In next Sunday’s Lectionary, we read of the way King David pulled strings to try and cover up the fact that he got a married woman pregnant. In the end he sends her husband back to the front line to be killed. Each dark deed breeds a darker one.
I don’t know what message we’re supposed to get from this – at least in the end David was repentant and acknowledged God’s way and is a hero in that sense. Maybe we’re supposed to admire that he was a bit of a jack-the-lad. He’s not the kind of hero I could ever identify with. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have the power to embark on that chain of nasty deeds.
I feel about him the way I would feel about a St Augustine or a Malcolm Muggeridge, having a whale of a time when they were young, with no care about treating other people right, and then in their older years taking it upon themselves to tell other people how to behave.
There are people who live their whole lives with the consequences of men’s wrongdoing.
There are questions of what does forgiveness mean in these circumstances, and what is repentance.
