Everyone who reads this story thinks Joab acted wisely. Everyone. We believe Joab was saving David from himself and was right for doing it. I’m not sure the text does, though. And I’m not sure GOD does.

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A vision of GOD through David and Jesus
Proper 14B  |  2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33; John 6:35, 41-51

For his own good

We have two stories of certainty and confusion. Two stories in which the people are certain of what they know but don’t see how far from what GOD is interested in they really are. And the hard part for us is that we often make the very same mistake.

In Samuel, we move ahead from David and his sin to his sons. These young men want to be king and are jockeying for position. Absalom, a middle son, attractive, charismatic, exceedingly popular, decides that his path to the crown involves getting started now. So he recruits followers and leads a coup d’etat. He has numbers on his side. He has charisma and circumstances on his side. He just doesn’t have Joab, the brilliant and ruthless commander on his side. He doesn’t have the army, trained for battle on his side.

So the army chases Absalom into the jungle and they’re looking to end the coup in the way coups are ended. But the king commands them to spare the traitor, his son. End the revolt, but don’t end his life.

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They disobey the king. We’re doing this for his own good, they are certainly thinking. He is out of his mind. David, the father, the king commands them to be merciful and they are not. And when David hears of his son’s death, he weeps. Notice that he doesn’t have Joab killed for treason, for disobeying his command. He weeps for his son, who he still wanted to save.

Everyone who reads this story thinks Joab acted wisely. Everyone. We believe Joab was saving David from himself and was right for doing it. I’m not sure the text does, though. And I’m not sure GOD does.

Missing the point

In John 6, we have Jesus speaking to this extended metaphor of eating and believing and saving. It begins with the feeding of the multitudes and when they are finished, it says (v. 15):

When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

This is a really pointed sentence: “they were about to come and take him by force to make him king”. Hear that. They were looking to forcibly draft him to be king. By force. So then he went away alone.

So the disciples get in a boat to cross over the water and there’s this storm and they’re all freaking out; Jesus comes walking on the water, and it says here, just a few verses after the near drafting of Jesus (v. 21):

Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land towards which they were going.

Jesus changes the circumstances. When these people try to make Jesus do what they want him to do, Jesus changes the circumstances. Because it isn’t about us, it’s about listening to Jesus.

So by the time we get to this part with the Judeans who are trying to mess with Jesus with semantics, fussing with the words he’s chosen, he again proves that they aren’t listening to him, to what he is communicating about GOD.

Jesus makes this metaphorical connection: I’m like the bread that came from heaven: the manna in the wilderness, the loaves just multiplied. I am the food that fills you in faith. I’m not just some dude teaching you. It isn’t just about my body and your flesh, it is about our faith and our community.

But they are fixated on the flesh, the body. The physical. Like Nicodemus asking how can I come out of my Mom’s womb again, they’re saying but we know your parents. And Jesus says to them This isn’t what I’m talking about at all.

Breaking the confusion

In both of these stories, we are told hard truths about GOD: about the Triune god of our faith. In the first, we are confronted with a king at the end of his reign, the king whose moral confusion leaves us with confusion about what to believe about what GOD wants. But we know about our world. We know what is smart or prudent. We know that Absalom is dangerous. A traitor. We all know what the military is supposed to do with traitors. For the sake of the army and the country.

But they refuse a direct order, they lie, and they refuse to acknowledge what they’ve done. And David shows mercy on them. The mercy he would show to his son. The mercy GOD had shown him by not killing him when he sinned. Just like the mercy we see in Genesis: mercy toward Adam and Cain, who were promised death but did not receive death. Mercy that drives us to believe that despite our own ideas of GOD and justice, we don’t have GOD’s moral compass. We don’t have the generous mercy that GOD possesses. Not when we think like our neighbors and our politicians.

And then we have the Judeans, who know Jesus is using a metaphor, who know he is using an image to share a profound truth, they know not to take Jesus literally. And they don’t take him literally about the bread – right? They don’t actually think Jesus is calling himself literal bread – but they are messed up about literally being from heaven rather than being born from a Mom. That when Jesus calls himself the bread of life, he isn’t talking about something provable with physics. They are stuck in their brains.

Just like we get stuck in our brains. Stuck about the humanity of Jesus and what that actually means. Stuck about the divinity of Jesus and how that all works. But this isn’t what Jesus is dealing with here, what he is trying to get these followers, get us to believe.

Jesus is dealing with relationship by sharing a physical image, a tangible substance linked to a metaphor to describe what relationship looks like. It is about physicality of bread in general, rather than the physicality of Jesus in the now. It is about relationship to him, to one another, to GOD, all together; not the relationship of a human to heaven or a son to a father. It is physical in that we are physically present, not in the proving and defining and making sense of the metaphysics.

A vision of GOD

We learn so much about GOD from these two stories if we are willing to get out of our own way. If we are willing to move past the physical and the actual; past the historic and the me-storic nature of our reflection on them. If we move past “what would I do” and move to what could GOD be doing here?

We see in David a man who is not only a heal, not only the bad man of a bad moment or the perfect man with a perfect past. We see a man who is more like GOD when he becomes a father, than he is an “effective” earthly king. More like GOD in fatherhood than he was as Jesse’s son. More like GOD in mercy than anyone on that battlefield. We recognize in that hoped-for mercy, and in the midst of sobs, we hear

“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

That unreasonable mercy of a parent, that hope for reconciliation dashed by murder, a father broken by the evil of humanity.

And we are called to eat the bread, physically and emotionally, in person, with one another, in our messiness and our confusion and our frustration. We bring all of our wailings and angers and questions and hopes and dreams to this space to pray, to worship, to work in faith, to love in faith, to receive and give mercy in faith. To reflect that dangerous, messed up love that GOD shares with us.

Even to David. Even to these Judeans. Even to the Romans. Even to the skeptics. Even to the criminal, the violator, the destroyer. This mercy, this love, this compassion, this hope for all of creation is so beyond anything we’re willing to acknowledge, but we’re called to see it anyway. To come to understand this as our work, our character, our being. We are given the chance to be more like GOD by being more like GOD to one another.

May GOD’s love be our love; GOD’s hope be our hope; GOD’s mercy be our mercy. Amen.