Bible readings: https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=567221767

This morning we thought about the parable of the talents and Zephaniah’s prophecy of doom directed at people whose wealth had made them contemptuous of God, who built houses and did not live in them. We were thinking about economics, and wondering whether Jesus and the prophets had to some extent foreseen some of the insights of Karl Marx.

So this morning was economics and this afternoon is politics, or to be more precise, government. We have a description of the change of government, 3,000 years ago in the time of King David. We may look forward to a general election from time to time, but King David could do it simply by having his successor, his son Solomon, anointed, as a result of a promise which he had made to his mother Bathsheba.

You will remember the pretty dreadful story in the second book of Samuel, chapters 11 and 12, telling how King David had taken a fancy to Uriah’s wife Bathsheba when he accidentally saw her in the bath; he engineered for Uriah her husband, who was a soldier, to be put in harm’s way and killed in battle so that he could marry Bathsheba, and how the prophet Nathan had told this story.

‘In a certain town there lived two men, one rich and one poor.  The rich man had large flocks and herds; the poor man had nothing of his own except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He reared it and it grew up in his home together with his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and nestled in his arms. It was like a daughter to him. 

‘One day a traveller came to the rich man’s house and he, too mean to take anything from his own flock or herd to serve to his guest, took the poor man’s lamb and served that up.’ David was very angry and burst out, ’As the Lord lives, that man deserves to die! He shall pay for the lamb four times over because he has done this and shown no pity.’ Nathan said to David, you are the man.’ [2 Samuel 12:1-7]

And David repented, although the Lord still punished him by saying that the child which he had fathered adulterously with Bathsheba would die, and he did: but then they had another son, Solomon, and David promised to Bathsheba that Solomon would inherit the kingdom after him.

Our lesson today was about how that promise was carried out. David, although he was a bad man in many respects, was a great king, and he kept his promises. I’m not sure that there is more than historical interest in the story so far as we are concerned, because we do depend on democracy in being ruled, rather than the divine right of kings.

Jesus was known as the son of David; he was in a line of descent from King David as the enormous and slightly different genealogies, that you find in Matthew 1 and Luke 3, demonstrate. It was important in that world to be able to prove your ancestry. Perhaps there is a small lesson about how people can change their ways, reform and repent, because there is an interesting little sideline at the very beginning of the lesson from the first book of Kings which we had. The king was very old and Abishag the Shunnamite was attending the King. She was another beautiful young woman, much in the way that Bathsheba had been. But we are told, a little bit earlier, that she had been brought in essentially to keep the old King David warm in bed. But the account takes care to tell us that he did not misbehave. There was no hanky-panky.

In our second lesson we go from divine succession 3,000 years ago to the end times, God the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. This is something which is far beyond our understanding. If you think of our expanding knowledge of the cosmos, of the billions of years and billions of miles in time and space, it seems odd that one can simply say that God is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. 

I think that mathematicians and philosophers will struggle today to tell you really what a beginning or an end of everything could possibly be. There will be some who will say that indeed they are logically impossible, because whatever you suggest to be the beginning, you can always imagine something that came before it; and the same is true of numbers, that whatever number you end up with, you can always add another one. 

So St John’s vision, when he was ‘in the spirit on the Lord’s day’, is as good as anything, as a vision of something which is completely beyond man’s understanding. This figure, of the ‘Son of Man’ clothed with a long robe with a sash of gold across his chest, says, ‘Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last, and the living one.’ It’s a vision of the kingdom. ‘Look, he is coming with the clouds. Every eye will see him, even those who pierced him’.

Well, I don’t think we are ready for him. Our world is full of terrible war, and our government, which I guess, at least so far as the ministers are concerned, you could say has not really been democratically elected but rather anointed, seems more concerned to be inhospitable to poor desperate refugees, than to do any of the other things that a good government should surely do. 

This is the time in the Christian year called the kingdom season, when we look forward to the coming of Jesus into the kingdom of God. But are we ready, and would we recognise Jesus? What if he came on one of those boats, or what if he was one of the brave surgeons still operating in the hospitals in Gaza? 

What would Jesus say? Dare one say it, he might well say it was time for a general ceasefire – everywhere.  All hostilities. This is the beginning. This is the ‘alpha’ of the kingdom. Let us pray that, until things get better, until ‘they shall not hurt or destroy on God’s holy mountain’, until then, there may be an alpha – but no omega.