Q. How can David say to the Lord, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Pss 51:4), when clearly his offense was against Bathsheba and Uriah her husband, and even the community who looked to David as king?
A. This is an important question for us to ponder, especially during Lent, when David’s confession (Pss 51) figures prominently in the Church’s liturgy, giving expression to the contrite heart our Lord is seeking in us. (I recently urged the seminary propaedeutic students to memorize this great penitential psalm—a good Lenten exercise for us all!)
The backstory concerns David’s adultery with Bathsheba and his subsequent confrontation by the prophet Nathan for the adulterous act, and for coldly calculating and callously contriving the death of Bathsheba’s husband Uriah as a coverup (see 2 Sam 11–12). Owing to the unbearable gravity of David’s sins, neither Bathsheba’s purity nor Uriah’s life could ever be restored. How then could David possibly say that he had sinned against the Lord alone?
To begin, David is not denying that sin has social consequences. In fact, the notion of private sin is completely foreign to the Bible; every sin we commit affects both ourselves and others (CCC §1849). But even those sins that directly affect others are, above all offenses, against God, because they violate a covenant made with God and break a standard of God’s righteousness. Every sin against another person is “first and foremost a betrayal of God” (Pope John Paul II). This is the point of David’s initial confession in 2 Samuel 12:13: “I have sinned against the LORD.”
The Scriptures are completely clear on this point (cf. Gen 39:9; 2 Sam 11:27; 12:9, 10, 13; Prov 14:31; 17:5; Matt 25:31-46). As Frank Sheed notes, “What makes sin ‘sin’ is not the damage, if any, done to others—which they might forgive us—but the disobedience of God’s law.” This is what we express in our Act of Contrition: “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, who art all-good and deserving of all my love.”
Related, sin is essentially a theological category. Apart from God’s saying so, there would be no sin—errors in judgment, perhaps, but not sin. And so, ultimately every sin is a sin against God alone, in the sense that only God defines sin—only God’s criteria reveal sin as sin. When there is no reckoning with God, sin becomes a meaningless category; or to put this more sharply, the death of sin as an important concept in society (or in our own lives) is simply a manifestation of the prior death of God.
This explains a lot of things about our current culture of relativism and its inability to respond with a sensible answer to the simple question: If there are no absolutes, what makes anything right or wrong (murder, rape, bestiality, pedophilia, . . .)? The answer commonly given nowadays reduces to a subjective and vague opinion about “what hurts others,” whatever that’s supposed to mean, or why that should even matter.
It should be apparent, then, that David’s model confession has huge implications, both for how we view sin in our own lives and for how we relate to a world where people do all sorts of evil things without batting an eye. They might consider it an error in judgment, if that, but it’s not sin to them, nor does it really matter. Commentator James Mays captures it this way: “If you were not there, my God, I would not be a sinner. I might be many other things, measured and classified by other norms and relations (a vindictive father, a selfish neighbor, a greedy businessman), but I would not be a sinner. Only when life is lived… in awareness of the infinite righteousness and love of God would it make any sense to pray as the psalmist prays.”
These convictions have all but vanished from the world today. That is not a problem we are going to fix by wagging our heads in horrified disapproval of the larger culture, but by our so living as the Church that God’s alternative kingdom of righteousness makes the kingdoms of this world sit up and take notice. In other words, as theologian Stanley Hauerwas likes to stress, the greatest ministry the Church can offer the world is not to become more like the world, but to make the world look more like the world. And one way to do that is to deal with our own sins in the way that David models in his famous penitential psalm.
This question was answered by Dr. Vern Steiner, president of the Emmaus Institute for Biblical Studies. For more information, visit www.emmausinstitute.net.
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