Difficult Stories
Text: 2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33
5 The king ordered Joab and Abishai and Ittai, saying, "Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom." And all the people heard when the king gave orders to all the commanders concerning Absalom.
6 So the army went out into the field against Israel; and the battle was fought in the forest of Ephraim. 7The men of Israel were defeated there by the servants of David, and the slaughter there was great on that day, twenty thousand men. 8The battle spread over the face of all the country; and the forest claimed more victims that day than the sword.
9 Absalom happened to meet the servants of David. Absalom was riding on his mule, and the mule went under the thick branches of a great oak. His head caught fast in the oak, and he was left hanging between heaven and earth, while the mule that was under him went on.
15 And ten young men, Joab's armor-bearers, surrounded Absalom and struck him, and killed him.
31Then the Cushite came; and the Cushite said, "Good tidings for my lord the king! For the LORD has vindicated you this day, delivering you from the power of all who rose up against you." 32 The king said to the Cushite, "Is it well with the young man Absalom?" The Cushite answered, "May the enemies of my lord the king, and all who rise up to do you harm, be like that young man."
33 The king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!"
—
Though last week’s Old Testament lectionary text is found just a few chapters before this one, quite a bit has happened since we last found David. The text last week narrates David’s sin — his seizing Bathsheba and subsequently murdering her husband, after which the prophet Nathan rebukes him and prophesies that “the sword shall never depart from [David’s] house” because trouble will rise up against David from within his own house (2 Sam. 12:1-12). As the story progresses, we find that Nathan’s prophecy is fulfilled — not once, but over and over.
We have built myths of the man David: the lowly shepherd boy who became king, who struck down a giant with only a small stone and slingshot, who united a divided kingdom. We’ve called him “a man after God’s own heart,” as one scripture passage says, who rescues his people from unjust leadership; and our tradition has historically named an entire biblical genre after him — the psalms of David. But the story of David is also one of corruption, moral decay, and corrosive and exploitative power. David’s transgression does not simply activate some divine curse (that, perhaps, would make the story more palatable), but his example trickles down into the lives of the people closest to him: his children.
Our text opens in the middle of his son Absalom’s plot to take the throne, but before this, we find Absalom angry over his father’s refusal to punish his brother Amnon over the sexual violence he committed against their sister Tamar — David’s own sin horrifically recapitulated in the next generation. Absalom is so angry that he kills his brother and flees the kingdom. Fast forward a few year, after Absalom is finally welcomed back into his father’s court, and Absalom begins an undercover grassroots campaign to usurp David. Second Samuel tells us that Absolom is particularly charismatic, and so he “[steals] the hearts of the people (15:6), claims the throne in Hebron, builds a resistance, and eventually takes the throne in Jerusalem, from which David quickly flees. And so the rivalry begins.
And this is all in the span of just a few chapters! It’s an unsettling narrative full of violence, betrayal, political intrigue, and at first glance it all seems quite far from us. But then again, the story has a mythical quality, existing solidly in its own time while also hinting at some reality in ours. Something about political violence, resentment toward political leaders, disputed leadership, and a government coup, sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?
As a former English major, it’s impossible for me to read this text without calling to mind William Faulkner’s prolific novel Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner was a two-time Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize winning author, and while his stories for the most part take place in the fiction Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, they also resonate globally as stories which encapsulate the staggering complexity of the human experience.
Absalom, Absalom! is a difficult novel in both form and content. Its stream of consciousness narration often switches between narrators and across time without signaling, and different narrators don’t always corroborate each other’s perspectives. And its sentences stretch on across pages, one of them spanning twelve hundred and ninety two words. My Southern Literature professor in college said to our class, “If you’re reading Absalom! for the first time and you understand what’s happening, you aren’t reading it correctly.” The confusion and disorientation are a necessary part of the experience. As one writer puts it, in order to make the story accessible, Faulkner must first make it inaccessible;he must first establish the story as a myth before he can tell another story about the making of that myth.
And the substance of the story makes it all the most difficult to stomach. The narrative surrounds Thomas Sutpen who, not unlike the biblical David, rises to power in his town from dubious and unlikely beginnings and quickly becomes more myth than man. He marries and has two children who seem to inherit the worst of him. After Sutpen’s daughter Judith falls in love with Charles Bon, a college classmate of Sutpen’s son Henry, and Sutpen tells Henry that Charles is in reality his own son from a previous marriage — their own half-brother — Henry refuses to believe it, repudiates his birthright, and leaves to fight for the Confederate army with Charles. After the war, as soon as Henry resolves to allow Charles to marry his sister, he discovers that Charles is mixed-race and kills him at the gates of the Sutpen mansion, fleeing into a self-imposed exile.
Like our biblical account, Faulkner’s is somehow equally absurdist and frighteningly real — uncanny, if you will. As readers, we grapple with how humanity can commit such horrific acts while believing that what they’re doing is not only harmful but virtuous. In both accounts, these acts are committed in the name of power — either abusing what power a character already has or attempting to amass more of it to unjust ends.
The thing about Absalom, Absalom! is that it is not the primary plot which drives the novel but the way this story is carried and narrated across generations. The novel opens with Quentin Compson being called to the home of the elderly Rosa Coldfield — Thomas Sutpen’s sister-in-law. She is nearing death and wants to pass the Sutpen story along to Quentin, who is the grandson of Thomas Sutpen’s first and perhaps only friend in Yoknapatawpha County. To Rosa, Sutpen is a demon, a harbinger of divine retribution, and the reason for all of her bitterness and misery, because of Sutpen’s behavior toward Rosa and toward her sister. She tells the story in an attempt to access some kind of atonement and salvation. Quentin discusses Rosa’s version of the the story at home with his father, who is not bitter like Rosa, but detached and fatalistic; he does not have the same stake in the story, but nonetheless his perspective expands Quentin’s. And finally, when Quentin begins school at Harvard and receives one final letter from Rosa, he shares the Sutpen story with his roommate Shreve, a Canadian student with only a vague frame of reference for the American South. He asks Quentin what the South is like, and the Sutpen story is the one Quentin chooses to tell him.
Though none of it happened to him, the Sutpen story is as much Quentin’s as it is the Sutpens’. He absorbs it, carries it in his body, and tells it again and again as he tries to make sense of it.
And I don’t think this is too different from how we as a Church carry difficult biblical stories like the one from our text today. The literary form of Absalom, Absalom! is in some sense an exercise in exegesis; as the story is recounted by each character who tells it, meaning is drawn out, each character and their motives examined under the harsh and unforgiving light of hindsight. There is no singular purpose to the story, and its meaning hinges on who tells it — which is not dishonesty or untruth but simply how storytelling and meaning-making work. We are always limited by our own vision, our own embodied experience, our prejudices and preconceptions, our stubbornness, our disillusionment. And David is no exception. Blinded by his lust for power, he thinks himself above the law. His failure to reckon with his own sin becomes a failure to see that sin reprised in the lives of his children. In David’s overlooking of Amnon’s sin, born evidently from a desire to preserve the family lineage (13:21), he forsakes his own daughter Tamar, whose voice is conspicuously absent from the narrative, and propels Absalom into a bloody and unnecessary vigilante campaign.
This is the story we receive in the text, but each of us does not receive the story the same. Perhaps some of us receive it like Rosa Coldfield — with bitterness and anger, because of how the abuses in the text open up the scars from our own wounds and cause us to ache for healing and justice. And some of us might take the posture of Quentin’s father, with a cynical detachment that pushes away any sense of culpability and inflates our own sense of morality. And finally there’s Quentin, who obsesses over the story and tries to boil it down into one final meaning in order to determine the substance and trajectory of his own life. Our response to the story depends on our relation to it, on where we see or do not see ourselves in it.
It can be tempting, I think, to remain detached from biblical stories like this one. Sometimes that detachment is a necessary means of survival because of how a story like this one might puncture existing wounds. But sometimes, I think, our detachment is an excuse not to wrestle with the difficulties of our scriptures.
I have loved stories and storytelling for as long as I can remember, and what led me to seminary was largely the question of what it means to continue to tell the stories of our faith. Growing up in a tradition where people so often flattened difficult biblical narratives into simple platitudes like “people are imperfect, but God shows grace anyway,” while using the text to traumatize and retraumatize, I wondered why we continue to tell stories that can perpetuate such harm. What was the point when these tragic stories always ended the same way, with their victims, after harm that is inflicted upon them, are left to pick up the pieces of their own lives alone.
For a while, I took a posture much like Quentin Compson’s — one of tragic obsession which assumed inevitable downfall and destruction. As I examined the legacies of power in the Church, how tradition most often fixates on victory narratives while ignoring those whom those very narratives victimize, I wanted to give up on faith entirely. But slowly, the more I wrestled and the more I learned, the more I realized that what matters equally as much, or perhaps more, than the telling of the story is how we tell it and whose voice we prioritize in the telling.
Old Testament scholar Phyllis Tribble is a foundation voice in the interpretive school of Womanism, a theoretical lens developed to account for deficits in both feminist interpretation, dominated primarily by white women, and African American liberationist theology, at the time dominated mostly by men. Tribble includes the rape of Tamar in her examination of what she calls texts of terror. She notes how throughout these few chapters, the men in the narrative are consistently mentioned by name, while Tamar is most often only referenced by the pronoun “she,” highlighting the way in which Tamar is beholden to the actions of her brothers and father. Unlike Absalom, Tamar does not lash out after what happens to her, not because she shouldn’t, but because she can’t. Her very life depends on her adherence to social decorum, and so she mourns, then quietly moves out of her father’s palace and into her brother’s house, and this is the last we hear from her. Meanwhile, Tamar’s father and brother engage in an obtrusive and bloody battle of the egos. Tamar is the one who is violated, and yet she is forced to deal with her trauma quietly and alone, while her brother uses her plight an an excuse to indulge his own lust for power.
And while I believe that the texts of terror should not be read from the pulpit, I do wonder how we can tell this story from our text today without reckoning with the legacy of violence against women that runs through it. If we ignore the subtext entirely, we only perpetuate the way the text itself marginalizes the women in it. And if we ignore the story as a whole, does that mean we’re ignoring the darker sides of our faith’s legacy?
Last summer, when my seminary friends and I went on a celebratory “we finished summer Greek” day-trip to New York, we saw the Broadway musical Hadestown, a retelling of the Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice. In this version of the story, after Eurydice makes a deal with Hades that she'll stay in the underworld in exchange for food and a place to stay, Orpheus comes to rescue her. Finally, after Hades sees how deep their love is for each other, he agrees to let Eurydice go, under one condition — they must walk the entire way one behind the other, Eurydice behind Orpheus, and Orpheus cannot look back at her. If he does, she’ll fall back into the underworld forever. If you know the myth, you know how it ends. The road becomes deathly quiet, and Orpheus gives into his doubt. He looks back, and Eurydice falls back into the underworld.
At the play’s end, the narrator Hermes attempts to make meaning from the tragedy. “It’s an old song,” she says, “and that’s how it ends. /… /Don’t ask why / don’t ask how. / He could have come so close / The song was written long ago / and that’s how it goes.” Why is this a story we keep telling, even when we know how it ends, she asks —
It’s a sad song
but we sing it anyway
‘Cause here’s the thing
To know how it ends
And still begin to sing it again
As if it might turn out this time —
I can’t say why tragedies happen; I don’t think any of us honestly can. But if there is a common through-line in Absalom, Absalom!, Hadestown, and perhaps this sermon, it’s the possibility in retelling. We can’t change the stories that come before us, but we can change how we tell them, and why.
In Absalom, Absalom! Quentin lets the Sutpen story — in his mind a myth for the South as a whole — destroy him. The novel ends with Quentin’s roommate predicting that the victims of the Sutpen story, the people whom Sutpen enslaved and abused, will inherit the earth. Quentin and his roommate mean it as an omen, but in a way their prediction is not so far off from the words of Isaiah 61 which Jesus speaks during his first sermon in the Nazareth synagogue:
[The spirit of the Lord God is upon me
because the Lord has anointed me;]
[God] has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives
and release to the prisoners (Isaiah 61:1 NRSVUE).
Somehow, in telling the stories of our faith, even the difficult ones, again and again, each time noticing more the voices that these stories may silence or suppress, we find our way to a new story. As the story travels and takes up residence in different bodies, we learn more about what — and who — might be missing from our narration. We can’t go back and deliver justice to the victims of the story, but we can and should do them justice in our storytelling. And perhaps someday, when we keep telling the tragic story again and again, expecting it to end the same, maybe it won’t.
I have a year of seminary left before I move on to whatever is next for me, and though I know already that I will leave with more questions than I have answers for, I have a hope now that before felt too far out of reach. On my first visit to Princeton, I visited a class in which the professor, without explanation, asked us to describe on a notecard as specifically as we could the smell of coffee. At the end of class, we pulled the notecards back out again. “Like the smell of coffee,” she said, “the gospel can seem impossible to describe.” Impossible not because of its evasive complexity but because of its mind-boggling simplicity. The Gospel, she said, is this, that “somehow, because of Jesus, everything will be okay.” This is not platitude but fact, and this hope is the telos of our storytelling. We will keep telling the story, again and again, each time with more care and more attention to whose voice we might be missing, and somehow, someday, even when we think the story will end the same, it will be okay.
Thanks be to God.
—
Mary Shelley Reid is an M.Div. student at Princeton Seminary and served as the summer intern in 2024. She preached this sermon on August 12, 2024.