Sunday Morning Meds

{from Psalm 57} 

“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, to 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.