“Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me, .
. .”
King David’s story is unsuitable
for Sunday School. It’s seamy-ness would
bring it an R-rating; but it’s violence, if shot in all its phantasmagoric
blood-letting, would undoubtedly mean the film could find an audience only in
the tiniest of art houses. List the most
sensational sins you can—adultery, torture, incest, murder, mass murder—David
lived them in spades. And yet, God has
spoken: this man, King David, he says,
is the man closest to my heart. Go
figure.
What we know of the story is
fragmented throughout several books of the Old Testament, shards and pieces of
a shepherd boy, a back-40 childhood in bibs and a straw hat; of a monster
felled with a slingshot; of a perilous hide-and-seek path to the throne; of
on-again, off-again popularity with his subjects; of treachery from his own boy;
of misdeeds, mistakes, and miscalculations; of exalted emotional highs and
treacherous, depressive lows; of a long and distinguished—but not unblemished—reign
as King of Israel. And through it all,
hundreds, even thousands of dead bodies littering Israel’s hills.
His story is, as the poet Robert
Pinsky points out in his book The Life of
David, an anthology of the very best stories in the Western tradition:
He is
wily like Odysseus and an impetuous daredevil like the Scarlet Pimpernel. Like Hamlet, he pretends to be crazy. Like Joan of Arc, he comes from nowhere,
ardent and innocent, to infuriate the conventional elders. Like the Athenian rogue Alcibiades he goes
over to the enemy side for a time. Like
Robin Hood, he gathers a band of outcasts and outlaws in the wilderness. Like Lear, he is overthrown and betrayed by
his offspring. Like Tristan and Cyrano,
he masters the harp as well as the sword:
a poet as well as a warrior-killer, but as a poet he is far above any
other hero, and as a killer no one among the poets can even approach him.
That the Bible gives us a time and
place for Psalm 57 is a blessing: “When
he had fled from Saul into the cave.”
Just imagine. His taking refuge in a hole in the ground is
occasioned by the King, Saul, who is obsessed with killing him. For relief, David had just gone over to the
enemy, Achish, King of Gath, where he had to feign madness—actually foamed at
the mouth—to escape death. “They tell me he is very crafty,” Saul tells the
Zephites when he instructs them to find him.
But here, in Psalm 57, David is on
his knees. If there’s spittle, it’s not
feigned. There is no craft, no guile, no
deceit.
In Psalm 57, a song he might have
sung in the cave—can you hear it?—the would-be King is a penitent, begging for
mercy, repeating himself, as if it can’t be said often enough. He’s scared to death. What’s more, he doesn’t know what to do. This very complex man has been made a pauper
by his need for God’s loving hand.
That story may not be replicated
too often in the Western canon, but it’s the whole story of the Bible—or at
least humanity’s part of it. David needs
God, and he knows it. David needs God,
so he calls upon his name.
And this is the gospel truth: David needs God, and God loves the needy.
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