Son of David

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
 Canticle 15
Romans 16: 25-27
Luke 1: 26-38

Twenty years ago I made my first and only trip to Europe.  I spent about a month-and-a-half in Germany, but on the way there my girlfriend and I laid over for about five days in London.  We stayed with a friend of hers in a council flat in Camden Town and I walked for miles all over central London taking in the sights.  On one of these excursions I went along The Strand to Westminster to see the houses of Parliament and the Abbey church where the English monarchs have been married and buried and crowned since the Norman Conquest.

My parents had a coffee-table book about Westminster Abbey that I had loved as a child, so I it was one of the few tourist attractions in the city that I actually tried to go into, and not just admire from outside.  But when I entered the great West Doors of the church I found there was a large barrier across the nave, and you couldn’t go any further without paying an expensive admission fee.  So I remained near the entrance, with the other casual tourists, gazing over the barrier at what I could see of the high vaulted ceiling and the clerestory windows and the great rows of columns marching into the distance. 

And as I stood there contemplating, something stirred in my heart.  Maybe it was some kind of racial memory passed down to me from my English ancestors on my father’s father’s side.   Because I’m not one to go gaga for royal weddings or Diamond Jubilees, or to care one bit for what the Duchess of Cambridge was wearing on her recent visit to New York.  But in that church in that moment twenty years ago I understood the awe and reverence of my ancestors for their King.  Not as a celebrity, but as a symbol of the soul of the nation, of the land and the people, bound together in unity of blood, history and religion.  In England the sacred power of that symbol has a house, a shrine where it peculiarly dwells, and there I was, in that house. 

In the Second Book of Samuel, David decides that it is time to build a house like that.  He has defeated his enemies and consolidated his power in his new capital of Jerusalem.  So it is only natural that now he should want to build a temple for the God who chose him to be shepherd of Israel, who favored him, and granted him victory.   And at first David’s spiritual counselor, the prophet Nathan, sees nothing wrong with the proposal.  But that same night the word of the Lord comes to Nathan that it is not David’s place to do this.  Because this is still the God of the Exodus, a God of wandering and wilderness who is not ready to settle down to live in a house.

Here the Bible uses a play on words that works as well in English as it does in Hebrew—a “house” can be a building, a palace or a temple, a dwelling place for a king, or for a god.  But “house” can also mean dynasty, royal lineage, a great and noble family.  David wants to build for God the first kind of house, a house of cedar to take the place of the portable tent tabernacle where the Israelites have worshipped and made their sacrifices since the days of Moses.  But God’s promise to David is to make him a house of the second kind, a line of descendants who will rule his kingdom for ever.   

In the context of Biblical history, this promise carries a certain freight of irony, because David’s throne turned out to be a little shakier than that.  Due to the disobedience of his descendents, their infidelity and arrogance, injustice and pride, the power of the house of David peaked in the second generation, with David’s own son Solomon.  After that the history quickly becomes one of rebellions, civil wars, and divided kingdoms, one that drags on with only a few bright moments, until it comes to what seems like a final end with the last king of Judah marched away to Babylon in chains.

But in the Babylonian exile God’s promise to David became more important, not less.  In prophecies like the ones recorded in the book of Isaiah, it became a cherished symbol of the people’s survival and hope.  The prophets told them that their Lord had not abandoned them, but was still on the move with them, and that before long he would bring them back to the land of their ancestors, where Jerusalem would be restored, and the temple rebuilt.  There a descendant of the royal line of David, God’s anointed, the Messiah, would take his place upon the throne of a new and greater kingdom, a rule of perpetual peace, prosperity, and justice.  

The New Testament is not shy about taking these prophetic promises of the Messiah and applying them to Jesus.  So in the Gospel of Luke when God sends the angel Gabriel to the one chosen to be his mother, she is the fiancée of Joseph, a man of the house of David.  And after he has spoken to her of God’s great favor for her, the angel makes a promise about the child she will conceive: “the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.” 

But this is not simply a national myth, about the restoration of a ruling dynasty.  Like that other story about Nathan and the building of the temple, the principal actor in this story is God.  As Mary immediately perceives, her child will not be born for the satisfaction of human ambitions and desires, no matter how natural or noble they might be.  His purpose will not be to furnish her husband with an heir, or the nation with the founder of a new royal line, but to establish a throne and a kingdom that belongs to God alone.

What kind of kingdom that will be becomes a little clearer in the subsequent scene.  Mary goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who does her honor as the mother of her Lord.  And this is when Mary, that lowly handmaid, unexpectedly bursts into triumphant song.  The words of the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, are not the words of prophecy about the messianic king.  Instead they hearken back to an even more ancient genre of biblical literature—those songs of women who give thanks to God, the liberator of the oppressed. 

At the shore of the Red Sea Miriam, the sister of Moses, leads the women of Israel with timbrels and dancing, singing: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.”  In the book of Judges the prophetess Deborah sings a victory song to God after the peasantry of Israel defeats the Canaanites and their kings.   In the First Book of Samuel, God answers the prayer of Hannah, a childless woman, with the birth of a son.  He is Samuel, the prophet who will anoint first Saul, and then David, as Israel’s king. 

But before any of that, Hannah prays a poem that is the model for Mary’s song: “My heart exults in the Lord; my strength is exalted in the Lord…The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength…The Lord raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor.”

If that sounds vaguely familiar, it is because Hannah’s son is consecrated to the service of the same God that Mary’s son will be.  This is a God who works through prophets and nations and kings, but his purposes are not identical with theirs.  The story that begins with the Gabriel’s greeting to Mary is about a God who also works through shepherds and fishermen, tax collectors and lepers and criminals.  This is a God who dwells in cathedrals, but also wanders through deserts, whose kingdom is found in palaces, but also turns up unexpectedly in shantytowns and hospitals, in prisons and fields of wheat, in kitchens, and tombs, and even in mangers.   On this fourth and final Sunday of Advent we look in heightened expectation for the birth of the Son of David, who will establish that kingdom, and rule it in peace for ever.