (Proper 13): 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a; Psalm 51:1-13; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35
This week, more than most, we get the fallout from last week’s readings. It starts with David and Bathsheba: Bathsheba (now just “the wife of Uriah”: she has lost her name) mourns her husband, but David takes her in and marries her, and she bears a son. But the Lord is not happy, and sends the priest Nathan to David. Nathan doesn’t directly tell David off; instead, he tells him a story, about a rich man who seizes the poor man’s ewe to feed a guest, instead of using one of his own. The ewe was the only sheep the poor man had, and he had bought a ewe, which could begin a small flock. David is outraged, and says the rich man “deserves to die”. And then Nathan provides the punchline: you are the rich man. Nathan proceeds to show David just how he had done exactly what the rich man had done in the story. And he will not die, Nathan says, but “the sword shall never depart from your house”. And David admits to Nathan that “I have sinned against the Lord.”
It is important (and useful) to think about Nathan’s words about the future not as a curse, but a prediction. David has taken to violence and subterfuge, and the practices of the head affect everyone: violence and subterfuge become the way people learn to live. Those who have dealt with family conflict know how it circles and reaches out its tentacles in strange ways. And it does it through the generations. We don’t need curses for it to happen: it happens.
It may not be an accident that our psalm today is the Psalm 51: we say this on Ash Wednesday. “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness; in your great compassion, blot out my offenses.” It recognizes that while we may not have sinned like David, we all have things we’ve done we would rather forget. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it was often said by those about to be executed; for many crimes, men could escape execution and prove their literacy by reading the first verse of it, which came to be known as the “neck verse”.1 But the psalm turns to hope: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Also, “Give me the joy of your saving help again, and sustain me with your bountiful spirit”. With God’s help, we can turn to something different.
Our other readings seek to bring listeners to a better way of living. The people fed on the mountain are somewhat annoyed when they wake up in the morning and Jesus and the disciples are gone. How dare they? They find Jesus, but Jesus tells them off: “you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of loaves”. And then proceeds to talk about food that perishes (that bread that goes moldy) and the food of eternal life. At the end of the discussion, Jesus promises, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
I sometimes struggle with the bread metaphor, because it is far too easy to slip between the metaphorical and the real. There are people who believe in Jesus who are starving. And the cynical might say, why worry about feeding people? But if you hold on to the metaphor, Jesus is giving you everything you need to learn how to live your life.
Paul is also advising his followers on how to live life. He tells his readers that “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness and deceitful scheming.” We turn away from that (it sounds a lot like David, doesn’t it?) . We live by “speaking the truth in love”, and in that way form a body “as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.”
Building itself up in love. What a great phrase. It gives life to the idea of the bread of life, which is what allows us to do that. It is how you build community. It is how we build community. Amen.
- Nerdy footnote on the neck verse: in the middle ages, there was something called “benefit of clergy”, which protected clergy from being executed the first time they committed a crime: they were protected by the church. Since the clergy were basically the only people who could read, reading the neck verse became the proof that you were clergy. As literacy spread, benefit of clergy turned into a first time reprieve for men. It did not apply to women, as they could not be clergy. Those who were reprieved with benefit of clergy were branded, so it was only good once. ↩︎