“I am pregnant” (2 Samuel 11:5).
2 Sam 11:1-4a, 5-10a, 13-17; Mark 6:26-34
When the elders of the Hebrew tribes went to Samuel asking for a king, he tried to dissuade them with a long list of charges they would have to accept by having an absolute ruler over them (1 Sam 8:10-22) . Among these placed their sons and daughters at the disposal of the king as soldiers and servants. Their first king, Saul, fulfilled this prediction by gathering an army to defeat their enemies. His successor, David, revealed the full implications of absolute power in today’s first reading.
The story of David’s adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband, Uriah, has a soap opera feel in its lurid details of a king idling after his siesta on the roof of the palace spying a woman in the bath. Her army, including her husband, fights his enemies (which kings do at the start of the year) while he is safe at home. But his lust will be served, so he gets the woman brought in, has sex with her, and sends her away. Why she was bathing in sight of the palace is an uncharted plot, but the result of their union is conception, so David orders her husband ahead to sleep with his wife to conceal his paternity.
We know the rest of the story, how David’s despicable plot fails because Uriah is loyal to him and has the discipline to refrain from marital activity under arms. So David arranges to have him killed on the battlefield. The child dies, plunging the king into deep guilt and grief, but he still takes Bathsheba, who later becomes Solomon’s mother. David’s story will descend into tragedy from now on, but he still survives in Israel’s history as a great hero and a “man after the heart of God” (1 Sam 13:14).
Today’s Gospel parables of the farmer and the mustard seed may only be inadvertently associated with David’s story, but that doesn’t stop the shared metaphor of a seed’s power from changing the course. of the history of salvation. David is a debauched sower whose lust for Bathsheba alters the genealogy of the royal line that claims Jesus as its apotheosis, the promised saviour, born in Bethlehem of the house of David. In the parable, a farmer is blessed with a fertility he does not understand, and the little mustard seed, sown in the wind, creates an expansive and unstoppable community of new life, a sign of the kingdom of God.
God’s preeminent role in all of this is to overcome human pride, ignorance and sin to save the world despite itself. Jesus comes so that we may have life, life in fullness. All of salvation history is a grace that germinates in the midst of adversity, betrayal, ignorance and violent opposition. From his birth to his death, Jesus suffered for our sins and triumphed over all kinds of evils to restore humanity to its divine destiny, life with God. Despite our sins, we are the harvest of God’s eternal love, and we are the sparrows that find a nest in the branches of the amazing mustard tree.