The selections of the story of Bathsheba read in worship were 2 Samuel 11:1-5, 14-27 and 1 Kings 1:11-18, 29-31.
So our theme word for this morning is peace. And I have to confess, that when I realized the way this was working out, and that this order meant “peace” would be our word for the day, I thought, well, here is where my brilliant Advent theme breaks down. Up to this point, the words lined up really well with the stories, faith of Tamar, hope of Rahab, love of Ruth, they all sort of fit. But I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to make sense of the peace of Bathsheba. This didn’t seem like all that peaceful of a story, it seemed more like an episode of Game of Thrones. But as I was pondering what to do with this text, I was reading a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that I have taped up on the frame of my computer screen. Bonhoeffer, if you remember, was a German Lutheran pastor who was killed by the Nazis for participating in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler. Here is what Bonhoeffer had to say on the subject of peace. He wrote: “There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared, it is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God’s commandment, wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of the Almighty god, not trying to direct it for selfish purposes.” And that got me thinking about the line from the prophet Jeremiah, about God’s anger against those “saying, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” And those two thoughts, Bonhoeffer’s distinction between peace and security, and Jeremiah’s judgment against those who claim false peace, started me wondering about what is meant by the word peace.
Because peace, really like all the words we’ve talked about this advent, sometimes get co-opted to mean less than they are. The most classic example of this actually comes from the time of Jesus. During the first century, Rome brought what they called the “Pax Romana,” the Peace of Rome, to their conquered nations. And while under the Pax Romana, there weren’t violent uprisings, it wasn’t because everyone was getting along, puppies and rainbows. The Pax Romana was peace through force; it was the violent squelching of any opposition. If you were on the right side of that force, then you may have experienced a modicum of calm, but the tension and fear certainly would not have felt peaceful. I supposed one could make the same argument that the beginning of Hitler’s rule of Germany was fairly peaceful, if you were not Jewish or gay or a gypsy or disabled, or any of the other reasons one might have to be judged a threat to the status quo. Allowing such atrocities to go on, resting in the false calm, is crying peace, peace, when, like the prophet Jeremiah announced, there is no peace.
So then I thought about Bathsheba. 2 Samuel 11 marks a turning point in the story of King David. Up to here, David was really the golden boy of the Old Testament. Everything he did was wonderful. Any battle he fought, he won, any challenge he faced, he conquered, he was faithful, obedient to God’s word, a gracious and merciful leader and ruler. But, in chapter eleven, the story shifted as the power seemed to go to David’s head. The problem is noticeable right off the bat. “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… But David remained at Jerusalem.” The role of a king was to lead the troops into battle. David especially had risen to power by being a great leader of troops. But here it was, the time for going out, and David sent someone else to risk danger in his place. This was peace for David, but certainly not peace for the men he sent.
And this peace that was not peace made David restless. And a restless king with too much power and not enough control is a dangerous combination. When you’re used to having whatever you want, and you have nothing to occupy your time, you run the risk of thinking you deserve whatever you want. Even if the thing you want is in fact another human being. David saw something he wanted, the wife of one of his soldiers, and he took it. What I find interesting, and really a better word is disturbing, about this passage, is that Bathsheba is less of a character than she is a piece of scenery. David saw her, summoned her, sent her back, all without her so much as saying a word. We wouldn’t even know her name, were it not used as a point of identification in verse three. Bathsheba had no part in her own story.
This makes Bathsheba a really relatable character, because sometimes things just happen. Sometimes we find ourselves feeling like set pieces in a story happening around us. When tragedy strikes or forces outside our control cause us harm, we might feel like Bathsheba, ordered around by a powerful figure, who crumbled her life for his own pleasure. Peace, peace, some might be tempted to say to her. What did you do lead the David on, to bring this on yourself? Or, look on the bright side; at least you’re now married to the most powerful man in the world. Those questions are silence, they are status quo, but they are not peace. Peace, for Bathsheba, does not come for many years.
But it did come. Our reading flashed us forward about forty years, to the time when David was old and ill. A little bit of background. Remember what I said about how David’s life really started to slide with the incident with Bathsheba? As is so often the case with these things, David’s actions didn’t just affect him, they spread to his family. This culture he created about taking what he wanted, regardless of who it hurt, shaped how his children interacted with each other. By this time, David’s oldest sons had already destroyed each other in their quest for power, and Adonijah, the fourth son, was trying to usurp power from his father by simply assuming the role of king while David was still alive.
Enter Bathsheba. No longer content to be a character as life happened around her, Bathsheba took the situation into her own hands and worked the system so David would name her son as his heir. Now, is this some questionable backrooms dealing, pulling the wool over the old king’s eyes when he was too infirm to defend himself, absolutely. I’m certainly not justifying tricking people and seizing power whenever possible. But what Bathsheba does here that I think is important to realize, is Bathsheba reclaimed her own peace. No longer would she allow others to value their peace over her. No, Bathsheba, who had once taken the safe role of doing whatever the king commanded, now threw safety and security to the wind and took the bold risk of shifting the situation to her favor. Sometimes doing what is right does not mean doing what is easy.
This morning we also heard Matthew’s version of the birth of Jesus. It’s a bit different from the one we’ll hear on Christmas Eve, from Luke’s Gospel. For Matthew, it is important to locate Jesus in the lineage of David, and Matthew does that by highlighting the position of Joseph.
The story starts out by giving some background. Mary and Joseph were engaged, which in the first century was as good as being married from a legal standpoint, when it turned out that Mary was pregnant. And “Joseph, being a righteous man…planned to dismiss her quietly.” Seems logical enough, until you really think about the word “righteous.” See righteous means one who lives by the law. And the Law of Moses is pretty clear about what should happen to someone who commits adultery, and let me give you a hint, it is not “dismiss her quietly.” So, Joseph’s decision to dismiss Mary quietly was not actually righteous by the strictest definition of the word. But it was righteous in the sense that it was the right thing to do. Even before Joseph knew the full story of Mary’s miraculous pregnancy, felt in his bones that subjecting her to the judgment of others was not the right thing to do. Like his ancestor Bathsheba, Joseph refused to follow the whim of cultural expectation and be a set piece in his own story. Instead, he sacrificed his own peace by this decision, but in taking this step, he brought about true peace, and peace that would become the Prince of Peace.
These stories, Bathsheba getting Solomon to the throne, and Joseph standing by Mary, are both stories that happened before Jesus was born. But like David’s mistakes affected his children, so I think did these stories of bravery shape Jesus. Because Jesus is the Prince of Peace, the one who comes to judge the world in righteousness. And neither of those roles is easy. It would have been easy for Jesus to go along with the way the Law was being interpreted, giving power to some at the expense of others. He would have made a lot fewer enemies, ruffled a lot fewer feathers, and probably would not have ended up on a cross. But instead Jesus, like his adopted father Joseph had done in claiming Jesus as his own, redeemed the law, bringing it back to the purpose God had intended for it, to bring justice and light and life to the world, rather than hold the world in the false peace of status quo. This is the peace who’s birth we celebrate at Christmas. The birth of the one who refused to be a character in other people’s stories, a pet Messiah who would follow the role assigned to him. Jesus loved the world too much to settle for peace that was not peace. And so Jesus threw safety to the wind, and in doing so brought about true redeeming, life-giving peace. May the power and righteousness and peace of Jesus fill you this season. And may you find the courage to seek true peace, for the God of Peace is seeking you. Amen.
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