Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

There’s something both curious and alarming about the beginning of our reading from Second Samuel this morning. “In the spring of the year,” the lesson begins, “the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him; they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah.” There’s something chillingly nonchalant about it. It’s spring? Oh yeah, it’s time for battle and ravaging and besieging. Almost forgot.

I don’t know the tone of voice with which the author of Second Samuel intended us to read these verses; I don’t know if they were being snarky, serious or sarcastic. Chances are the spring was an optimal time to go to war given weather conditions, whether or not agricultural schedules and cycles would be overly disrupted by things like conscription and similar sorts of considerations. Still, the idea that going to war occurs on a reliable seasonal schedule is discomfiting, however true it was or may continue to be.

The story that follows this introduction is the story of how David used the occasion of a war to seduce Bathsheba and make sure her husband, Uriah, was killed. (Also, you can be sure that whenever Joab appears anywhere in a story, things are not going to turn out well for someone. Joab was David’s “fixer,” the sort of person who tries to make sure that the hands of someone in power stay as technically clean as possible…while making sure that dirty work gets done.) Given what follows, then, I think this introduction is telling us something about the relationship between violence in a culture and violence in personal relationships. I think we’re being clued in to how social and cultural violence empowers, enables, and exacerbates violence in families, between families, between friends, between neighbors, between strangers.

Now, I don’t think the text is arguing that war compelled David to make a series of incredibly poor (and blatantly treacherous, wicked and evil) choices. What I do think the text is telling us is that violent actions become easier in the midst of violent conditions. Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist famous (or notorious) for the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 would observe that he had come to disbelieve the adage that bad apples spoil the barrel. Instead, he maintained, a bad barrel will spoil the apples—a culture of violence, in other words, has a way of reproducing itself in people and in their relationships.

It might sound like I’m arguing for the existence of a spirit of violence at work in the world, and to some extent I am. But the nature of that spirit, like the nature of evil itself, is not about a positive activity, about the presence of something or other, but about a negative activity, about the absence of a good which ought to be present. Violence doesn’t work by adding violence to a situation, but by stealing peace, by diminishing love, by destroying relationships, by eroding our sense of our dignity and the dignity of others, by marring or obscuring what is good, true, beautiful.

By grace, though, we are called to a ministry of presence. We are called to be lights of the world in our generation. By grace, through faith, in hope, with love, we are called to lift up, to cherish, to nurture the good in this world, in our neighbor, in ourselves.

Dear beloved Friend: if you find yourself in a dark room, you don’t dispel the darkness by shoveling it out. No. You turn on a light. You kindle a flame, however small. What light(s) might you kindle today? What light might you allow to be kindled in you? With what brilliance of grace and love might you shine today?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+