“Draw your chair
up close to the edge of the precipice,” novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald once
offered, “and I'll tell you a story.”
Nathan
makes the same offer, except that the chair is a throne and he keeps the
precipice up his sleeve for a final flourish. Scholars have seen the prophet’s
ploy as an end-run around the formidable anger of an absolute sovereign: David
has killed once to cover up his crime; what’s one camel-coated preacher more or
less after you’ve wasted a good general? Nathan, this theory runs, lets his
center collapse in a feint before the king’s onrushing anger, then rolls his
flanks from the ambush of a crafty “Ecce homo!”
But
fear does not drive Nathan. The first time he appears in the sacred narrative
he tells this same sovereign “no” concerning a monumental building project – a
subject on which despots tend to be fairly sensitive. (2 Samuel 7.1-17) “Thou
art the man” holds no terrors for a Hebrew prophet.
So
why the story?
Nathan’s
narrative is not subtle subterfuge that softens the truth but a poetic sucker
punch that tells a truth no legal language could contain. Adultery, murder,
cover-up: David knew the facts, but David had no idea what he had done. His
heart hit the granite-hard and granite-smooth surface of those familiar terms
and found no crack for the tendrils of true understanding to grasp.
Story
turned facts to truth.
Nathan’s punch
line whipped away the veil and revealed that the king’s throne perched on the
precarious fault line of wrath. David knew the facts; now David felt what he
had done.
Facts
are no more truth than skeins of yarn are tapestries: The word-weaving of the
story-teller transforms atomized data to personalized experience. Kings do not
repent when they know, but when they feel. And kings are not so different in
this regard from you or me.
Too much
contemporary preaching sells its story-telling birthright for a mess of
modernist pottage. Preachers practically don the lab coats of reductive science
and run the sacred text through the supercollider of analysis in an attempt to
isolate the single particle of fact that provides the mass of meaning.
Maybe it would be
better if, like Nathan (or Jesus), we told stories.
C. S. Lewis once
explained that part of what drove his Narnia books was “a certain inhibition
which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it
so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings
of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An
obligation to feel can freeze feelings.” Instead, the great author chose to
“steal past those watchful dragons” by telling the same truth using a different
set of facts – or falsehoods.
This Sunday we
will sit there again: adulterers by default through bored indifference to the
spouses of our youth, murderers in effect by the desire to reduce or dismiss
the space others occupy in a world we want for our own, petty tyrants on
pew-shaped thrones insulated against conviction by the very bulwark of familiar
religious facts. But a great gulf fixed yawns at our very feet; we’ve pulled
our pews up to the precipice.
Maybe a story
would help.
Once Upon a Time,
Doug
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