I’m returning to these notes after the busiest winter, spring, and half of summer that I have ever experienced. I wrote a couple of notes, getting back to them in fits and starts, but I haven’t been able to sustain the writing time. During this time my company released four books, one of them in two editions. Since I was primary editor on all of the above, I had little energy for writing new things.
I did, however, get time to complain on my Threads blog about a bowdlerized lectionary passage. And that is my complaint again today. But having made the complaint, I want to talk a little bit about how one might handle a passage such as ours.
Our Old Testament lection takes up the story of David after Uriah is dead. Nathan the prophet is sent to him, and gets him to convict himself by telling him a story of injustice. We end with 2 Samuel 12:13a as David confesses, “I have sinned.” If you look at the second half of verse 13, you might wonder why it was left off. God forgives the sin and says that David will not die, death being the penalty he himself had demanded for a similar, though lesser crime.
But if you follow through to verse 14 you’ll find the problem. Though David is forgiven and will not die, the child that is the product of the adultery (in the viewpoint of this story) will die.
Now many pastors are probably very glad that this last verse is left off. They would rather not deal with those questions on a Sunday morning. I don’t blame them. But the problem is this: The passage is still there in the Old Testament. In my experience, many, many Christians are caught unaware in discussions with skeptics because they aren’t even aware of what is actually in the Bible. Skipping portions of stories in this fashion helps preserve that ignorance.
Now I don’t see how you’ll handle a verse like this in a 10, 15, or even 20 minute homily. There are simply two many questions. How can the child be held responsible for his parents’ actions? Did God really kill a baby in order to punish the father? What about the death penalty for adultery? That is so foreign to our day and age that many people may ask why it should be such a heinous crime. After all, even fairly well known pastors and evangelists have been forgiven and restored to ministry after committing just such a sin. The death of the baby just makes it all that much harder.
Whatever your answer to these questions, I would suggest that if you are a pastor or teacher in the church you will need to be able to deal with them. My preference for this is either the Sunday School hour–if one can make sure it actually is an hour!–or a Wednesday night or other study during the week. That gives time for people to air out their questions and not just listen as the pastor explains how he or she has worked through the questions.
My own answer involves cultural accommodation. God is dealing with people who think in precisely the terms presented in the story. I don’t think we have to imagine that divine sovereignty decreed the death of the child, but rather that God used the natural death of the child to teach a lesson to someone who was only able to hear in those terms.
Once we have looked at this ancient situation, however, we should ask about God and HIV. When a baby is born HIV positive through no fault of its own, perhaps through no fault even of its parent, just how do we see God’s justice? What about “crack babies?” How do we look at them?
Difficult passages like this give us an opportunity to address difficult questions that we might normally try to avoid. We should take the opportunity when it is given to us.
