The Power of Love

A Sermon preached on Sunday, July 11, 2021 at St. Augustine’s

2 Samuel 11:1-15, Ephesians 3:14-21, John 6:1-21

Apparently, there are nearly 1,000 references to David in the Bible, most of them of course in the Old Testament in the books of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles and in the Psalms, but also quite a few in the New Testament. Jesus is called the Son of David, Luke and Matthew go out of their way to establish him as an ancestor of Jesus as does Paul, who states that Jesus was “descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom 1:3–4). People wanting healing address Jesus as Son of David, as do the crowds when Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph (Mark 11:9–10): “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David.” And even when David’s name is not mentioned, the gospel presentations of Jesus are still full of motifs associated with Davidic kingship—the status of the king as Son of God, as shepherd of the people, and as judge and teacher of the law, for example.

But after hearing today’s story, we must wonder why. Surely David is not someone we want to compare Jesus with! Just a few weeks ago, when I last preached, I talked about some of David’s weaknesses. His need to appear strong, his attempts to hurry things along, his putting himself in God’s place as Lord over life and death, and as I said “that David is not strong on relationships, and they will prove to be his downfall.” That is definitely the case today when his desires once again got the better of him. And it wasn’t just bad for him, but also for Bathsheba – we do not hear that she consented - and even more for her husband Uriah whose exemplary behaviour is in strong contrast to David’s.

David, if you remember, wanted to build a house for God and wasn’t allowed to. I sometimes wonder if David’s idea of that house or temple was not just to honour and praise God but also to put God away, to try and contain God within the building, so that God couldn’t see what David was up to. We still try and do that today, especially when and if we see our faith as just something for the Sunday service and not as something that informs and guides our whole lives.

So clearly it is not David’s behaviour that we are supposed to think of when connecting him with Jesus. But for Jesus’ role as saviour of Israel, and then through Israel as saviour of the whole world, it was important both for the Gospel writers and for Paul to establish Jesus’ legitimacy through his genealogical or at least spiritual ancestral connection to Israel’s great king and hero. For Christians, it is also in the resurrection of Jesus, that God has truly fulfilled the promise made to David through the prophet Nathan: “I will establish the throne of his kingdom for ever. I will be his father and he will be my son.” (2 Sam 7:13–14) And just as Jesus as the second Adam redeems the sin of the first Adam, and releases us from the consequences of that original sin, so I think that Jesus as “Son of David” redeems the very human sins of King David.

In the gospel passage from John that we heard this morning David is not mentioned or referenced directly. There are actually lots of echoes of the biblical presentation of David in the Fourth Gospel, but the Evangelist John tends to use Moses as his great biblical model for Jesus, as is the case in this passage (though I would remind you that Moses was also not just a good role model – beginning with his murder of the Egyptian overseer). It was under Moses' leadership that Israel escaped through the Red Sea, travelled through the wilderness, and miraculously received food there. Jesus' miraculous feeding of the five thousand (John 6:1-15) recalls God feeding Israel in the desert with manna, and Jesus’ rescue of his disciples as he walks to them on the sea (6:16-21) recalls the miraculous passage through the Red Sea. While these miracles remind us of events that happened to Israel under Moses’ leadership, they also show us that Jesus is much more than Moses, they clearly reveal Jesus as sovereign over the forces of nature, as God or at least someone with direct access to God and God’s power.

Unfortunately, the crowd doesn’t fully get it. He is the prophet (like Moses) who is to come into the world, they say. No, he is much more than that, the miracles reveal that is God present in our midst, saving God’s people. Then they try and take him by force to make him king, but the sort of king they are thinking of is the original David – the human one, the king who goes out to battle, the one with all the weaknesses. They got the message that he is the Messiah, the anointed one as kings and priests were, but they have not understood the role of Jesus as Messiah. Jesus is a triumphant, conquering king, but his victory, won through suffering and sacrifice, is to conquer death, not bring death, and his weapon in doing so is not a sword, but love.

The crowd, the people are focused on their own ideas and desires and confusing them with God’s will. We still do today! Susan B. Anthony, American social reformer and women's rights activist once said: “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” Too often we remake God in our image, rather than the other way round. Following God in Jesus is not about us hoping that God will make all our desires and wishes come true. As we saw with David that is not even healthy. Yes, God does provide for both our physical and spiritual needs, just as Jesus does for the 5,000 people in the Gospel account.  But the desires that God will help us fulfil are those that are consistent with our true purpose as beings made in God’s image and that comply with our true goal, as described in the Letter to the Ephesians, of being filled with all the fullness of God.

The theologian Tom Wright says of the section of Ephesians we just heard that the themes of love and power; power and love run through this prayer. Power – human abuse and divine power for good – and love – misguided human love and God’s love for us – are also themes running through our OT and Gospel readings. The love of power – as demonstrated by King David, and by the crowds who misunderstand Jesus’ true mission – is the path to death and destruction. The power of love on the other hand, Wright says “has driven weak people to do powerful things.”[1] There’s a 1984 song by Frankie Goes to Hollywood called “The Power of Love” (not to be confused with the 1984 Jennifer Rush song of the same name) with a surprisingly theological refrain:

The Power of Love A force from above Cleaning my soul Flame on burn desire

Love with tongues of fire Purge the soul Make love your goal

Or as Paul prays, “I pray that…. Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that …. you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:17-19) God’s transformative power can and will enable us to accomplish far more than all we can ask or imagine – but this power is not ours to do what we like with. It is the power to do good, to feed the hungry, to reassure the fearful, to point people to the root and ground of our being, to point them back to God. It is what we can achieve when we “Make love our goal.”

Amen.

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[1] N.T. Wright, Paul: The Prison Letters, p. 40

Joining the feast

 

A Sermon preached on Sunday, July 11, 2021 at St. Augustine’s 

2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19, Ephesians 1:3-14, Mark 6:14-29

Two of our readings today are about parties or celebrations, but not necessarily ones I want to be invited to. Herod’s party ends fatally for John the Baptist, who wasn’t even invited – he was languishing in the dungeons. It was clearly a great feast, a banquet, and it included music and dancing, at least by Herod’s stepdaughter Salome – the translation is simply wrong here by the way.  But if I were a guest and considering the Herod family history – Herod’s father was Herod the Great – the one responsible for the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem - I would still be worried about surviving the night, however good the food and entertainment. And I would soon lose my appetite when instead of the next course of food, a platter appears with John’s head on it.

David’s party sounds a little better, at least the reason for it is. The occasion is David bringing the Ark of the Covenant, the symbolic seat of God, to Jerusalem, his new capital. He also has two recent victories over the Philistines to celebrate. And so, we have dancing with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals.  And food, lots of it: whenever the procession had gone six paces, David sacrificed an ox and a fatling and after the Ark is safely ensconced in its tent, David distributes food to the whole multitude of Israel, to each a cake of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins.

But what we didn’t hear about, those verses (6-12a) were left out, is the death of poor Uzzah who was killed when he reached out his hand and touched the ark of God, to stabilise it. Nor do we hear how David was then so afraid of the Lord that he said, ‘How can the ark of the Lord come into my care?’ So he left it in the house of Obed-edom for three months, presumably to see if Obed-edom and his family survive the experience. Why did Uzzah die? The text says that “the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God struck him there because he reached out his hand to the ark.” We knew that the Ark was dangerous, when the Philistines still held it, many of them became ill. I think the real message of the episode is not to try and constrain God in a box, and that God is not to be tamed or controlled.

The other cloud over the festivities is Michal’s reaction, David’s trophy wife, symbol of his victory over her father Saul: When “she saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD; she despised him in her heart.” This is another sign of trouble to come. David is not strong on relationships, and they will prove to be his downfall.

The problem is that both of these parties or celebrations are motivated primarily by human emotions and desires, and not by our best ones. Power, fear, insecurity, and jealousy are the dominating desires. David and Herod want to appear strong but are shown up as weak. Bringing the Ark into Jerusalem, the new capital city, is intended to give divine legitimacy to David’s rule as king and successor to Saul. But David is afraid of the Ark, he does not seem to completely trust in God’s promise – what we call the Davidic Covenant – that David’s house and kingdom will endure forever. In fact, most of David’s problems, some of which we will hear of as we continue to work our way through the books of Samuel and Kings over the next months, occur when he doesn’t trust in God and tries to help or hurry things along himself – when he is impulsive. David’s big mistake is to try and force God’s hand. Herod’s is to try and stand in God’s place as Lord over life and death.

Herod is also very impulsive and insecure. He fears John the Baptist, and what he stands for, yet at the same time “he likes to listen to him.” But when tricked by wife and daughter, his fear of what others might say if he doesn’t do what he promised is more important than a man’s life. Constrained by his oath, he has John beheaded. That reminds us of another leader, also more willing to sacrifice a life rather than lose face and out of fear for his power: Pontius Pilate who, despite having found no fault in Jesus, handed him over to be executed.

It is not the partying that is a problem, but the reason for the party. Parties, feasts, celebrations are not intrinsically bad, on the contrary. Part of our faith is to look forward to a party, what we call the eschatological banquet, the feast at the end of times when, according to the prophet Isaiah (25:6-8): “… the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain    the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever.” This party is all good news: It is for all peoples, not just for a select group or nation or class or colour. It is marked by generosity: rich foods, well-matured wines, and it signifies victory over death and evil.

I know it does not always look like it, but we party, we celebrate each week at church. The Eucharist looks forward to that heavenly banquet, it also looks back to the last supper, connecting us to the moment of Christ’s victory over sin and death, and it connects us through Christ with all other Christians who have celebrated, who are celebrating, or who will celebrate Holy Communion, holy connection, holy community.

The Eucharist is a meal whose purpose is to help us overcome those human weaknesses that so marred the other feasts we heard about. There is a death at the centre of this feast, Christ’s death for us on the cross, but out of that death comes the promise of new and unending life. The Ark of the Covenant is gone, lost when Jerusalem fell to Babylon. But we have received something much better than a box, first God’s presence among us as a fully human being and now the divine presence in bread and wine made holy. This divine presence is not a danger to those who draw near, it brings life. The only risk is that will change us, for the better.

Why do we come to this feast? Not out of a desire for power, for we know we are powerless. Not out of fear, but to overcome fear. Not out of insecurity, but because we trust in God and God’s promise. And not ever out of jealousy, for there is no reason ever to be jealous when God’s gift of true and abundant life is freely given and is meant to be freely shared.

Draw near with faith. Receive the body of our Lord Jesus Christ which he gave for you, and his blood which he shed for you. Eat and drink in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your hearts by faith with thanksgiving.[1]

Amen.

 

 

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[1] Common Worship, Order 1, Invitation to Communion