Ok, you know the story, but let’s go over it again.
King David. You might not be able to place him in an exact year right off the bat. But you probably immediately think, he’s a big shot in the Bible, specifically the Old Testament; he’s a king; he managed to knock out Goliath, if you remember the story of David and Goliath (or you might be saying, ‘that was King David??!!’). But either way – yeah, it’s King David, who was seen as giving rise to the lineage that Jesus came from, who fought and won bloody battles, who was a very talented musician and a wise and faithful man – in short, the greatest of the Israelite kings.
And what else about David? Does “David and Bathsheba” ring a bell at all? The story goes that David was out on the roof of the king’s house one day, where you’ve got a pretty good vantage point, and saw her bathing. She was, by reputation, a beautiful woman, and she was married to a man named Uriah, who was off fighting David’s bloody wars.
And then – the Hebrew isn’t very clear here – then he either seduced or forced his time with her, and she got pregnant, and to cover his tracks, David has Uriah put on the front line of battle – in essence, ensuring that Uriah is killed.
Not a good scene for the greatest ruler of all Israel, and the head of the lineage that Jesus comes from. In the space of a few days, he’s pretty much managed to break probably all 10 commandments, in one way or another. Which isn’t to think less of David, it’s to remind us that we are all human.
And then the prophet Nathan comes to David – the kings usually had a prophet buddy they were coupled up with – and he doesn’t have very nice things to say to him. And David gets it. David wakes up.
Now – why am I dragging us back through this story? Well, it’s for this reason.
We just read Psalm 51 – we prayed it, I hope. It’s one of the, oh, Top 10 hits of the psalms, and probably one of the top two or three that people know. We pray it together on Ash Wednesday, which is the kick-off to Lent, and now it’s closing Lent out for us. So it kind of book-ends this whole time of preparation for Holy Week.
And if you look at it in your Bibles, at home, which I’m sure you all have by your bedsides, you’ll see something written at the beginning of it. You’ll see “Psalm 51,” and then, if you have a decent translation, you’ll see a little insert before the psalm starts, and that little insert goes something like this:
“To the leader: A psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.” … “Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness..”
That’s what’s in Scripture, right before we get to, “Have mercy on me, O God…” It’s not something some modern editor wrote in, like lots of the headings inserted into our Bibles, which are great, but you just have to remember what came from where. This is Holy Scripture: “A psalm of David, after he had gone in to Bathsheba…. ‘Have mercy on me, O God….’”
And what difference does that make? You know what, I probably don’t have to give you the answer to that one – because you probably already feel it. Suddenly, what seemed like a nice prayer, “O God have mercy on me,” has gotten really juicy.
Right? – it’s good stuff. Face it, lots of us probably perked up at the story of David and Bathsheba. It may upset us, it may interest us, it may attract us. But this point is, it affects us.
And that’s because in the end, it’s not David’s life that’s juicy. It’s our lives that are juicy, or upsetting, or attractive, or whatever. That’s why this psalm starts to mean something, and in fact it’s the only way it has any hope of meaning anything. It’s the rubber hitting the road in our lives. And that’s why that little blurb about David is there – it jolts us into real life.
Because the point is not what David said or did – and we have no idea if he really said anything like this. The reason that whoever put this in there chose such a well-known and notorious event, was to get us inside the feeling of something critical and real and human. To get us inside some time when we felt like that, even if the specifics were different. A moment when we felt confusion and overwhelmed or fear or grief or longing. And circumstances had gotten way beyond us. And things we knew, and the way we knew them, had come to a crushing halt. And we couldn’t see any way out on our own.
When you’re in a place like that, or when you’ve gone to a place inside of you that’s like that – because we can carry those places around in our hearts – this psalm is the way out. A good way out, not a trick way out.
You see, we treat it like a penitential psalm, and it is – letting us be accountable for what we feel we’ve done wrong, and the mistakes we might not have seen in ourselves. It might be something big and notable, or something that’s quietly gone awry deep inside us, like envy or judgmentalism. And the psalm lets us account for that – but that’s not all.
This psalm is full of good news. It may not sound like good news at first – it’s not very sexy to say “Yeah, I’d love to say what I’ve done wrong.” But as anyone in 12-step can tell you, it’s basic to mental and spiritual health and you can’t get off the mark without doing it. So that’s good news – and then the psalm takes us further than that.
Look at these verbs- wash me, cleanse me, teach me, don’t see what I’ve done wrong, restore me, recreate me.
Don’t take those for granted. Because there are two really important things going on there. First – it’s in the imperative; we’re really stepping up to God here. This is a very brave psalm. We’re saying to God, “do these things for me!!” We’re laying claim to the fact that we deserve to be made new, to be made whole – to be made again. “Ok God, you created me once, I need you to create me again.” You ever felt like that?
But here’s the second important thing in all that – and maybe this is the most important.
There is one thing, and one thing only, that lets us make those bold demands – or, those pleas – however you want to look at it. And that thing is the basic belief that we … are…. worth … it.
We are worth it. You are worth it, I am worth it. There’s nothing else these verbs could rest on. If we weren’t worth it, we would have no basis on which to make these requests of God.
So you see, by praying this psalm, it automatically takes us out of our own squirrelly inner worlds, where the bad can seem too bad and the good can seem too virtuous, and things can get distorted. And in this psalm God gives us the gift of helping us get out of ourselves and not kid ourselves about what’s inside us – but toward, not punishment, but health.
Because wiping the slate clean, as we’re asking for here, doesn’t mean we’re just the old cookie-cutter self that we were before we went through the experience of Psalm 51. It means things are different. With this psalm, we get to shake off the self-justification we keep in place out of fear, which means we get to shake off the fear. Being forgiven – or, more important, letting ourselves feel forgiven – affects us and doesn’t leave us the same as we were. To trust that we are forgiven means we begin to believe we are worth it.
Every time you say this psalm, you are saying that you are worth being freed in all the places where these words feel like they’re really about your life.
And the thing is, I can tell you that all day.
But will you believe me? And if you believed me, what would happen?
That’s it. That’s where I’ll leave it. Because the answers aren’t going to pop up onto a PowerPoint screen inside our heads. They’ll probably work themselves into our thoughts and feelings over time until suddenly we realize we’re in a new place.
But that’s why I point us to David and Bathsheba and Psalm 51. Like a gift that’s all wrapped up in tissue paper even after you get the box open, the little inset shows us the psalm is meant to be opened up in the stories of our real lives, and in all the raw material that’s there.
Maybe it makes David a little more real – not judged by us, but real. But mainly it is we who can become a little more real, because if we experience the psalm in this way – not like something abstract or judgmental, but something that gives us life on the inside – then maybe we can relax with what’s inside us, and know that it’s going to be ok.
The 13th-century Islamic poet Jelal-addin Rumi wrote, “Why, when God’s world is so big, did you fall asleep in a prison of all places?”
This psalm is meant to help us out of whatever prison we’re in. Every time we claim “cleanse me, restore me, don’t look at what I’ve done wrong,” we claim that we are worth that gift. And when we do that, we climb out of the cage.
And it’s only when we get outside of it that we can look back and say, “Oh my gosh. Look where I was sleeping.”