Christchurch Parish News, March 2019
In 1656, when sitting for his portrait, Oliver Cromwell insisted that the painter, Samuel Cooper, depict him ‘warts and all’. This stringent command would appear to be in sharp contrast to the prevailing zeitgeist of our own time, when many of us fine-tune our online appearance using filters and specialist editing apps such as Facetune. But in fact, even then, Cromwell was being counter-cultural. A previous painter, Peter Lely, had deliberately smudged the wart on Cromwell’s forehead. But this time, Cromwell was having none of it. In his Puritan earnestness, he wanted the world to see him as he really was. He knew that it mattered because it is through the face that we see the person beneath.
This tension between what our true self is and how we present it to the world is also at the heart of a new TV series from Denmark on Channel 4. It’s called Ride upon the Storm and is about a priest called Johannes Krogh, played by Lars Mikkelsen. Krogh, who comes from a long family of priests, is a highly conflicted character with many destructive failings as well as inspiring strengths. The story focuses on how the tension between who he really is and how he appears to be impacts those around him, both his family and the parish more widely.
Nothing new?
Of course, such stories of moral weakness and failure are not new for us as readers of the Bible.
Take David, for example. It all starts off so well when we first meet him as a young boy. It’s the classic tale of the underdog, plucked out of nowhere, who nonetheless against all the odds saves the day. Even then, we often still sanitise the story, especially when teaching it to children. After David fells Goliath with a slingshot to the forehead, we usually omit the part where he then proceeds to cut off Goliath’s head and take it back with him to Jerusalem.
But even allowing for such martial grittiness, in his early adult life David is presented as a brave if uncomplicated character. For example, when he is on the run and hiding in the hills from the increasingly erratic King Saul, he notably refuses the opportunity to sneak up on the king unawares and assassinate him.
But when he does eventually succeed Saul as king of the Israelites, things start to unravel and the narrative presents David as a person of deeply questionable morals. The key moment comes in 2 Samuel, chapters 11 and 12. This is the story of David that we prefer not to tell children, and if we do, there is the temptation to airbrush it, a temptation that, as we shall see, we are not the first to experience.
We join the story at springtime ‘at the time the kings sally forth’ — with the better weather comes the prospect of war. But David is no longer a man of the battlefield, and instead of leading the fight himself as he did when he was younger, he now dispatches his soldiers, preferring to stay at home in Jerusalem.
After a long afternoon nap, as the day begins to cool, David goes for a walk on the roof of his palace. From there he sees a beautiful woman bathing on a flat roof below. Finding out that she is Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite (one of David’s soldiers), he has her sent to him, whereupon ‘she came to him and he lay with her’.
The hero of the Israelites, the vanquisher of Goliath and successor to Saul, is depicted as an adulterer. And not just with any man’s wife, but with one of his very own soldiers.
The story moves swiftly along and Bathsheba is declared to be pregnant. What will David do?
It quickly becomes clear that he has no intention of owning up to what he has done. Instead, his strategy is one of cover-up. He has Uriah brought back from the battlefield and tries to get him to sleep with his wife, Bathsheba. If he can get Uriah to do this, no one will suspect David of being the father. But Uriah refuses. His rectitude stands in contrast to David’s deviousness. He will not go to his wife— sexual abstinence being the norm for soldiers when in combat.
David doesn’t give up. He gets Uriah drunk, still with the same aim in mind. Again, in spite of the king’s tactics, Uriah refuses, preferring to sleep at the gate with his master’s guards.
Running out of options, David proceeds to hatch a ruthless plan. He sends Uriah back to the battlefield but this time with a message for Uriah’s commander, Joab. Without knowing, Uriah is carrying his very own death sentence, for in the message are the king’s instructions to Joab to leave Uriah in an exposed position on the battlefield, such that he cannot avoid being killed by the enemy. When Joab duly does this, it is not just Uriah who is killed. Other Israelite soldiers die, too.
After Uriah’s murder, Joab sends a messenger to David with the details of the events of the battle. At first, David is appalled that such a military blunder could have been allowed to happen. He questions the messenger as to how it could be that the lives of these brave Israelite soldiers were so easily lost. He even cites previous examples from which lessons should have been learnt and thereby such losses avoided.
But then at the end of his report, the messenger tells the king that in addition to the others, ‘your servant Uriah the Hittite also died’. And with that, David’s mood changes instantly. Instead of castigating the messenger for the military incompetence of his master, he instead waxes philosophical about the fickle nature of war, ‘the sword devours sometimes one way and sometimes another’. He tells the messenger to return to the battlefield with instructions for Joab to take the Ammonite city that was being attacked.
The chapter closes with Bathsheba hearing that her husband has been killed. After the customary period of mourning, David once more sends for her and she is brought to his house and becomes his wife. It is only with the very last sentence of the chapter that the narrator passes judgement on the actions of this adulterous, murderous king: ‘the thing that David had done was evil in the eyes of the LORD.’
The story continues in 2 Samuel 12. David is artfully confronted by the prophet Nathan, during which he effectively condemns himself. Having listed his iniquitous actions, Nathan then pronounces the judgement of the LORD God of Israel upon David and descendants, ‘And so now, the sword shall not swerve from your house evermore’. Bathsheba’s child dies. In due course she bears David another son, Solomon, who will be his heir and famously build the temple in Jerusalem. But from that day on, betrayal, division and destruction haunt David’s family, a precursor to the cleaving and destruction that awaits the Israelites themselves as a nation at the hands of the Assyrians and later the Babylonians.
That such a story should be included in Holy Scripture is astounding. If you think about it, it’s almost the last thing you’d expect to find in a sacred text: a story that shows one of the heroes of the faith in such an unswervingly critical light (and there are many other such stories throughout the Bible). You’d expect a story such as David’s adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah to be airbrushed out so that he could be presented in the best possible light. But here it is for us to read, ‘warts and all’.
The edited version
Only, things aren’t quite that simple. For the story of David’s life is told a second time in the Bible, in the books that are called 1 and 2 Chronicles. Turn to chapter 20 of 1 Chronicles and we find that it begins in exactly the same way as 2 Samuel 11: ‘And it happened at the turn of the year, at the time when kings sally forth, that Joab led the army force and ravaged the land of the Ammonites’. In 2 Samuel 11, this is the point when we zoomed in on David on the roof of his palace looking down on Bathsheba bathing on the rooftop below. But in 1 Chronicles 20, there is no late afternoon rooftop stroll. No mention of Bathsheba bathing. Nor any mention of her husband Uriah the Hittite. In 1 Chronicles, the entire sorry story of David’s adultery with Bathsheba and subsequent murder of Uriah is totally airbrushed out of the picture. The wart has been removed. The Facetune app has done its job. The narrator of 1 and 2 Chronicles wants to present David in the best possible light and so leaves out the parts that show him to be a man full of dark as well as light.
So whilst it is striking that the Bible includes these stories of heroes who are morally deeply compromised, in many ways it is even more striking that it also includes the same stories but heavily edited, which leave out all the compromising details. In doing so, the Bible acknowledges both that God works through very fallen humans, ourselves included, and at the same time makes us face the fact that our nature is to pretend that these things never happened, even years later. Cromwell stood with the narrator of 1 & 2 Samuel—that is a story told warts and all. However, the narrator of 1 & 2 Chronicles tells the story with a Facetuning app in hand to edit out, as it were, all the unpleasant, messy details. We might bemoan the contemporary trend to present ourselves in a way that is not true to reality, but the temptation has been there all along. Human nature remains unchanged.
A lesson for us all
Reading such stories, both in their warts-and-all versions and in the edited versions suitable for before the watershed, we see ourselves. Not just in our fallen actions but in the layers of deception (normally each one very slight) that we deploy as we try to conceal and represent ourselves differently.
But we can draw comfort. For as we enter Lent, we are to undertake the spiritual discipline of self-reflection and examination. This is the time of year when we bring to God our past and our present, with all the failings of when we have missed the mark in our lives. And we can do so with confidence because we do so trusting in God who has this uncanny habit of working through the least likely, no matter their failings. Likewise, we know that it is never too late to return to God, whatever the mess we’ve made of things and how we’ve tried to cover it up over the years.
Luther said, ‘all of life is repentance’ — a constant turning to God amidst the myriad moral complexities of our lives. For Christians, this confidence is of course rooted in Christ. If God can turn an unjust state execution into the means of cosmic redemption, then whatever mess we may be making of our own lives is not going to be beyond the redemptive power of His love.
When we read David’s story, both in 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Chronicles, we see ourselves as God sees us, both warts and all and desperately trying to cover up our failings, even years later. Lent is when the Holy Spirit leads us to look at our self-portraits through Christ’s eyes. And as we do, we may dare to face ourselves as we truly are. For we know that ultimately we will be judged, yes, but judged in love.
All quotes from the Old Testament are from Robert Alter’s vivid translation, which I heartily recommend. The commentary that accompanies the translation is excellent.