The ‘David Syndrome’ and How to Deal With it

 

Nathan confronts David

  
(This homily was given on February 27, 2022 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani.  Read Sirach 27:4-7; Psalm 92:2-16; 1 Corinthians 15:54-58; Luke 6:39-45.)

[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Eighth Sunday 2022]

You could call it the “David Syndrome”—named after David, the second king of Israel.  It’s what Jesus is talking about in our gospel reading today from Luke 6, in that section where he says, ”Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam [i.e., the plank] in your own?  How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me remove that splinter in your eye,’ when you do not even notice the wooden beam in your own eye?”

As I said, this syndrome—this disorder—is named for King David, because this is precisely where he was at after he sinned with Bathsheba.

Most of us know the story.  David was out taking a stroll on his rooftop veranda one evening and he spotted a young woman bathing off in the distance.  So he invited her over to his place for a little “coffee-and”.  Not surprisingly, it was the “and” that got him into trouble.  One thing led to another (as the old saying goes), and the woman—Bathsheba—ended up pregnant.

Now David could have repented and ended things right there, but instead he made the decision to take matters into his own hands and to try to conceal his sin.  He called Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah the Hittite, home from battle and tried to get him to go home.  He wanted Uriah to sleep with his wife, and thus to think that he was the father of the child.  But Uriah refused to go.  And it was right for him to refuse because at the time the nation was at war, and Uriah was a good soldier.  Good soldiers in Israel weren’t supposed to go home to their families when a war was going on.

So David arranged to have Uriah killed.  He instructed the leader of his army, Joab, to put Uriah on the front lines of the battle, and then to pull back from him at a certain point, so that Uriah would be exposed to enemy attack—a “sitting duck,” so to speak.  Well Joab, unfortunately, did what David commanded him to do, and Uriah was, indeed, killed.

So there was David—guilty of two deadly (what we today would call “mortal”) sins—and yet he felt absolutely, positively no guilt whatsoever—about any of it!  For him, life was great.  He had a new wife (he ended up marrying Bathsheba) and a new son.  And in his kingdom, it was business as usual.

Until he was presented with a problem—a problem that supposedly involved someone else.  The prophet Nathan, inspired by the Spirit, came to David one day and said, “David, I need your help. I’m trying to figure out how to judge this particular case.  There were two men in a certain town; one was really, really rich, the other, unfortunately, was really, really poor.  The rich man had lots and lots of flocks and herds (too numerous to count); whereas the poor guy had just one little lamb that he had bought with the little money he had. But he loved that lamb—and so did his children.  It was part of their family.  That is, until the day the rich man stole the lamb from the poor man and his family, and cooked it up as a meal for one of his houseguests.  He could have chosen one of his own lambs to feed his friend (he had thousands to choose from), but he refused to do that.  What do you think about that man, David?  What’s your opinion?”

David got angry and said, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die!  He should be executed!”

Nathan said, “Well, that’s very interesting, David, because YOU ARE THAT MAN!!!”

That was the moment David realized that he had a plank sticking in his eye—and a pretty big one at that.  It was also the moment when he began the process of removing the plank.  Thankfully it did not take long for the king to admit his sin to Nathan.  In fact, the very first words that came out of David’s mouth after Nathan confronted him were the words, “I have sinned against the Lord.”  Later on David would express his repentance in the 51^st psalm when he wrote: “Have mercy on me, O God, in your kindness; in your compassion blot out my offence.  O wash me more and more from my guilt, and cleanse me from my sin.”

Hopefully it’s now clear: the “David Syndrome” is the tendency we all have to see the sins of other people more clearly than we see our own.  David saw the sin of the rich man in Nathan’s story very clearly, but he was blind to his own.  It reminds me of the little story I read this past week in a commentary on today’s readings.  Some of you probably have heard this before.  It’s about 4 monks who had taken a vow of silence.  All four of them were walking down the road one day, when one of them stubbed his toe on a rock.  He said, “Ow!”  The second turned to him and said, “You idiot!  You broke your vow of silence!”  The third said to the second, ”You’re a bigger idiot than he is; you broke your vow of silence in telling him that he broke his!”  The fourth one just smiled and said, “I’m the only one who didn’t.”

Here we have four men, each of whom saw the faults of the other three more clearly than he saw his own.

That’s fallen human nature; that’s the “David Syndrome.”

I think it’s providential that we have this particular gospel reading on the Sunday before Lent begins.  (Yes, believe it or not, this coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday!)

Lent is a time of year when we should focus in a special way on the “planks” in our eyes: the planks that we, like David, tend not to be aware of—or that we may tend to ignore.  That requires some introspection; that requires some honest soul-searching, which in Catholic terms is commonly referred to as an “examination of conscience.”

Examining our consciences is actually something we should get in the habit of doing every day of the year.  If King David had examined his conscience after he committed adultery with Bathsheba, perhaps he wouldn’t have added murder to the list of serious sins he needed to repent of. 

Ordinarily, planks are removed for us in the sacrament of Reconciliation—even big planks like David’s.  Hopefully we will all make the effort to get to confession at least once during the upcoming Lenten season.  (You’ll notice in the bulletin that Fr Najim has added a few more confession times during the weeks of Lent to make it more convenient for you to get there.)

All that having been said, my prayer for all of you is that this year you will have, not only a happy Easter, but also (and even more importantly) a “plank-free” Easter!

How To Love Your Enemies—Especially The ‘Instant’ Ones!

David spares Saul

(Seventh Sunday of the Year (C): This homily was given on February 20, 2022 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani.  Read 1 Samuel 26:2-23; Psalm 103:1-13; 1 Corinthians 15:45-49; Luke 6:27-38.)

[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Seventh Sunday 2022]

 

You’ve heard of instant coffee and instant oatmeal; you know about instant winners and instant rebates and instant feedback and instant messaging.

But you’ve probably never heard of “instant enemies”—until now.

And yet we’ve all had them in the past—and in all likelihood we will have many more of them in the future.

So we’ve got to be prepared to deal with them!—because of all the enemies we may have in this life, our “instant” ones are often the most difficult to handle. 

Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel to “love” our enemies.  That, of course, includes ALL of them, whether they are the instant type or some other variety! 

Now what’s interesting about this command is the fact that Jesus presumes that we will have enemies; he presumes that even the very best among us—even the greatest of saints—will have enemies here on earth.  Consequently he doesn’t say, “Love your enemies if you happen to have them”; he simply says, “Love your enemies (i.e., the enemies you ALREADY HAVE—and presumably will have in the future!).”

David, as we heard in today’s first reading, had an enemy in King Saul, who was hunting him down to try to kill him!  St. Paul, the author of today’s second reading, made a number of enemies during his missionary journeys.  (We know that because he wrote about them quite often in his letters, most especially in his Letter to the Galatians.)

Even Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, had some enemies—among them the scribes and the Pharisees and the other religious leaders of the day who were closed to him and his message.

Sometimes, of course, we may be the cause of the problem; we need to admit that in a spirit of humility.  Someone, in other words, might be our enemy because we have sinned against them in some way.  This is what makes us different from Jesus.  Jesus was perfect; if somebody was his enemy we can be absolutely certain that it was not his fault.  That’s not the case with us!  St. Paul says in this text from 1 Corinthians 15 that we all “bear the image” of the “earthly man” (i.e., Adam).  That means we all have within us the residual effects of original sin; we all have the potential to harm other people in pretty serious ways. 

So if that’s the reason someone is our enemy—because we’ve intentionally harmed them in some fashion—then the solution is for us to admit it.  We need to come to terms with our guilt and repent and seek reconciliation!   

That having been said, Jesus in this passage is speaking specifically about those times in life when someone else’s sin is at the root of the problem.  He’s speaking about those situations when someone else’s evil action has caused them to become our enemy.

And those situations can come upon us very quickly, can’t they?  As we all know, a person can move from the “friend” category to the “enemy” category in a matter of only a few seconds.  And I submit to you today that it’s those people—our “instant enemies”—that we usually have the most difficulty dealing with. 

Terrorists like the late Osama bin Laden, for example, are definitely enemies to all of us, but they’re rather distant ones.  They’re people, in other words, that we don’t deal with directly and on a daily basis (thank God!).  For us, to desire the good for them (which, incidentally, is what love is: to love is to make a conscious decision to desire “the good” for another); for us to desire a terrorist’s good (which would include his conversion and repentance and sanctity) really isn’t all that difficult.  It might be a lot harder for us if we’ve lost a relative or friend in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world in recent years.  But most terrorists are far enough removed from our day-to-day experience, that loving them in this way is relatively easy.

It can be much more difficult to “desire the good” for the guy who suddenly cuts us off on the highway, or who makes an obscene gesture to us in a crowded parking lot (not the St. Pius X parking lot, of course—no one would ever do such a thing there!). 

It can be very hard to love your own sister when she takes your toys or video games without your permission and ends up breaking them; it can be hard to love your brother when he connives with lawyers to take more than his rightful share of the family estate!  It can be very hard to love your spouse or your child when they lie to you about something really important; it can be hard to love your co-worker when he steals the credit for something that you did, and then happily gets the raise that you should have gotten.

What makes these situations so difficult is that these are people for whom we have had good feelings (or at least no negative feelings).  Then, all of a sudden, they do something to us and we have really bad feelings toward them.  In effect, they become our “instant enemies”!

So-called “crimes of passion” are committed by “instant enemies”.  The violence that comes from “road rage” is caused by instant enemies.  How often have people said things they have later regretted very deeply because they overreacted to an instant enemy?

It happens all the time.

This is why we must pray daily and ask the Lord to fill our hearts with his love—his forgiving, merciful, patient love.

But that’s not sufficient.  Prayer is essential, but it’s really not enough.  In addition to prayer, we also have to train ourselves to “think rightly” about other people.  That can help us to respond to them in a loving way whenever they become our enemies.   

Here we can definitely take a lesson from David in the Old Testament.  Now if there’s anyone who had a good reason to hate his enemy, it was David.  Saul, as you will recall, was the first king of Israel; but he had disobeyed God in a very important matter, and so the Lord took the kingship away from him, and he promised it to young David.

That wasn’t David’s fault!  It was Saul’s fault; but Saul hated David because of it and wanted to kill him.  And so he began to track David all over Palestine; he began to hunt him down.  Well, at one point the tables suddenly got turned: the hunter became the hunted.  Saul and his men were asleep in their camp, and David and his men found them.  Needless to say, Saul and his soldiers were like sitting ducks.  And Abishai, David’s general (as we heard in today’s first reading), immediately wanted to kill Saul in David’s name.

But David refused to let him do it.  And he refused because of how he thought of Saul.  He recognized this man—evil though he was—as “the Lord’s anointed”.  And so he said to Abishai, “Do not harm him, for who can lay hands on the Lord’s anointed and remain unpunished?” 

Abishai probably wanted to say to David, “Are you crazy?  This guy hates you; he’s out of his mind; he’s been tracking you for days, and now you’ve got him exactly where you want him.  End it; kill him, and stop this madness!”  

But David, to his great credit, had trained himself to “think rightly” about his enemy, and so he responded to him with love and mercy instead of hate.  David didn’t always do that with respect to his enemies, but he did do it here.  He “thought rightly” about Saul; he didn’t simply pray.

The fact is, every person we encounter in our daily lives is also “the Lord’s anointed”.  Did you realize that?  Every single person we meet on this earth has either been anointed—literally!—by God in the sacrament of Baptism; or if they’re not baptized they’ve at least been anointed with the “image” of God when their human soul was created.

We need to train ourselves to think of other people in this way—as God’s anointed sons and daughters—so that if they ever become our enemies (especially our “instant” enemies) we will still be able to love them and desire the good for them.

Because remember what Bishop Sheen once said: “The real test of a Christian is not how much he loves his friends; [the real test of a Christian] is how much he loves his enemies.”