Not Asking For It

Thanks for being here this morning. No seriously, Thank you. I know there’s probably a lot of other things that you could be doing right now.

We’ve been really on a journey the past few weeks haven’t we? If you’re just tuning in, don’t worry I’ll catch you up to speed. So, We’ve been looking at Jesus’s family tree as reported in the very opening verses of the New Testament. And what we are really looking at is all of the women’s names who have been inserted into this lineage and seeing how all 5 of them are people who would typically be considered “Bad Company.”

So far we’ve talked about the deceptive blackmailer Tamar, The Prostitute Rahab, and if you made it over to the second service last week we talked about the Immigrant Ruth. Today we are going to move into one of the more disturbing and pivotal stories in our Bible. Everything is about to change here. So I know that you’re hanging on every word here so let’s just get down to it.

Matthew 1:6 NRSV

and Jesse the father of King David. And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah,

Full Stop. This one isn’t even named by name. She’s mentioned only by who she was married to, and um… she ain’t mentioned as David’s wife… so what’s up?

Lets find out.

First, let’s talk about where we are in the story of Israel. You’ll remember Rahab came onto the scene when Joshua and the Israelites were invading the land of Canaan. Then a generation later, after the conquest but when Israel was still a loose band of tribes — a time called the Judges — Ruth came onto the scene and she had a son name Obed.

Obed’s son was a man named Jesse who had a whole host of sons. In that same time, Israel realized that they needed a king. The period of the Judges was rough and Israel barely survived. So a King was consecrated — a man named Saul. His job was to unite the people of Israel and drive out these invaders called the Philistines. And he was not very good. The war was going poorly because he wasn’t very obedient.

Enter a young shepherd boy, Jesse’s youngest son David. David kills off a Philistine Giant named Goliath and becomes super famous and the best military commander that Saul has got. They have lots of drama because Saul fears that David will become king (spoiler alert, he does) and so things get really messy.

But eventually Saul dies and David does become king. David truly unites the kingdom, he captures Jerusalem and establishes it as the Capital city of Israel. And Israel enters its Golden Age. Things are all trending upwards for God’s people. There are threats, but the military might of the kingdom is keeping peace within Israel proper. Things are the best they’ve ever been. It seems as though the promises and plan of God have finally come to fruition. God has turned the descendants of Abraham into a mighty nation, and they are led by a righteous and Godly king.

2 Samuel 11:1 NRSV

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; they ravaged the Ammonites, and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.

So David has decided he’s not going to go out into battle with the army this spring. He sends his #2 Joab out instead. Which isn’t odd to us… but this was an unusual practice for a king in the ancient days. But whatever. Maybe David was tired right? Let’s carry on.

2 Samuel 11:2–5 NRSV

It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. David sent someone to inquire about the woman. It was reported, “This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite.” So David sent messengers to get her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she was purifying herself after her period.) Then she returned to her house. The woman conceived; and she sent and told David, “I am pregnant.”

Oh the drama. So now our woman — the wife of Uriah has a name: Bathsheba.

So she’s doing her ritual cleansing as was required by the law. And David — the king — has her brought to him and, well, you get it I’m sure.

This is usually the part of the story where people have tried to defend good old David and say that he was seduced. But that’s not what the text says. It says he saw her, she was beautiful, he wanted her, he had her brought to him by his officers, and they slept together.

Was it consensual? Maybe. The text doesn’t say. Was it ethical? No. Was it Moral? No. Was it in direct violation of the law? Yes.

Did David have considerable power over Bathsheba? Yes. He was the king. She was not asking for this, but it happened to her anyway. And now old David’s got a big problem on his hands. She’s pregnant.

So what he does next is he tries to cover up what he’s done. He sends for Uriah, who is on the battle front and wines and dines him, trying to convince him to go home and sleep with Bathsheba so that everyone will think the baby is his. But he’s like “no i can’t go do that, not while my friends are in battle! I’ll sleep at the palace gates.”

Finally tired of trying, David sends Uriah to the front lines of the battle and tells Joab to order the men to abandon him. And Uriah is killed in battle. Then David has the newly widowed Bathsheba brought to him and she becomes his wife.

Not glamorous. Not Heroic. Not the King David that we’ve come to know and love. And this moment right here begins the moral decline of David and also the decline of the kingdom of Israel.

The consequences are nearly immediate. Just when David thought that he had gotten away with it a prophet named Nathan comes to him and calls him out:

2 Samuel 12:9–10 NRSV

Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword, and have taken his wife to be your wife, and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, for you have despised me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.

Nathan is like: There’s going to be trouble in your house — which indeed there was trouble to come. But even worse, something more imminent and terrible will happen:

2 Samuel 12:13–14 NRSV

David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nathan said to David, “Now the Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die. Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the Lord, the child that is born to you shall die.”

This is like the hardest part of the whole story. The immediate consequence of David’s action is that the child that Bathsheba carried becomes ill and dies, and God does not answer his prayers to save the Child’s life. Why? This is one of the mysteries of the Hebrew Bible. The only thing that I can think of is that David is being forced to face the reality of what he has truly done in having Uriah killed. The death of a loved and cherished one is a pain that David has caused, and now must feel the full weight of.

But what we can easily forget is that his new wife, Bathsheba, the one who faced the grief of Uriah’s death and David’s treachery now must suffer loss again, and this time it is multiplied. She didn’t ask for this. This is the consequence of something that was done to her. She is the victim in this story. She is the one who bears the full brunt of the sin of David.

Larry Nassar was a renowned sports medicine doctor at Michigan State University and also served as the doctor for the USA Gymnastics team. Over the course of 20 years he sexually abused over 150 athletes. As the scandal began to unravel and Larry was convicted of his crimes, a judge allowed his victims to appear and deliver victim impact statements.

One of those victims is a young woman named Rachel Denhollander. In her lengthy statement she spoke about the way that Larry had changed her life and the chaos that he created in her heart and mind.

She spoke about not being able to even hold hands with or look at her future husband in the eyes because intimacy wasn’t something she could trust.

She spoke of dreading it when she became pregnant how she trembled in fear of going to be alone with a doctor whom she was supposed to trust.

She spoke of holding her babies, and remember a time when Larry had brought his own daughter to his office for Rachel to hold. How she had hoped that he would keep his daughter in the session with her because maybe he wouldn’t abuse her with his daughter present.

She spoke of how alone she felt. How no one listened to her when she came forward with allegations. How they were swept under the rug. But then she did something unexpected.

She uttered these words:

“In our early hearings. you brought your Bible into the courtroom and you have spoken of praying for forgiveness. And so it is on that basis that I appeal to you. If you have read the Bible you carry, you know the definition of sacrificial love portrayed is of God himself loving so sacrificially that he gave up everything to pay a penalty for the sin he did not commit. By his grace, I, too, choose to love this way.

You spoke of praying for forgiveness. But Larry, if you have read the Bible you carry, you know forgiveness does not come from doing good things, as if good deeds can erase what you have done. It comes from repentance which requires facing and acknowledging the truth about what you have done in all of its utter depravity and horror without mitigation, without excuse, without acting as if good deeds can erase what you have seen in this courtroom today.

The Bible you carry says it is better for a stone to be thrown around your neck and you throw into a lake than for you to make even one child stumble. And you have damaged hundreds.

The Bible you speak carries a final judgment where all of God’s wrath and eternal terror is poured out on men like you. Should you ever reach the point of truly facing what you have done, the guilt will be crushing. And that is what makes the gospel of Christ so sweet. Because it extends grace and hope and mercy where none should be found. And it will be there for you.

I pray you experience the soul crushing weight of guilt so you may someday experience true repentance and true forgiveness from God, which you need far more than forgiveness from me – though I extend that to you as well.”

I believe that David felt the soul crushing weight of his guilt. I believe that there was restoration in his life. But this story isn’t about David. It’s about David’s victim: Bathsheba. A woman who never seemed to outlive her victim’s identity. Even in Jesus’s lineage we are reminded that she was the wife of Uriah. A woman taken from her husband, her life, and her home to become the wife of the king.

But we also see that there was purpose in the pain. God used it to do a number of Good things. The next child that David and Bathsheba had was a man named Solomon who grew up to be a great and wise king, the king who built the temple and oversaw the greatest economic expansion of Israel.

We don’t know what the end result was when it came to Bathsheba’s happiness and fulfillment in life. But we do know that in her brokenness, God made sure that she wasn’t forgotten.

I think it’s easy for us to want to avoid the difficult stories that people who have been victimized have to tell. They are hard to hear. Sometimes hard to believe. We are fortunate that Bathsheba’s story was so important to God that it’s been immortalized in the Holy Scriptures and in the lineage of Christ — the ultimate source of healing.

I’m grateful that we live in a time when Rachel Denhollander and others like her can have their story told.

If you’ve got a story thats burning a hole in your soul, a story that is causing you distress, a story that you hide because you believe that it makes you “bad company” I want you to know that it doesn’t. That you aren’t damaged goods, that your voice matters, that your story matters. You may not have been asking for the pain that has been dropped into your life, and that’s a hard thing to come to terms with.

But remember the words of Rachel Denhollander. Remember that we worship, serve, and celebrate a God who wasn’t asking for the pain that he got when he took on the cross. Jesus took on the weight of the sin of the world. Jesus understands. Jesus knows what you feel.

Jesus wants you to find respite and recovery and restoration in the arms of God and in the arms of the community of faith.

It’s not lost on me that this is Christmas eve. And this subject is heavy. But today we celebrate the love of God revealed to us in the baby born in a manger. And I want you to wake up tomorrow knowing that God sees you, that God knows your story, and that you are in Good company when you turn your pain and your anger and your sorrow over to him. God knows. God cares. Your church cares. And that is something to write on your heart today.