Pentecost +9 - Year B
Want to make a difference? Popular opinion says, be a leader. The more leader you are, a leader of leaders, a king, the more difference you can make.
Trouble is that this runs contrary to a reality that we are in life together. As the old nursery rhyme or proverb has it, for want of a nail a kingdom was lost.
With no balance, kings get themselves into all manner of difficulty. If their difficulty is not on the battlefied it is within their desires as deep as biologic urges. In our day we are not dealing with political kings, but economic kings. Yes there is a direct relationship between politics and economics, but the question of accountability is different. Ultimately political kings need a modicum of attention given to the well-being of the populace. Economic kings don’t have people as their arbiter, but profit. Needed work can be shifted from populace to populace with no care for any populace at all.
We can tsk-tsk all we want about David and sex, but if we miss conspiratorial murder we have revealed ourselves as questionless careerists or privatized kings.
This is what Jesus might well have been afraid of with the beginning of a Draft Jesus for King campaign. We wouldn’t just have later innuendo about Mary Magdaline and institutionalized male descendants, but Jesus would be zapping Syro-Phoenicians, Romans, and Pharisees with nary a second thought. Jesus knew Samuel even better than David’s first-hand experience.
Looking beyond the immediate text we might wonder about Nathan being a night’s sleep off of challenging David’s plan for a Temple and showing up late regarding Bathsheba. Where are Jiminy Cricket or Nathan when you are facing your temptation. Community hasn’t yet designed any mechanisms for aiding folks in their lonesome valley of temptation (whether rather mundane or murderous), so what have you learned about walking that valley by yourself?
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