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| 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 51st 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!