Chapter 12
Good Monday Morning to this new Week 12 of 2022
The current crisis and conflicts here in the West have caused quite some discussion,
especially in light of the fact that so much is shared out of the western worldview.
I stumbled over a blog and post at “citychurchlongbeach.org” and it spoke out of my heart. How often do we just see things out of only one or only “our own” view or perspective?
How do you listen to God’s word? Which persons in the story do you identify with? Today, ponder the insights from a Native Christian leader about the dominant Christian culture – and then read through the passage from 2 Samuel 12 with an open heart. Ask God to speak to you.
“White Christianity suffers from a bad case of Disney Princess theology. As each individual reads Scripture, they see themselves as the princess in every story. They are Esther, never Xerxes or Haman. They are Peter, but never Judas. They are the woman anointing Jesus, never the Pharisees. They are the Jews escaping slavery, never Egypt. For the citizens of the most powerful country in the world, who enslaved both Native and Black people, to see itself as Israel and not Egypt when it is studying Scripture, is a perfect example of Disney princess theology. And it means that as people in power, they have no lens for locating themselves rightly in Scripture or society — and it has made them blind and utterly ill equipped to engage issues of power and injustice. It is some very weak Bible work.” Erna Kim Hackett
The Lord sent Nathan to David. When he came to him, he said, “There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him. “Now a traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from taking one of his own sheep or cattle to prepare a meal for the traveler who had come to him. Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and prepared it for the one who had come to him.”
David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, “As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this must die! He must pay for that lamb four times over because he did such a thing and had no pity.” Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man!” 2. Samual 12: 1-7
Julia Kristeva also takes a view at this sotry.
Revisiting Bathsheba and David by Julia Kristeva
How about focussing a bit in regard to Bathsheba, not only as the imagined enticement of an illicit romantic encounter, but that of the symbolic system. In this context we could see Bathsheba as metaphorical maternal element of the symbolic order and drives, versus the metaphorical paternal element of the Law and its order. We could then understand Bathsheba as seductive with her imagined power to lead aside, to lead astray, away from
the symbolic of the law of the Father. Perhaps then the idea and mention of her seductiveness is a representational image of the danger of the temptation to act contrary to the laws and principles by which one normally abides, to deviate from the way things are and are to be done in one’s culture and society. Bathsheba is then representative of
the danger to trespass this patriarchal paradigm and its symbolic system, to go beyond its
boundaries, to be seduced to a new paradigm for ethical and equitable living. Then in a
parabolic manner, that is, by taking her story as a parable, Bathsheba is a metaphor for all that seduces us to a disruption of the status quo. We could then see the story as a parabol
that will bring about a revolution of a new otherness in a new paradigm.
When a woman is not given a voice in her own life-story, that is, when her story is told about her but not with her or by her, this is one way of silencing a woman. However, this silencing of her voice in her own story does not mean that she is therefore unprotesting, with the implicit accusation that she is therefore complicit when she is acted upon.
Bathsheba’s story also tells us what happened when David forgot about love. Denise
Lardner Carmody writes that, “to divorce the beauty of a lover from her or his total personality, and then suborn that beauty into the services of one’s own satisffaction is to pervert the interaction. David perverted his first encounter with Bathsheba, and because of it and the consequences that followed he became abject and felt rejected by God. David wept in his abjection and prayed for a religious ritual so that he could come to accept forgiveness and feel once more that he was loved by God. For “love is the most divine, transforming force in the human experience the best evidence that the Spirit of God moves in our spirits, often with sighs too deep for words” There came a transforming force in David, an unwonted, that is, an unaccustomed and unusual generosity as the power of love took him out of himself and into an ability to give comfort to Bathsheba in vers 24 we read;
then David comforted his wife Bathsheba.
It is in the between of our relationships, in the transformation of our interactions with each other that we discover love as healing the traces of our inscription and the experiences which mark us. Although at times filled with “fear of crossing and desire to cross the boundaries of the self … . if we can cross that with our thinking and our tradition we will undergo a revolution, and we will see things in a new light based on an ancient biblical commandment of love also shown in so many stories and parables.
Wishing you a good start to this week as you try to bring order into some of the many thoughts of this very turbulent time.
Philemon