Bible reading: 2 Samuel 11:26 – 12:14.

When Bathsheba heard that her husband had been killed, she mourned for him. When the time of mourning was over, David had her brought to the palace; she became his wife and bore him a son. But the Lord was not pleased with what David had done.

The Lord sent the prophet Nathan to David. Nathan went to him and said, “There were two men who lived in the same town; one was rich and the other poor. The rich man had many cattle and sheep, while the poor man had only one lamb, which he had bought. He took care of it, and it grew up in his home with his children. He would feed it some of his own food, let it drink from his cup, and hold it in his lap. The lamb was like a daughter to him.

“One day a visitor arrived at the rich man’s home. The rich man didn’t want to kill one of his own animals to fix a meal for him; instead, he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared a meal for his guest.”

David became very angry at the rich man and said, “I swear by the living Lord that the man who did this ought to die! For having done such a cruel thing, he must pay back four times as much as he took.”

“You are that man,” Nathan said to David. “And this is what the Lord God of Israel says: ‘I made you king of Israel and rescued you from Saul. I gave you his kingdom and his wives; I made you king over Israel and Judah. If this had not been enough, I would have given you twice as much. Why, then, have you disobeyed my commands? Why did you do this evil thing? You had Uriah killed in battle; you let the Ammonites kill him, and then you took his wife!

“‘Now, in every generation some of your descendants will die a violent death because you have disobeyed me and have taken Uriah’s wife. I swear to you that I will cause someone from your own family to bring trouble on you. You will see it when I take your wives from you and give them to another man; and he will have intercourse with them in broad daylight. You sinned in secret, but I will make this happen in broad daylight for all Israel to see’.”

“I have sinned against the Lord,” David said.

Nathan replied, “The Lord forgives you; you will not die. But because you have shown such contempt for the Lord in doing this, your child will die.” Then Nathan went home.

Message.

I wonder if you’ve read any of the books by the Yorkshire School Inspector, Gervase Phinn? If you haven’t, let me tell you that they’re a sort of school version of the James Herriott vet books, full of amusing events and characters – and a real love for children. Gervase is getting on a bit now, but Moira and I did once hear him speak; he was a marvellous and entertaining story-teller who spoke very quickly!

As a townsman from Doncaster, Gervase sometimes got into trouble with the country school children – never more so than when he went into an infants’ class and told a story about sheep. His difficulty wasn’t with the story itself but with his visual aid: a picture of a ram with a smiling mouth, short horns, a fat body and shining eyes. A six year-old boy asked, “What breed is that?” Gervase was nonplussed: “I don’t know”. “Don’t you know your sheep then?”, the boy continued. “No, I’m afraid I don’t”, Gervase had to admit.

A lengthy discussion ensued, involving most of the children and the class teacher. Was the ram a Masham or a Swaledale? Was it a Blue-faced Leicester or a Texel? No-one could decide, so eventually the teacher called in a girl from the next-door classroom, a girl with eight breeds on her family farm who, everyone agreed, “Knew her sheep”. Everyone held their breath as the girl examined the picture. Finally she came to her verdict: “I reckon it’s a Bleu de Main or Rouge de 1’Ouest. Them’s French breeds”. It was Gervase, not the children, who left the school that day having learned something new.

We’re all familiar with sheep poetry and parables in the Bible: the picture of God as our shepherd in the 23^rd Psalm and Jesus as the Good Shepherd in John 10; Isaiah declaring that we all, like sheep, have gone astray; Jesus looking sadly at the crowds and seeing them as sheep without a shepherd; and of course the parable of the man who leaves ninety-nine sheep to fend for themselves while he searches for the one that was lost. We also have Jesus separating the sheep from the similar-looking goats at the Last Judgement. These passages are “common currency” among Christians. Nathan’s parable about the rich man with large flocks taking the poor man’s pet lamb to feed his unexpected guest, is perhaps less well-known. But it fits in well with the other texts and, crucially, it strikes a chord with David who, as we all know, had been a shepherd boy in his childhood. We can imagine him thinking, “Ah, a sheep story? How nice!” But it wasn’t.

Now Nathan, who seems to have replaced old Samuel as Israel’s chief prophet, faced a daunting task. He had been sent by God to reprove David but must have felt that he was in a very difficult place. On the one hand, he had to remain faithful to his divine call – that was part and parcel of being a prophet (and what might God do to him if he disobeyed? – this is the Old Testament, after all!). On the other hand, he was about to face a man who wouldn’t take kindly to being told off, a king who could order him to be taken away and killed if he said the wrong thing. So I think that Nathan was being both creative and cunning in thinking up this little tale which piqued David’s attention and caught him off-guard. We can imagine him pricking up his ears and paying attention as the story was being told; we can read how angry he was at the rich man’s selfish actions; we can almost feel the knife going in as Nathan said, “That man is actually you”. To his credit – because he was not a complete scoundrel – David listened to Nathan with humility and horror. The parable had its intended effect.

I want to move on to a different aspect of today’s story: did you notice how many – or few – times Bathsheba is mentioned by name? I’ll tell you? – it’s just once; yet she’s called “Uriah’s wife” four times. And we never hear her voice; she is silent throughout, except when she mourns after Uriah’s death. All this suggests that married women weren’t really seen as people in their own right, with their own desires and emotions and ambitions, but as their husbands’ possessions; it’s noticeable that Nathan couches his admonition to David purely in terms of what he had done to Uriah: stealing his wife and then causing his death. The fact that David had Bathsheba brought to him as a sexual plaything receives no comment, nor is there any sense that he might have caused her hurt or pain. It’s Uriah who has been sinned against; Bathsheba barely gets a look in.

You may think that this view of women is an ancient anachronism. But it isn’t. In England and Wales, common law said that a married woman was subordinate to her husband who, as “her baron or her lord”, should offer her his “protection and influence” – this was called “coverture”. When a man and a woman married, they counted as one person in law, with the wife’s property automatically becoming her husband’s; he could dispose of it whenever he wished. A wife, on the other hand, couldn’t draft a will or dispose of any property without her husband’s consent. It was only by Acts of Parliament from 1870 – not that long ago! – that wives began to have the right to own, buy and sell property and have their own separate legal identity. Until then they were, quite literally, “goods and chattels” owned by their husbands. And, just to take things further, the law stated that, by marrying, a woman was implicitly giving her husband unlimited sexual consent: this was contested by women over many years and overturned as recently as 1991 by a ruling in the House of Lords.

Sadly there are still men who treat women in a subhuman way: not just those who traffic them from one side of the world with attractive but phoney offers of employment, only to steal their passports and lock them into a life of prostitution, but powerful men who only seem to think of their own gratification. Perhaps this has always been the case, and always will be: but it’s wrong. God created all people as unique individuals, worthy of respect. After all, even St Paul wrote, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. Christians (and of course other people of integrity) ought to be saying loudly that exploitation of women (and, indeed, of all vulnerable people) is a grievous sin; we should be sad whenever it is uncovered and glad when it’s brought to book.

There are parts of this story which I haven’t touched on. For instance, was it right for David to take Bathsheba as yet another wife once her mourning period was over? What do we make of the dire prophecy that her child would die (which it did)? Do we realise that Bathsheba’s later son Solomon would become the next Jewish king, even though he had no right to take that position and was challenged by Absalom and Adonijah, both of whom got killed for their rebellion? And are we comfortable that Bathsheba is mentioned in Matthew’s gospel as one of Jesus’ ancestors (although even here she is called “the wife of Uriah who was killed”)? None of these aspects of today’s story are easy!

But I want to concentrate on the main thrust of today’s tale. It’s this: Nathan courageously “spoke truth to power” which made David finally realise that he had used his privileged status for selfish ends – I touched on this last week. As a professor from Princeton Theological Seminary puts it, “This story is not about sex or adultery, really. It’s not really about lust or desire either. At its core, the story is about the pernicious draw of power, the unrestrained greed that accompanies acclamation, the will of the powerful to take and consume what belongs to the poorest among us”.

He continues: “When the powerful sin, they leave a wake of destruction. Families are rent apart. Relationships are irreparably damaged. The innocent are harmed. The story of David is tragically still too common today. The crimes of the powerful are too often the subject of cover-ups, spin and excuses, not justice”. Sadly, I think he’s right. Thirty centuries of history may have passed, but things haven’t really changed.

“But”, you will say, “David repented of his sin”. That’s true; but it begs a very serious question, which is this: we may well believe that God is willing to forgive someone who repents of their sins, but what about the people that they have sinned against? – our actions have consequences which can’t always be reversed or undone. So a convicted drink-driver may sob their heart out in court, but that won’t bring back the child they’ve killed: is it really possible for the bereaved parents to forgive? What about when a military commander appears on television and says that they’re sorry for bombing innocent civilians in error? Or when a company “regrets” its negligence after an accident in which people have been maimed for life? The clock couldn’t be turned back for Bathsheba to “unhave” her baby or for Uriah to miraculously be restored to life. David was repentant: but what was done, was done.

I said last week that this tale is a sordid one of abuse and exploitation. Today’s episode gives us a glimmer of hope – no more – that David has seen the error of his ways, has learned something about humility and about how to treat other people. And we are perhaps left with two challenges. One is to ask ourselves if, in any way, we are abusing our position of power or privilege, if we are “making use” of people without thinking of the consequences for them. That’s a trap that any of us can fall into; we must make sure that we don’t. The other is to ask if we are facing situations such as bullying, corruption or thoughtlessness where we need to speak truth to those who have power but tremble at the thought of doing do. Of course we need to carefully think through what we are going to say, and we need to be aware of the reaction we may cause. But sometimes it’s got to be done.

Bathsheba and Uriah were victims. David was an abuser. Nathan was a hero – as, in his own way, confronting both the Jewish and Roman authorities, was Jesus. We know whose example we must follow.