Once
in Royal David’s City
1st
Samuel 16:6-13
Luke 2:8-11
“Once
in Royal David’s City”: it’s one of my favourite Christmas carols.
Every time I sing it I recall the heart-warming and heartbreaking
complexity of David’s life. David:
born to be king. Jesus,
David’s Son: born to be the
king.
I:
-- Some people might say that the title
“king” was all that David and Jesus had in common.
David, after all, was
a military hero; Jesus never once threw a spear.
David had a lethal streak in him.
When he suspected that people were plotting against him, he
assassinated them first. No
one, however, found such a streak in Jesus.
David played power politics, and played
power politics with consummate skill.
Jesus never had the chance, and wouldn’t have played political
games in any case since his kingdom, he told Pilate, didn’t originate
in this world.
Then what did David and Jesus have in
common? They both had
simple, uncomplicated rural backgrounds.
They were both country fellows, brought up far from the intrigues
of the big city. David was a
shepherd-boy. Jesus grew up
in the home of a self-employed handyman, in
Nazareth
, a one-horse town light years from the sophistication of
Jerusalem
, the big apple.
In addition, both David and Jesus were what
I call “earth creatures.” They
put on their trousers one leg at a time, and didn’t pretend anything
else. Their humanness,
down-to-earth and earthy at the same time, was always up front.
They lived life exuberantly, affirmed life ardently, celebrated
life boisterously, and everywhere relished a good time.
Jesus, we know, spent more than a little
time partying. In fact he
was accused of overdoing it. “A
glutton and a drunkard” his enemies hissed at him.
Not only that; Jesus partied with the “wrong” people, the
folk who sat loose to religious convention and moral custom.
When uncomprehending people asked Jesus why his disciples
didn’t fast in principle, why his disciples didn’t mope around with
sour faces and sunken cheeks, Jesus replied, “The bridegroom’s here.
My followers are at a wedding reception, not a wake.
Furthermore, Mr. or Ms. Questioner, why aren’t you in here
partying with us instead of holding yourself aloof and forfeiting our
good time?”
David was like this.
When the Philistines, who had captured the Ark of the Covenant,
had finally been routed and the Ark of the Covenant returned to
Jerusalem
, David rejoiced. The Ark of
the Covenant symbolized God’s never-failing presence with his people,
Israel
. So exuberant was David
that he began to dance. He
danced with such ardour, such utter self-forgetfulness, that his kilt
flew up and he accidentally exposed himself.
The servant girls tittered at the preposterous spectacle of their
king cavorting like a university student in a victory parade following
the football team’s triumph.
Michal, David’s wife, was angry and
embarrassed and disgusted – especially disgusted – all at once.
Michal, it must be remembered, was the daughter of King Saul.
She was a blue-blood, born to the aristocracy.
She always knew her husband to be low-born, but had married him
anyway on account of his talent. Now he was behaving like a
fourteen-karat oaf. She felt
he had behaved un-aristocratically.
David had, and he couldn’t have cared
less. “I was dancing
before the Lord”, he tried to explain to his acid-tongued wife; “It
was before the Lord that I danced.”
Years later Jesus would turn on his detractors, “When the king
and his kingdom are here, are my friends and followers supposed to be
sad sacks?”
David and Jesus had ever so much in common.
Both were winsome. Both
attracted followers. Both
drew to them those who would follow them anywhere.
II:
-- Blind Bartimaeus
knew this. Bartimaeus had
learned that Jesus was in the crowd.
“Jesus, Son of David”, Bartimaeus had called out.
A few days later, in the last week of his earthly life, Jesus had
ridden into
Jerusalem
on a flea-bitten donkey, and the crowds had called out, “Hosanna to
the Son of David.”
Son of David.
In what respect was Jesus the son of David?
Spelled with a lower-case “s”, “son of” is a Hebrew
expression that means “of the same nature as”.
When people hailed Jesus as “son of David” they were saying
that he mirrored David in several respects.
“Son of David” spelled with an upper-case “S” means
“messiah”. Jesus is
David’s son in both respects, both little “s” and capital “S”.
Jesus is David’s clone in many respects; and as David’s clone
in the profoundest respects he is the long-promised messiah.
Bartimaeus knew this.
So did the crowds who hailed our Lord on Palm Sunday.
What did all such people expect from Jesus?
What are we expecting from him now?
[1]
People
then and now expect deliverance. The
name “Jesus” is the English translation of the Greek “Iesous”,
which Greek word translates the Hebrew “Yehoshua.”
“Yehoshua” means deliverer, saviour.
We all want deliverance. We
all need it.
David had been no armchair dreamer.
David had done something. After
his death there had intensified in
Israel
a longing deeper than the child’s longing for Christmas Day, a longing
for the day when a clone of David would appear, and more than merely a
clone. For David’s greater
Son would deliver
Israel
from any and all who afflicted it. In
the course of delivering
Israel
, David’s Son would bring righteousness and prosperity and
contentment, everything the Hebrew word “shalom” gathers up,
everything the bible means by “peace”.
All of us want, more than we want anything else, righteousness in
the sense of right-relatedness everywhere in life; we all want
prosperity not in the sense of riches but in the sense of richness; we
all want the contentment born of God’s blessing.
In my own life I can find grounds to praise
God for deliverance. If no
one else is aware of what those grounds are, that’s all right, since
there are aspects of the personal history of all of us that we do well
not to advertise. At the
same time, I’m aware that the Deliverer or Saviour hasn’t finished
his work within me, and therefore like Bartimaeus of old I continue to
cry out for the Son of David.
My heart aches for people who are
habituated to anything distressing, whether chemical substance or
character defect or psychological preoccupation or injury-fuelled
resentment – anything. My
heart is one with those who shout, “Don’t hand us a pamphlet or tell
us to read a book or ask us to take a course; just tell us where
there’s deliverance.” However
much some of us relish intellectual subtleties, deep-seated habituations
don’t yield to them. Where
thinking is concerned we relish subtlety; where habituation is concerned
we crave plain, simple release.
The Son of David has been appointed the
deliverer of everyone. There
is no addiction to which he isn’t equal.
If the community that he forms around him (i.e., the church)
loses sight of this truth or simply loses confidence in him, parachurch
groups quickly proliferate around the church.
These parachurch groups always feature a program as simple as it
is effective. And the
members of these groups can always point to people who have been
delivered. These groups are
a frequently-needed reminder that deliverance is the principal reason
the church is in business.
We
mustn’t think that only the substance abuser is habituated, like the
booze-crazed or the cocaine sniffer or heroin injector.
Scripture speaks of subtle habituations, subtler to be sure yet
every bit as deadly, from which many more of us need to be delivered:
envy (what has a firmer grip on us than envy, and what is deadlier for
us and others?), enmity, backbiting, gossip, slander, mean-spiritedness,
stinginess, chronically negative thinking.
Just to contemplate the list (albeit partial) that scripture
brings forward makes us realize that we don’t need religious
fine-tuning or psychological finessing.
We need nothing less than deliverance.
In coming to church today we’ve come to the right place, for
the Son of David has been given to us for just this purpose.
[2]
When
Bartimaeus and the crowd around him; when you and I and so many more
hail Jesus as Son of David we are expecting something in addition: we
long to see justice done. Despite
the brief but disastrous episode concerning Bathsheba and David’s
shocking treatment of her husband Uriah (David, you will recall, when
infatuated with a woman who happened to be another man’s wife, and
when tempted to take her displayed the culpable stupidity that we all
display when temptation turns reason into rationalization; David
arranged to have Uriah murdered so that he could have Bathsheba,
Uriah’s wife); despite his indefensible collapse David implemented and
enforced justice in Israel in a way that Israel hadn’t known before
and wasn’t to know after. The
poor were protected (always the first responsibility of an Israelite
king). The widow, the
orphan, the resident alien – in other words, the most vulnerable
people, the marginalized, any who were at risk because utterly
defenceless – all these people had a resolute defender in King David.
On the other hand, those who fleeced the
widow or exploited the poor or grew rich by grinding someone else into
the ground – these people learned that this king couldn’t be bribed,
wouldn’t be compromised, and remained formidable at all times.
We all long to see justice done.
The cry for justice that goes up from the dispossessed of the
world is still a cry inspired largely by David and the Son of David.
Who has been at the forefront of the protests against injustice
in Africa, in Latin America, in
South Korea
? Christians.
What is the one institution that that all tyrants attempt to
suppress? The church.
Who were the people who startled us Canadians several years ago
with the near-hopeless struggle of so many fellow-Canadians?
The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Who established
Mississauga
’s food bank? (It’s the
model of food banks throughout
Canada
, and it distributes food every
year whose market value is $12 million.)
Children of David, children of the Son of David.
Everyone is aware that while segments of
the church led the campaign for the abolition of slavery, other segments
of the church campaigned to retain slavery.
In other words, the church didn’t speak with one voice on this
matter. Still, the gospel
that the church cherishes transcends the church and therefore can always
correct the church. And the
church’s gospel has certainly inspired the cry for justice.
To speak of the gospel is always to speak of him whose gospel it
is, Jesus Christ. Christians
can’t consistently embrace Jesus Christ and deny justice to their
fellows.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred in Nazi Germany for his opposition
to Hitler, pleaded for justice and stood with those deprived of it.
For this reason there is now a plaque attached to the tree in
Flossenburg from which he was hanged.
The plaque doesn’t read, “In memory of one who dedicated
himself to social justice.” It
reads more simply yet more accurately, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a witness
to Jesus Christ among his brethren.”
King David was renowned for the justice he
enacted. We who cling to his
greater Son are ever looking to Jesus Christ for that justice which we
must now do ourselves.
3]
There’s one more reason why we,
like the ordinary people in
Jerusalem
before us, have hailed Jesus as Son of David.
We know that David was an ordinary person from an ordinary family
in an ordinary town – and was wonderfully used of God.
We are ordinary too. We
aren’t ashamed of our ordinariness, because we have learned by now, I
trust, that people who don’t own their ordinariness are highly
dangerous. (More on this in
another sermon.) Ordinary as
we are, and unashamed of it as well, we too want to be used of God.
We don’t pretend we’re outstanding and don’t even aspire to
be outstanding. But neither
do we want to live and die without being used of God.
We know we can be, and are going to be, just because God has
always used the most ordinary humans – like David of old, like the Son
of David.
Moses – he was the child of a despised minority.
Moses had a speech impediment as well: he stuttered.
He remains the most formative figure in
Israel
to this day.
Rahab
– was a Canaanite woman who hid Joshua’s spies in her home and
afforded them hospitality. Rahab
was a prostitute. Rahab is
written up in the heroes of faith in the book of Hebrews.
Amos – “I don’t belong to
that clique of religious professionals who forge careers for themselves
by saying what people and the politicos want to hear”, Amos thundered.
“I’m just a cowboy.” Amos
was a prophet whose searing word can still penetrate the hardest heart.
David
– a shepherd boy who found Saul’s armour cumbersome and went out to
face Goliath with his slingshot. His
own people had said to David, “Don’t be foolhardy: Goliath is too
big for you to hit.” “If
he’s that big”, David had replied, “then he’s too big for me to
miss. Who is this
uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living
God?”
Jesus
– so very ordinary that people smirked, “He can’t be much; nothing
significant ever comes out of
Nazareth
.” Yet used of God as no
one else can be just because he alone is Emmanuel, God-with-us.
I’m aware of two features of us that we
often think will preclude us from being used of God.
One is our psychological quirkiness; the other is our sin.
David had both. So
have all Christian leaders, not least of whom was the leader of the 18th
Century Awakening and whose stamp is found everywhere on the
English-speaking church and society since him: John Wesley.
Wesley could communicate with the lowest-born even as elsewhere
he often appeared peacock-proud. Sin?
Quirkiness? Wesley,
hugely deficient in self-perception, was often laughably unwise and
sometimes dangerously unwise, especially in his relations with women.
Yet who has been more tellingly used of God?
The truth is, all God’s servants are quirky and clay-footed.
We long to be used of God ourselves.
As spiritual descendants of David and his Son we know we’re
going to be.
To
speak of David and the Son of David, as we have this morning, is to
suggest that only one generation separated the two men.
In fact David and Jesus are separated in time by 1000 years.
David and Bathsheba had a child, their
first. A son.
They had great hopes for the child.
But the child died in infancy, breaking their hearts.
One thousand years later a child was born who fulfilled their
hopes in ways beyond their wildest dreams.
This child wasn’t merely a great king, not even the best king.
This king is King of kings just because he is the Son of God.
Having been raised from the dead, the can never die.
Alive, he greets us this morning, and therefore we hail him with
undiluted, unreserved joy.
And it’s all because of what happened
once in
Bethlehem
, once in Royal David’s City.
Victor
Shepherd
Advent 05
