Sunday Advent Reflection: What’s the Worst that Could Happen?

Last updated on: December 13, 2015 at 7:59 am by Anne Kennedy

Sunday Advent Reflection: What’s the Worst that Could Happen? 2015-12-13T07:59:54-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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David’s adultery with Bathsheba wasn’t the only sin of his long career. That sin reached out long fingers of consequence all over his family and the life of Israel, culminating in the rebellion and death of Absolam. Another sin, though, is just as difficult to look at, to swallow down as you trudge through the text. Somewhere a long the way, whether out of pride or insecurity, David takes it upon himself to number the people, particularly those who could fight in war.

This is a curious problem, coming as it does in the middle of Chronicles, which is one big long numbering. You go along from the excitement and drama of 1 & 2 Kings and suddenly and abruptly it all ends for another genealogy, and then the numbering of David’s mighty men. So when David orders a census I think, “What’s the big deal? Why can’t he count the people?” Except that anytime you’re not supposed to do something, even if it is a small thing, it becomes a big deal. In this case, David’s advisors plead with him not to go ahead, knowing that it will not turn out well, but he doesn’t listen to them.

So the numbering goes forward, and then David is rebuked by God and he is stricken to the heart with sorrow over his sin. And again, I always wonder why he couldn’t have been stricken to the heart before he went ahead, but I know, deep down. If you have purposed to do something, it doesn’t matter, you’re going to do it, and mostly God doesn’t stop you, because stopping sin isn’t that useful. We think it should be useful. We think that God should stop, or should fix, or should provide in such a way that we feel no physical or spiritual discomfort. If we were God, that’s how we would do it. That assumption, that God should stop the bad and cause the good lies at the heart of so much anger and disappointment and rejection of the God revealed in these pages.

No, God waits for David to sin, and then he is convicted of sin, and certainly he is forgiven, but there is a consequence, and unaccountably, David has to chose between three terrible options. Again, I stop here and try to figure out which would be the least awful, because they are all really bad. But David doesn’t hesitate, he chooses a plague brought about by God himself in which 70,000 men of warring status, die. And his reason for this choice is that it is ‘better to fall into the hand of the Almighty’ than to fall into the hand of men. How does he know this? How does his trust in God extend so far over his own shame and the death of his own people?

I don’t know, exactly, not being the king of a country. But I do sin. I have found myself in places where God let me go forward into an attitude or an action whose ugliness affected not only me but practically everybody around me. He could have stopped me, he could have shown it to me earlier, but he didn’t. And then, right when I’m feeling pretty comfortable, stepping high, wide and lively in the place of rage, he strikes, he cuts to the heart, and I am left bereft and sorry, amazed at his grace in showing me at all, wishing, often, that he cared for me a little less.

The Lord disciplines the one he loves. We are promised this. And sometimes the discipline is meted out in death, or what feels like death. And you have to think, that’s so awful, surely it is not a loving God. Death is always terrible. It’s the worst thing that could happen.

Except that it’s not, it’s not the worst thing. The worst thing is being let go into your own way, to do your own will, forever. God wants you, and me, to see that his way is actually higher, and holier, and truer, than our own way, our own choices, the own death that we chose. He works on us through the troubling and painful process of discipline, which cannot be flattened out into a kind of formula, which is so intimately governing of each particular soul and everything, both bad and good, that is found there.

If you willingly chose to walk in his way, to be under his disciplining and dreadful will, to put yourself into the hand of the Almighty, it may often seem that you have come to the worst, that it has already happened, and that everybody has it better than you. But in reality, he is sparing you, he is dealing death out slowly so that you might live. Forever.

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