Abstract
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 that I had died instead of you, O Absalom my son, my son!’ (2 Samuel 18:33)
In 1629, the composer Heinrich Schütz, Kapellmeister to the Elector of Saxony in Dresden, set to music the final verse of 2 Samuel 18. It is not a long piece – between 7 and 8 minutes – but condensed in it is all the grief of a parent who has lost a child he loved. Four trombones and continuo convey a shifting of emotional tectonic plates, while a solitary bass voices David’s grief: ‘Fili mi Absalon, quis mihi tribust ut ego moriar pro te, fili mi, Absalon’ - ‘Absalom, my son, my great sorrow is that wish I had died in your place, my son, Absalom’. In the second book of Samuel, Absalom’s death is the tragic ending of a story that began with his birth, the third son of king David by an Aramean princess at 2 Samuel 3:3. We learn (2 Samuel 14:25) that ‘in all Israel there was no one to be praised so much for his beauty as Absalom’ - a chip off the royal block: little wonder that David loved him. But David indulged his sons, especially his eldest, Amnon, who was left to run wild. After his half brother Amnon raped their beloved sister Tamar, Absalom was enraged. While David took no action, Absalom bided his time until, following a dinner party, he had Amnon killed. David exiled Absalom, who was allowed to return to court after three years but still kept from his father. Yet, even after their eventual reconciliation (2 Samuel 14:33) Absalom continued to attract anyone of whom David had made an enemy until he had gathered enough support openly to rebel by having himself anointed king at Hebron (2 Samuel 15).
David didn’t feel himself to be in a secure position and fled Jerusalem. But David had more support than he feared and, when the armies of father and son finally clashed, it was Absalom who was routed. Fleeing the battle on an ass, Absalom’s head was caught fast in the cleft branch of an old tree leaving him ‘hanging between heaven and earth’. When news of the battle reached David, his first thought was for his son and he asked after ‘the young man Absalom’. When he learned of his son’s death, David’s lament was piteous and his grief unalloyed by the fact of his victory. Whatever relation the poet who wrote Psalm 130 has to David, this psalm – Martin Luther’s favourite – articulates a cry for forgiveness to God with such startling economy and power that it might well fit this moment in David’s life.
In Schütz’s time, the loss of a child was a more common human experience than it is now – especially where the soldiers involved in the bitter thirty years’ war left their boot-prints. But who can say whether, although a rarer experience in developed countries, losing one’s child is any harder now than once it was. I have not lost a child, but others in my family have and, like most clergy, I have been drawn close from time to time to the grief of parents. In basic ways, human nature does not change and David’s reaction rings true: any parent who has loved a child who has died would willingly take their place. David’s sense of responsibility makes his grief even worse. He blames himself: another all too recognisably human element in the narrative. To see one’s child die and be unable to change the outcome, to bury the child who should, in the natural order of things, have buried you, may be the hardest grief to bear. For those who this week, this month or year find themselves in this position, or find themselves with those dealing with such grief, what can be said?
In the situation faced by David, he blamed himself. Blame often keeps company with death, especially where a death is of a child, or where a loved one has died – as Absalom did – in a situation of conflict with those who loved him. Grief lays bare emotions at a time when we may least be able to handle them. One of the challenges of families dealing with grief can be how to speak to those around us. At the simplest and most obvious level, those of us who find ourselves offering support to bereaved people have to find something to say, something that expresses concern naturally and honestly. In our reading from the letter to the Church in Ephesus, Paul offers advice about how to live in fellowship with one’s neighbours. It is a passage with many parallels with Paul’s other letters (especially Colossians 3:5-14) and clearly represents convictions about how Christians should treat each other that are deeply held. He does not have those who grieve particularly in mind, but juxtaposed as it is in this week’s lectionary with the story of David’s grief, the passage proves strangely helpful: ‘Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you’. It may take years, but helping the bereaved person to be kind, not only to those they would strike out at in blame, but also to herself, is a work of God’s grace.
To anyone with even a little human experience of grief, the wisdom in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s insistence (in his lectures on ‘Spiritual care’) that often the first thing for a Pastor to do when faced with a grieving person is to be silent becomes clear. Only after silence, after staying with the loss, often for a long time, is it right to begin to speak. And perhaps among the words that it may eventually – that it may ultimately – be right to say are that God understands and shares in grief. God’s sharing in grief cannot restore the lost one to us, nor help us to sleep when we wake in the middle of the night, nor dull the unpredictable spasms of pain when we see something that reminds us. That God shares in our loss cannot take the loss from us, but it can help us begin to believe that death need not isolate us from God, nor mean that hope is extinguished forever, nor mean the end of love. God with us means that death and loss and grief – ‘O Absalom, my son, my son’ – is not the final thing to be said. In our Gospel reading the intimacy of relationship between Father and Son within the Trinity is spoken of in such a way that it is the Father alone who draws people to the Son, who alone has seen the Father. Is it impossible that, in situations of extreme grief, we may find in this relationship within the one God a way of speaking to those who grieve? The Father – as John the Evangelist has told us already – ‘so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16). David wishes that he could die in the place of his son Absalom. But in His Son, God did die in our place and in his life is the promise of life for those who have died, and also for us.