52:150 (Part II)

Part I is here.

The plumbing ended up over $900. Not good. It’s much easier to write about release and transcendence when plumbing bills are minor, when we can skate away with $200 worth of repairs and breathe relief. It’s harder when the inconvenience means delaying another purchase or causes us to rethink some lifestyle choices. This is because major inconveniences—not trials yet, but inconveniences—cause us to reexamine our values and behavior, sometimes forcing us to alter various habits. And, this isn’t easy. Not only is it notoriously difficult to change a habit, but all the more difficult when part of our darker nature craves instant gratification. These inconveniences—the stuff of everyday life—constantly pits our own light and dark against each other, to see whether we release or grab.

This juxtaposition of light and dark is what makes David accessible to us, including in Psalm 52. His story is one of the most familiar, not only because of the amount of text devoted to him, but because of how he has lived on in popular culture. We hear of David and Goliath while watching football on Saturdays, listen to the latest cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” to see the mythologized version of the king, see him channeled in the movie Braveheart­—whether producers realized they were channeling him or not. David the poet. The king. The giant-slayer. The adulterer. The murderer.

While many biblical characters exemplify doubt, fear, greed, lust, anger, patience, selflessness, and faith (often all in one story), David captures our imagination uniquely. His story is accessible because we experience such stories around us, again and again. The rags-to-riches tale. The, for lack of a better term, David and Goliath drama. The hamartia that we see in tragedy. The suffering and waiting that we see explicitly in the Bible, but also in every good story, and experience ourselves. We see lust and duplicity, love and friendship, battles won and lost, kings killed, rebellion and escape. It is our story with the high intrigue of court added in. It is a thrilling story, and especially applicable to our modern imaginations because we see a king with a divided nature, with varying facets to his person, some glorious and others equally hideous. He was the original conflicted warrior, tragic hero, unholy saint.

And we like him. We cannot help but like him because he is like us. The good, and unfortunately, the bad.

Psalm 52 sets up this division between good and evil, yet something else is happening in the sub-text. The pauses in the psalm—shown by the word Selah—come after verse 3 and 5, both verses referring to a man who loves evil more than good, and man who God will snatch and tear from his tent. We think of David and his mistakes, the times that he missed the mark, whether in seducing Bathsheba and then covering it up by killing her husband, or disobeying God. A good knowledge of the Old Testament reminds us that this poem is grounded in the story of David and his men eating the bread that Ahimelech the priest gave them, which they could only eat if they hadn’t been with a woman. It reminds us of David’s seduction and cover-up. The pauses, the story itself show the two-faced nature of David’s character.

What surprises us, however, is not this nature. We understand this nature. We have pulled to car over to give a transient a few dollars, and then flipped off the person who cut in front of us. This is who we are. Full of hate and love. What surprises us about David is his audacity, and God’s posture of grace to him. This psalm, while hinting at David’s infidelities, declares him to be a flourishing olive tree. While warning us of the sin latent within, it proclaims that those who lean on God are exuberant.

It calls, once again, for us to re-understand grace not as a paltry sin-management program, but as God’s radical posture of love toward us. It is nearly unthinkable for us to claim, and yet we do. And, in claiming grace we do not promise to be a little better (though many of us try while asking for forgiveness), but throwing ourselves on God, remembering in Psalm 51 that we ask God to make us a new creation—not for us to try harder—and then we will worship in the assembly.

This is the second lesson of Psalm 52, the sub-textual lesson, the one we see when we remember the stories going on here. Grace continues to shine more brightly than we dare—or do—imagine. It reminds me of that verse that would come hundreds of years later in Matthew 11: “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.” There is no other way to take the kingdom, to accept grace: no amount of cleaning or groveling will do. We come as the saying goes “warts and all” but that is not enough: we come full of the grotesque and hideous, full of that which we won’t even speak, full of death; we ask for life. There is no other way but to take it by violence, to ask suddenly and unexpectedly, to demand knowing that we are owed nothing. This is grace. This is the grace that David knew, and we saw he was a man after God’s own heart. His darkness, our darkness, makes it so that we must simply lunge at grace like we might snatch a purse (if we were so inclined, which I hope we are not); we sneak up on it and grab it knowing it should never be ours, and then five steps away hear, “Would you like my watch, too?”

If only we knew this grace. Not the grace soft-peddled in churches, not the sin-management grace where we are told to grovel or promise, the cultural grace that entails making yourself look a little better: may we know the grace of the purse-snatcher, of the violent, of King David.