God discloses His power over sin – 1 Sam 12:1-17; Mk 4:35-41

Saturday of Week 3 of OT; St. Stan's.

“You cannot know yourself so well as by reflection.”  It’s a line from Julius Caesar, but it sums up well David’s experience.  David, if you remember, spied on Bathsheba bathing, got her pregnant and coolly dispatched her husband, one of his loyal soldiers, by sending him on an impossible military endeavor, and fails to see anything wrong with what he’s doing.  Until… David gets sucked into Nathan’s story, lets himself imagine himself in it, is moved to empathy and is moved to right judgment.  Nathan need only point out the obvious and David finds himself convicted by his own sin.

That’s the power of good story telling, and why literature has such an important place in my own spiritual reading.  Nathan’s telling of the parable is artful enough that it moves a king to identify not with the rich man (who’s portrayed rather boringly – after all, he has everything, and is completely described by that one sentence); no, the king identifies with the poor man who has just one thing and is a compellingly painted character just in these few lines.  The king is moved out of himself, out of his world, out of his cares and absorbs the cares of another.  Despite the fiction of the person, David engages in very real solidarity, cursing the rich man in his anger.  His willingness to listen and really relate to another’s suffering opens him to a very painful realization about himself, and his sin.

And his response evidences this growth in solidarity, this evolution in pastoral fortitude, for his response, once he’s admitted his sin, is to seek to share in the suffering of the child.  He’s let himself be moved by another’s suffering, now he’ll consent to suffer with another.  Now, God can’t so easily be bought.  We re^ad through verse 17, and in verse 19, the child dies.  But once the child dies, David, weakened by his penance and strengthened in compassion, goes to comfort Bathsheba, the mother.  In a new way, he shares another’s suffering.  By verse 24, Bathsheba has another child by David.  That child is Solomon.

Here in narrative form we have the truth that Paul would state more bluntly: “the wages of sin are death.”  Here, we have also the quiet truth that will drown out that one: death and sin are conquered; love brings new life.  Our gospel shows us powerfully: Christ is present to the perishing.  Christ has the power.  The storm will not drown us, not ultimately.  We’re never promised there won’t be storms, but the cross of Christ is our anchor.  Sometimes it’s only through a willingness to step out of ourselves, to understand another’s suffering, to accompany them through it, that we discover who we are: perishing sinners, beloved, being redeemed.