Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Tragic Consequences?
“Everything
happens for a reason.” Is that what you
think? Lots of people do. I don’t know whether I agree or not. That is because I’ve no idea what people
mean when they say that. Do they mean
that there is behind the scenes an all-knowing and perhaps all-powerful God
that ordains events to happen just as they do?
Do they mean that God might not be manipulating events, but is indeed
working through them to bring about God’s own purposes for God knows what
reasons? Do they mean that there is a
non-personal but very real meaning in any or all events that, if you have
enough courage and discernment, you may discover? Do they mean that life is just full of
endless lessons to be learned and that we humans have the possibility and
capacity of learning those lessons from whatever happens to us?
Some of
these positions make more sense to me than others. The Bible and the larger Christian tradition
certainly make plain that God does not always get what God actually wills. Yet there is no denying that ultimately,
God’s Will is sovereign. In the end,
God’s will for love and justice and peace will indeed win out. Stories bear that out on a small scale. And in the larger scheme of things, Christian
faith sees that there is an end towards which all things are moving, and that
in the end, God will be all in all.
Because
Christianity is often, and in my opinion quite incorrectly, assumed to be a
system of belief rather than a way of life, such thinking as the notion that
God’s will finally will be victorious, supreme, indeed ultimately uncontested,
seems to provide considerable comfort to a great many people. I myself find it attractive, and like lots of
other people, can fill my mind with images of a world that is healed, a
humanity no longer full of people at each other’s throats, a creation restored
to pristine beauty. I am, as possibly
you are, able to imagine that God is at work in human efforts, willing to bring
about peace, equality, justice, and shared abundance, through the very energies
we exert towards those things. They are the will of God, aren’t they?
But then
there is tragedy. You are familiar with tragedy, because the way we know about
it at all is that it continually shows up in our lives. Tragedy has its own particular niche in our
experience. It is different from
disaster, which might be caused by natural forces or by a collision of things
that happen to get in the way of each other and spoil life for any and all
things touched by the resulting wreckage.
Tragedy is different, too, from stories that simply have sad endings,
even terrible endings, as melodramas frequently do. Tragedy in the sense that I am talking about
it involves a good person who is in many ways exemplary, whose very strengths
become the impetus for a bad mistake—an error in judgment. You will notice that your very strengths are
the things that give birth every once in a while to such an error, usually when
your strengths tempt you to go beyond human limits, so that like a misguided
Icarus, flying for the first time, you get carried away with what you can do
and fail to take into account that what goes up must come down. Tragedy results when such a failure leads to
ruin, misery, and even death.
David in
today’s story is a tragic hero. Indeed in
the story of the Absalom rebellion, he is more tragic than hero. If you have been tuned in to the unfolding
story the last several weeks, you may recall that things start to unravel one
afternoon in Jerusalem, when David, left in his palace while his army was off
fighting, notices a woman bathing, sends for her, lies with her, and gets her
pregnant. Bathsheba, the woman, is the
wife of Uriah the Hittite, exemplary boy scout.
David has him come home on leave, does his best to get him drunk so that
he will sleep with Bathsheba, fails to crack Uriah’s moral vow of sexual
abstinence, and sends him back to the front with a note pinned to his uniform
meant for the Commander Joab, saying, “Please kill me. Send me to the front.” For doing such a dastardly deed, Nathan the
prophet assures David that the sword will never depart from his house and that
what he has done surreptitiously will in fact be done to him when his neighbor
invades his harem and sleeps with his wives in the sight of all Israel.
Darling of
God, a man after God’s own heart, David has royally messed up. He knows it.
He admits it. But that does not
avert the tragic consequences. The
example that he has set is one that his sons quickly pick up on and
emulate. Amnon, oldest son and heir apparent,
seduces his half-sister Tamar, rapes her, and then spurns her. Tamar goes public with the story. David professes anger, but does not say quite
why he is angry or at whom. Absalom,
next in line, is Tamar’s brother who bides his time to avenge his sister’s
shame. After a couple of years, he kills
Amnon, for which deed David banishes him from the royal court. More time passes. Absalom is determined to get David’s
attention and burns the field of General Joab to do just that. David welcomes Absalom back, yet won’t quite
reconcile with him. Perhaps David knows
that Absalom is a real threat to his own kingship. Again, Absalom bides his time, interjects himself into the judicial system where David is obviously weak, wins the hearts
of a large slice of the population, and ultimately sets himself up as king,
ensuring thereby that civil war has begun.
Brilliant
and charismatic though he is, Absalom is no match for the wily old king, who
knows just what to do to bring down the rebellion. He and the royal entourage flee Jerusalem,
while Absalom comes into town and proceeds to fulfill the prophecy of Nathan by
sleeping with all the royal concubines.
While keeping some spies in Jerusalem and by making sure that one of his
trusted allies infiltrates Absalom’s circle of advisors, David is nonetheless
anxious. When the day of battle arrives,
in his headquarters down near the Jordan River, the king gives orders to his
commanders to “deal gently with the young man Absalom” for his, David’s
sake. They do no such of the kind. Riding through the thick Forest of Ephraim,
Absalom is caught by his beautiful hair in the branches of an oak, while his
mule goes on riderless. Told where he
is, the impetuous, efficient, loyal, no-nonsense General Joab takes three javelins
and spears Absalom through the heart as he remains hanging in the oak. Joab’s men surround Absalom and finish the
job. They throw his body into a pit
and cover it with stones.
David hears
the news from the Cushite messenger.
“May all the enemies of my lord the King be like that young man.” And the tragedy has come to its head. David is deeply moved. As he goes up to the chamber over the gate,
they can hear him grieving: “O my son
Absalom, my son, my son Absalom. Would I
had died instead of you! O Absalom, my
son, my son!”
What to do
about tragedy: that is the
question. We cannot undo the past. We cannot go back to some afternoon years
ago, when passion got the best of us and we lost our heads there for
awhile. We cannot retreat to several
years ago when it seemed so right to hold on to our grudges while somebody else
squirmed. We cannot erase injudiciously
chosen words, spoken in anger, or take back poisonous gossip we have injected
into a conversation. We are lucky if bad
choices do not get away from us causing more damage than we could fathom. Nor can we ease ourselves off the hook by noting that
whatever tragedy is unfolding is somebody else’s tragedy, not our own. For if it is happening to somebody in your life, even remotely in your life, it is indeed your
tragedy. For all Jerusalem and all
Israel pay the price for the tragedy of David.
Sometimes one terrible negligence can set off a bombing or a shooting
spree or an assassination that plunges half the world into chaos and
mourning. So it is with the choice of
somebody else’s wife or husband on a spring afternoon. Tragedy unfolds with no denouement until hell
has been paid right and left.
There are
various kinds of tragedy, as different people have pointed out. Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche all looked
deeply at tragedy and saw if from differing angles. Sometimes people are caught in the grip of
circumstances that they simply cannot escape.
Sometimes a Hamlet will carry so much loathing and disgust that his
spirit is weighted down to death long before the sword fatally pierces
him. Sometimes a Lear will rave in the
wilds about treacheries that have only taken place in his warped and paranoid
mind. Many times, as in Theodore
Dreiser’s An American Tragedy a Clyde Griffiths will be so enchanted with society’s promised trophy of success that
he will kill rather than risk losing what he can never really have. Sometimes, as in Faulkner’s tale, Absalom, Absalom, the hate-filled,
racist structures of society will conspire to wreck the lives of people who on
occasion try to act nobly but cannot find a way to do it. What do we do about tragedy?
Frederick
Buechner, writing about David’s tragedy, said that when David wished he had
died instead of Absalom, “he meant it, of course. If he could have done the boy’s dying for
him, he would have done it. If he could
have paid the price for the boy’s betrayal of him, he would have paid it. If he could have given his own life to make
the boy alive again, he would have given it.
But even a king can’t do things like that. As later history was to prove, it takes a
God.”*
That is the
gospel. It is not that God wills
everything to happen just as it does.
But it is that a Divine Presence, a thoroughly moral Presence, makes
itself felt in the midst of the deepest human tragedies. We may or may not learn from them, but God
does not appear to give up providentially watching over us, nor to withdraw a
loving-kindness that extends to the most broken of us. God is at work on human made crosses to
loosen the grip of death in what we call resurrection. God takes the stupid blunders made by the
best of people and redeems both the people and their blunders. The tragic Hamlet himself says to his friend
Horatio, “There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we
will.” No purpose of God can ultimately
be thwarted. And though we do not know
and may never know how to avert the tragedies in which we are the main
characters and supporting characters, we do know that our Redeemer lives, and
that at the last day, he will stand upon the earth; and though our bodies be
destroyed, yet shall we see God, whom we shall see for ourselves, and our eyes shall behold as our Friend, and not a
stranger.
* Frederick Buechner,
Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 6.
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012
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