The Man Who Wept

2 Sam 18; 1 John 6:35, 41-51

August 8, 2021

The king said to the Cushite: “Is it well with the young man Absalom?”
The Cushite answered, “May the enemies of my Lord, the King,
And all who rise up to do you harm, be like that young man,”
The king, deeply moved, went up to his chamber ... and wept.
And as he went, he said, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom.
Would I had died instead of you. O Absalom, my son, my son.”

This is heart rending. Just to read it, just to hear it, is to fight the tears away. “Would I had died instead of you. O Absalom, my son, my son.” A parent’s cry, if ever there was one. Not even the Book of Job, for all the suffering depicted in that book, contains such heart rending words. The only passage in scripture that rivals it for tearing us apart are Jesus’ final words in the gospels of Mark and Matthew, when Jesus, nailed to the cross, cries out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” More needs to be said about that despairing cry of Jesus, but, for now, let’s stay with David, the king, for a bit.

David, as you all know, was no angel. As a young man, he leads a small militia that extorts payment from local farmers; when Saul the king dies, David seizes the throne and takes care, sometimes deadly care, that no one in Saul’s line could challenge him for the throne; and, famously, David, when it pleases him, takes other men’s wives for his own. And though David, as king, has a wildly successful political and military life, in his private life he is not spared great sorrow. David knows loss, knows inner pain, knows how vulnerable we are, knows that none of us has our life without great suffering. David’s long loved friend, Jonathan, dies young in battle; his and Bathsheba’s first child dies in childbirth; his daughter, Tamar, is raped by another of David’s sons; his son, Absalom, rebels against David, and gets killed by David’s men, though David gave strict orders to spare his life. With all that, scripture tells us two remarkable things about David, remarkable because, given David’s many wrongdoings, and given God’s righteousness, they seem unlikely: for despite all, David never stops loving the Lord, and, despite all, God never strops loving David. When the prophet, Nathan, tells David that God will inflict a series of disasters upon him for plotting the death of Bathsheba’s husband Uriah, David makes no excuses, no cry for mercy, but simply confesses, “I have sinned against the Lord.” And when disasters fall upon David, he never shakes his fist against God, he never complains to God about them, and he does not ever --- with the exception of Bathsheba’s fatally ill newborn baby --- (David does not ever) ask for God’s protection. It’s as if David knows that his love of God and God’s love of him does not protect him from destructive social and natural forces.

I think here of Simone Weil, the French mystic that I spoke of in my last sermon. Weil says that God has nothing to do with force, nothing to do with coercion, nothing to do with dominating rule, that God does not protect us from worldly forces, does not protect body and soul from wounds, even unto death. God rules the world, Weil says, not by might but by goodness and wisdom, by love and forgiveness. We know this, she says, not by reason but by the feelings of the heart. This is faith, she says, God felt by the heart. In perhaps a hyperbolic moment, Weil adds that you have to be blind and deaf to believe there is any proof of divine mercy in nature or history. You would think that we Christians would have learned that long ago. For there is our Lord, beloved of God, scripture constantly telling us Jesus is beloved of God, and there he is, hanging on the cross, as if he were a criminal, in terrible pain, powerless, mocked, his clothes torn from him, rejected by his people, betrayed by one of his own disciples, condemned by priest and pharisee, convicted by the secular governing authorities --- and Jesus himself ends his life with those terrible despairing words, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” The Man Who Wept No, even less than David, the other of God’s great beloved ones, Jesus is not protected by God; God leaves him on the cross, wounded in soul and body, unto death. And yet we call him our Lord, not the triumphant Caesars, Napoleons, emperors, rulers of the world, they are not our Lord; the crucified, powerless, rejected Jesus is our Lord. We need to feel the strangeness of this.

The gospels, always striving to help us into believing in Jesus as our Lord, is replete with healings and miracles. But there are other figures in scripture, let alone in other writings from the ancient world, performing healings and miracles, and I think that even the resurrection stories, simply in themselves, if there were nothing more, would not suffice for why we call Jesus Lord. There are, though, six words in the Fourth gospel, words that pierce our heart and meet the hunger of our soul, words that account for why we call Jesus Lord, words that Jesus says about himself ... and those words are in today’s gospel reading. Here are those words. Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.” Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.” And then, strikingly, he says: “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” This is metaphorical talk, true talk, deeply, existentially true, but it is not literally true. Literal understandings of our faith can be a killer. Jesus is talking of the hunger in our soul, a hunger for ultimate meaning, ultimate purpose in our life; a hunger for mercy, for forgiveness for all the wrong we have done --- and the one who meets that hunger is truly our Lord. I don’t know whether we all experience that hunger, and even those of us who do experience it, may experience it sporadically, or perhaps only once in our lives --- though once we experience it, I do not think we ever forget it. Simone Weil says, to deny that hunger is to lie to ourselves. That perhaps is a little too strongly said, a little heartless. I was helped in my thinking here by something my son Stephen wrote me about Saint Augustine. Stephen is a church historian and knows Augustine better than I do. He reminded me that Augustine, in his incomparable book, The Confessions, talks of the hungers he had as a young man in his twenties. They were worldly hungers, hunger for public success, hunger for physical love. Augustine was gifted, and succeeded in meeting these hungers, and yet remained restless until, finally, he felt in himself a hunger for God, a hunger that would not letr go of him. Looking back on his early life, Augustine says how he loathes himself for going so long without a hunger for God. He’s too hard on himself, of course, saints seem to be that way, but he does throw light on one of the reasons we less saintly people do not find in ourselves a hunger for God. For there are many things in this world that are good, many things that are worth loving, and we hunger for those things. Only when we find ourselves still restless, when we find ourselves hungry for what the world cannot offer, we may discover in ourselves a hunger for God, a hunger for one who gives us a calling, who gives us a mission in life no matter how humble, who forgives us for what the world cannot forgive, forgives us for what we cannot forgive ourselves for. In discovering that hunger, we discover ourselves as spirit, and open ourselves to that transcendent spirit we call God, finding Christ as the tangent to God, finding the life and words of Christ, dwelling on that life and those words, discovering the spirit of Christ, discovering Christ alive, present, living in our thoughts, in our faith, in the eucharist, so that Christ indeed becomes the bread of life for us, feeding our hunger for love and purpose and compassionate spirit at the root of all, so that we find ourselves even if just for a moment no longer hungry, no longer thirsty. And then we may well find ourselves saying, as Saint Augustine said: I was restless until I found rest in thee. Praise Christ for such a great mercy.

Praise God.

Amen.