Week 21 — Table of Contents
May 21, 2026
2 Samuel 3:22–5:5
The closing chapters of David’s long road to the throne are stained with blood that is not his own — and Scripture takes pains to make that clear. Joab murders Abner under the guise of peace, settling a private grudge over his brother Asahel and seizing the chance to remove a rival from David’s court. David’s response is unusually public: he tears his clothes, walks behind the bier, fasts until sundown, and composes a lament for the very general who had hunted him. The narrator’s note that "all the people took notice of it, and it pleased them" lingers — David’s grief is genuine, but it is also a political act of distancing, an insistence that the throne he is about to inherit will not be built on Joab’s treachery.
Then Ish-bosheth is assassinated in his bed by two of his own captains, who carry his head to Hebron expecting reward. David executes them on the spot and buries Ish-bosheth’s head in Abner’s tomb. Twice in a few chapters, men try to clear David’s path by killing for him, and twice David repudiates the murder while taking the throne the murder made possible. The narrative refuses to give us a sanitized hero. It also refuses to credit human violence with God’s work. When the elders of Israel finally come to Hebron and anoint David king over all the tribes, the text frames it as the keeping of a long-standing promise: the Lord had said, "You will shepherd my people Israel." Thirty years old, seven and a half years already reigning in Hebron, David finally sits as king of a united nation — and the kingship arrives by covenant, not conspiracy.
John 12:12–36
The crowd that welcomes Jesus into Jerusalem with palm branches and shouts of "Hosanna" reads the moment as a coronation. They quote Psalm 118 and Zechariah 9, and they are not wrong — the King has come to his city. But Jesus enters on a young donkey, not a war horse, and John tells us plainly that even the disciples did not understand until later. The triumphal entry is real, but it is the triumph of a different kind of king, one who will be crowned with thorns before he is crowned with glory. The Pharisees say to each other, "Look, the world has gone after him," and unwittingly speak the truth: Greeks have just arrived asking to see Jesus, and the gospel is about to break its tribal banks.
Jesus answers the request to see him with a saying about a grain of wheat. Unless it falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; if it dies, it bears much fruit. The path to seeing him truly runs through the cross. And then John records something extraordinary — Jesus admits aloud, "Now my soul is troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour." The voice from heaven that answers is the third such voice in the gospels, after the baptism and the transfiguration, and Jesus says it came for the crowd’s sake, not his own. He calls the cross his glorification and the moment of the world’s judgment, and he warns the crowd to walk while they have the light. Then, John notes with quiet sorrow, he hid himself from them.
Psalm 65:1–13
Psalm 65 is a harvest song that begins in the temple and ends in the fields. It opens with praise that is owed — "Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion, and to you shall vows be performed" — and with the staggering admission that iniquities prevail against the worshiper, but God atones for transgressions. The one who answers prayer is also the one who forgives, and the two acts are not separated. Blessedness, the psalm says, belongs to the one God chooses and brings near to dwell in his courts.
From there the psalm widens its lens. The same God who atones is the God who established the mountains, stilled the roaring of the seas, and made the dawn and dusk shout for joy. He visits the earth and waters it, fills the river of God with water, provides the grain, drenches the furrows, and crowns the year with his bounty. The hills gird themselves with joy; the meadows clothe themselves with flocks; the valleys deck themselves with grain. Atonement and agriculture, forgiveness and field — the psalm gathers them into a single hymn because they come from a single hand.
In one sweep today, three texts trace how God’s kingdom actually arrives. In Hebron, the throne comes not through Joab’s knife or two captains’ ambition but through covenant promise patiently kept. In Jerusalem, the true King rides in on a donkey and speaks of dying like a grain of wheat — his coronation will be a crucifixion. In Zion, the worshiper sings that the God who silences the seas is the same God who silences sin, and that both acts are gift.
The temptation in every age is to hurry God’s purposes by means God has not chosen. Joab thought he was helping David. The crowd shouting "Hosanna" thought they were ushering in Israel’s restoration on their own terms. We are not so different — we want kingdom outcomes without kingdom means, harvest without the seed falling into the ground. David repudiates the shortcuts. Jesus walks straight into the troubled hour. The psalmist receives the year’s bounty as a gift he did not produce.
What today’s readings ask of us is the patience and the trust to let God establish his reign his way — through promises kept slowly, through a King who suffers, through atonement we cannot manufacture and harvests we did not water. The shouts of joy at the end of Psalm 65 are the shouts of people who finally understand they have been receiving, all along. May we hear the voice from heaven, walk while we have the light, and join the meadows and valleys in their song.
May 22, 2026
2 Samuel 5:6–6:23
David’s first acts as king of a united Israel are the capture of Jerusalem and the bringing up of the ark — political consolidation and spiritual centralization in a single stroke. The Jebusite stronghold that no one had been able to take becomes the City of David, and Hiram of Tyre sends cedar and craftsmen to build him a palace. The narrator pauses to say something theologically weighty: "David knew that the Lord had established him as king over Israel and had exalted his kingdom for the sake of his people Israel." The throne is not for David. It is for the people, and ultimately for the One whose people they are. Two Philistine campaigns follow, both won by inquiring of the Lord and by following his specific instructions — including the strange sound of marching in the balsam trees.
Then comes the ark, and with it a sobering lesson in how holy things must be handled. The first attempt to bring the ark to Jerusalem ends in death. Uzzah reaches out to steady it on its new cart and is struck down — not because his motives were impure but because the ark was being transported on a cart in the first place, in imitation of the Philistines rather than in obedience to the law that prescribed poles and Levites. David is angry, then afraid, and leaves the ark at the house of Obed-edom for three months while he searches the Scriptures. The second attempt is done by the book, with sacrifices every six paces and David himself dancing before the Lord with all his might, stripped down to a linen ephod. Michal despises him from a window and is barren to the day of her death. The chapter sets two responses to God’s holiness side by side: undignified joy and dignified contempt.
John 12:37–13:17
John ends Jesus’s public ministry with a heavy citation from Isaiah. Though Jesus had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe — and this, John says, is so that the word of Isaiah might be fulfilled. He quotes both Isaiah’s question ("Lord, who has believed what he heard from us?") and Isaiah’s vision of the Lord’s glory, and he tells us flatly that Isaiah said these things because he saw Jesus’s glory and spoke of him. Belief and unbelief are not random; they fall along the line the prophets traced long before. And yet even the unbelief is not total — many even of the authorities believed, but for fear of the Pharisees did not confess it, "for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God." Jesus’s final public words are an appeal: whoever sees him sees the Father; his words are not his own but the Father’s; the one who rejects him will be judged by the very word he has spoken.
Then the camera turns. Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God — rose from supper, laid aside his garments, took a towel, and washed the disciples’ feet. John piles up the descriptions of Jesus’s authority precisely to set against them the smallness of the act. The one in whose hands the Father has placed everything kneels at the feet of men whose feet are dirty from the road. Peter protests, then over-corrects, and Jesus has to explain that the foot-washing is a parable of the deeper cleansing he is about to accomplish at the cross. When he is finished, he gives them the example: "If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet." The towel is the new badge of kingdom authority.
Psalm 66:1–12
Psalm 66 begins as a global summons: "Shout for joy to God, all the earth; sing the glory of his name." It is one of those psalms that refuses to keep Israel’s God local. The whole earth is called to worship, to come and see what God has done, to bless the One who has kept their feet from slipping. The exodus is recounted in brief — "he turned the sea into dry land; they passed through the river on foot" — and made the basis for present rejoicing.
But the second movement is more honest than triumphalism would allow. "For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried. You brought us into the net; you laid a crushing burden on our backs; you let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water." This is not a song of people who have been spared trouble. It is a song of people who have been brought through it. The conclusion — "yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance" — is the testimony of those who learned that the fire was not the end of the story.
Holiness, humility, and the long road through fire — today’s three readings braid these together. David learns in one chapter that holiness cannot be casual: even good intentions, when joined to disobedience, can be deadly. The ark is not a religious decoration but the throne of a present God, and it asks to be handled on his terms. Jesus, in whose hands the Father has placed everything, demonstrates that divine holiness expresses itself not as distance but as a basin and a towel. And the psalmist, looking back at a nation that has been ridden over and brought through fire, declares that the place of abundance is on the far side of testing.
It is striking how often we get holiness exactly backwards. We treat God casually and ourselves grandly, when the gospel teaches the opposite — God is holy in a way that requires reverence, and yet he chooses to express that holiness by stooping. David’s dance and Michal’s scorn frame the question for us: what does undignified joy in the presence of a holy God look like in our own lives? The disciples’ clean feet and Peter’s slow comprehension press the same question from the other direction: are we willing to be served by Jesus, and then to serve as he served?
The psalm offers the long view. Whatever fire we are walking through, whatever water has come up to our necks, the testimony of God’s people is that the road leads through and not merely into. May we, like David’s second procession, learn to do things God’s way. May we, like the disciples, let the Lord wash our feet. And may we, like the psalmist, find the breath to shout for joy on the other side of testing — and to invite the whole earth to come and see.
May 23, 2026
2 Samuel 7:1–8:18
Second Samuel 7 is one of the theological hinges of the Old Testament. David, settled in his cedar palace, tells Nathan he wants to build a house for the Lord — and Nathan, speaking too quickly, gives him the green light. That night the word of the Lord comes to Nathan and reverses the whole conversation. God has not asked for a house. He has been content to move with his people in a tent. The question is not whether David will build God a house; the question is what kind of house God will build for David. And then comes the promise: "Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever." The wordplay is intentional — "house" means temple, dynasty, and family all at once — and the promise stretches far beyond Solomon to a Son whose kingdom will have no end.
David’s response is one of the most moving prayers in Scripture. He goes in and sits before the Lord — sits, not stands, a posture rare in Israelite prayer — and asks, "Who am I, O Lord God, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far?" The shepherd boy who killed a giant has become a king who knows he is small. He recites God’s faithfulness, asks God to do as he has spoken, and rests the whole future of his line on the promise just given. Chapter 8 then recounts the military expansion that follows — Philistines, Moab, Zobah, Syria, Edom — but the narrator carefully notes that "the Lord gave victory to David wherever he went," and that David reigned over all Israel administering justice and equity to all his people. The covenant of chapter 7 is what makes the conquests of chapter 8 something other than mere empire.
John 13:18–38
Back at the table, the foot-washing gives way to a darker word. Jesus knows whom he has chosen, but Scripture must be fulfilled: "He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me." The betrayal is named before it happens, so that when it happens the disciples will believe that Jesus is who he claims to be. He is troubled in spirit and says plainly, "One of you will betray me." The disciples look at one another at a loss. The beloved disciple, leaning back on Jesus, asks the question for them all, and Jesus identifies the betrayer by a morsel of bread dipped in the dish and given to Judas. It is a final, almost tender gesture — the hospitality of bread shared, even with the one who is about to break covenant. Judas takes the morsel, Satan enters him, and he goes out into the night. John adds the three terrible words: "And it was night."
What follows is one of the most beautiful tonal shifts in the gospel. With Judas gone, Jesus begins what we call the Farewell Discourse. "Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him." The glorification is the cross. And then the new commandment: "Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." The badge of belonging in the kingdom is not theological precision or moral severity but observable love. Peter, hearing Jesus speak of going away, makes the brave promise — "I will lay down my life for you" — and Jesus, with sad clarity, foretells the three denials before the rooster crows.
Psalm 66:13–20
The second half of Psalm 66 shifts from communal praise to personal testimony. The psalmist comes to the temple with offerings to fulfill vows made in the day of trouble, and he invites the hearer to draw close: "Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for my soul." Worship here is concrete — vows kept, sacrifices brought — and it is also evangelistic. The one who has been heard cannot keep silent about it.
The psalm closes with a striking moral note. "If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened." Answered prayer is bound up with honest dealing. And then the final word, simple and astonishing: "Blessed be God, because he has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me." The psalmist’s confidence is not that he has earned a hearing but that God has not withdrawn his hesed, his covenant love, even from one who needed to be tested as silver.
The three readings circle around the same astonishing claim: that the eternal God binds himself to particular people by promises that he himself will keep. To David he promises a house forever — and means it in a way that reaches all the way to Bethlehem. To his disciples Jesus gives a new commandment and a new identity, knowing full well that one of them will betray him and another will deny him before the night is out. And the psalmist, looking back over his own tested life, blesses the God who has not removed his steadfast love.
There is comfort here that is almost too good to receive easily. David did not negotiate the covenant of 2 Samuel 7; he received it. The disciples did not earn the Farewell Discourse; they got it on the very night they were about to scatter. The psalmist’s prayer was not answered because his record was clean but because the Lord had not withdrawn his hesed. Every one of these moments is a moment of grace given before it is deserved, often given precisely when it is undeserved.
The invitation today is to sit, as David sat, and ask the question that opens his prayer: "Who am I, that you have brought me thus far?" To hear Jesus’s "love one another" not as a moralistic demand but as the family resemblance of those who have been loved first. To say with the psalmist, "Come and hear what he has done for my soul" — and to let the testimony of God’s steadfast love through testing become an invitation that draws others in. The God who builds houses no one asked him to build is still in the business of keeping promises bigger than ours.
May 24, 2026
2 Samuel 9:1–10:19
"Is there still anyone left of the house of Saul, that I may show him kindness for Jonathan’s sake?" The question David asks in 2 Samuel 9 is so countercultural that the narrator slows down to let us hear it. Ancient Near Eastern kings, having consolidated power, eliminated the remnants of the previous dynasty as a matter of policy. David goes looking for them — to bless them. Mephibosheth, Jonathan’s son, lame in both feet, is brought from Lo-debar to the royal table. He bows in terror, calling himself "a dead dog," and David responds by restoring all of Saul’s land to him, assigning Ziba’s entire household to farm it for him, and seating him at the king’s table for the rest of his life. The chapter ends with the quiet line, "So Mephibosheth ate at David’s table, like one of the king’s sons." Hesed — covenant kindness, undeserved and unforced — has a face and a name in this chapter.
Chapter 10 then shows the same kindness offered and refused. David sends emissaries of comfort to the Ammonite king on the death of his father, only to have them humiliated — half their beards shaved, their garments cut off at the hips — and sent home in shame. The Ammonites hire Aramean mercenaries; Joab and Abishai split their forces and route them both. Hadadezer regroups and is crushed again. The chapter that begins with a gesture of grace ends with a battlefield strewn with dead, because grace was treated as weakness and answered with insult. The juxtaposition is intentional. Mephibosheth received hesed and was lifted up. The Ammonites despised hesed and were brought low.
John 14:1–31
"Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me." Jesus begins the central chapter of the Farewell Discourse by addressing the exact emotional state his words about leaving have produced. The room is full of frightened men, and his answer is not to minimize the trouble but to plant their hearts elsewhere. "In my Father’s house are many rooms… I go to prepare a place for you." Thomas asks how they can know the way, and Jesus gives one of the great I-am sayings: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Philip asks to be shown the Father, and Jesus answers with words that reframe everything: "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." The God of the Old Testament is not behind Jesus or above Jesus; he is fully present in Jesus.
Then Jesus makes two promises that hold the church together to this day. First, the promise of the Spirit: "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth." The same Spirit who was on Jesus will be in his disciples, teaching them all things and bringing his words to remembrance. Second, the promise of peace: "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you." This peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of Christ through the Spirit, and it is given precisely to hearts that would otherwise be troubled and afraid. He ends the chapter with the quiet decisiveness of a man walking toward Gethsemane: "Rise, let us go from here."
Proverbs 12:28–13:9
This stretch of Proverbs gathers a series of contrasts between the wise and the foolish, the righteous and the wicked. "In the path of righteousness is life, and in its pathway there is no death." A wise son hears his father’s instruction; a scoffer does not listen to rebuke. From the fruit of his mouth a man eats what is good. Whoever guards his mouth preserves his life; he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin. The proverbs are not promises of mechanical reward but observations about how reality, ordered by a wise God, actually works — and warnings about the ways foolishness erodes a life from the inside out.
A few stand out as worth meditating on. "The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied." Wanting is not the same as working. "Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm" — character is shaped by the company we keep. And the gentle observation, "Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life." Proverbs sees the human heart with clear eyes and refuses to pretend that waiting is easy or that disappointment does not wound. But it also insists that there is a path through, and that the path begins with listening.
Today’s readings put the question of kindness — given, received, refused, embodied — at the center. David goes looking for someone to bless for Jonathan’s sake. Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, looks at frightened men and says, "Let not your hearts be troubled." Proverbs traces, in its accumulated wisdom, what it looks like to walk in the path of righteousness day by day. Each text shows that grace is not an abstraction but a posture, and that posture leaves marks.
The Mephibosheth scene is the gospel in miniature. A lame man, descendant of the failed king, called "dead dog" by his own mouth, is brought to the king’s table and seated as a son. We are that man. The whole of John 14 is the elaboration of how it happens: through the way, the truth, and the life that Jesus is; through the Spirit who comes to live in us; through the peace that the world cannot manufacture and cannot take away. And the Proverbs reading reminds us that the life we have been given is meant to be walked — in the company of the wise, with guarded lips, refusing the sluggard’s empty craving for the diligent’s quiet supply.
May we today receive the seat at the table that has been offered, refuse the Ammonite reflex of mistaking grace for weakness, and listen for the Helper who teaches all things. May our hearts, in the middle of whatever trouble has arrived, hear the simple imperative: "Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me." That belief is not naivete. It is the path of righteousness, and it leads to life.
May 25, 2026
2 Samuel 11:1–12:31
"In the spring of the year, when kings go out to battle… David remained at Jerusalem." The opening sentence of 2 Samuel 11 is already a verdict. The king who should have been with his army is on his palace roof at evening, and from there he sees Bathsheba bathing. What follows is told with terrible economy: he sees, he sends, he inquires, he sends again, he takes, she comes, he lies with her, she returns. There are no speeches, no internal monologues, no excuses. Just a chain of verbs that lead from glance to adultery. When Bathsheba sends word that she is pregnant, David’s response is not repentance but cover-up. He brings Uriah home from the front and tries to engineer a night with his wife so the pregnancy can be attributed to him. Uriah, with a soldier’s integrity that shames the king, refuses to enjoy a privilege his comrades cannot have. So David escalates. He sends Uriah back to Joab with sealed orders for his own murder. Uriah carries his death warrant in his own hand. The chapter ends with the line that hangs over everything that follows: "But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord."
Then comes Nathan, and one of the great pastoral confrontations in Scripture. He tells David a parable about a rich man with many flocks who steals a poor man’s one beloved lamb. David’s anger flares — the rich man deserves to die. Nathan’s "You are the man" is one of the few moments where a prophet’s finger lands on a king and the king does not have him killed. David’s confession is brief and complete: "I have sinned against the Lord." The forgiveness is real — Nathan says, "The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die" — but the consequences are not undone. The child dies. The sword will not depart from David’s house. And yet, in the middle of grief, Bathsheba conceives again, bears Solomon, and the Lord sends a word through Nathan that this child is loved — Jedidiah, beloved of the Lord. Grace does not erase consequences, but it does not abandon the guilty either.
John 15:1–16:4
"I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser." The seventh and final I-am saying of John gathers the long Old Testament image of Israel as God’s vine — often a disappointing one — and locates its fulfillment in Jesus. Every branch in him that does not bear fruit, the Father takes away; every branch that does bear, he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. The image is honest. Fruitfulness in the Christian life requires a kind of cutting back that we would never choose for ourselves. The repeated word is abide. "Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me." Apart from him, nothing. In him, much fruit, answered prayer, and joy made full.
Then Jesus shifts the frame from horticulture to friendship. "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants… but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you." It is a stunning escalation of relationship. But friendship with Jesus, he immediately warns, comes with the world’s hatred. "If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you." The Helper will come and bear witness about him, and the disciples also will bear witness, because they have been with him from the beginning. He says these things so that when persecution comes, they will not fall away. The hour is coming when those who kill them will think they are offering service to God.
Psalm 67:1–7
Psalm 67 is short and almost entirely missional. It opens with the priestly blessing of Numbers 6 — "May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us" — but immediately gives the blessing a destination: "that your way may be known on earth, your saving power among all nations." The blessing is given for the sake of those who do not yet know. Then the refrain breaks out: "Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you!"
The middle of the psalm grounds this universal hope in God’s character. "Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth." The God of Israel is also the God of the nations, and his rule is good news because it is just. The psalm closes with the earth yielding its increase and God blessing his people, "that all the ends of the earth may fear him." Even the harvest is missional. The blessing of God’s people is never an end in itself.
Today’s readings hold together a hard truth and a soaring hope. The hard truth is that even David — the man after God’s own heart — is capable of devastating sin, and that sin in the household of God produces real consequences even when forgiveness is fully given. The soaring hope is that the same God who confronts and forgives sin is also the vinedresser who prunes for fruit, the friend who lays down his life, and the King whose blessing always overflows to the nations. The thread that holds it all together is grace that does not minimize and does not abandon.
David’s story is sobering precisely because we are not so different. We remain when we should go to battle, we look when we should look away, and we cover when we should confess. The mercy of the story is that God sends Nathan, not Joab — confrontation that leads to repentance, not destruction that leaves no way back. Jesus’s words to the disciples are the same kind of mercy in a different register: "Abide in me." Apart from him, fruitlessness; in him, pruning that produces fruit, joy that is full, friendship that bears every cost. And Psalm 67 reminds us why any of this matters — that God’s saving power may be known on earth, that all the peoples may praise him.
The invitation today is to bring whatever Nathan would say to us and let him say it. To abide in the vine instead of trying to bear fruit by sheer effort. To receive the priestly blessing knowing it is meant to spill over the edges of our lives toward people who have not yet heard. And to trust that the God who said over Solomon "Jedidiah, beloved of the Lord" is still in the business of writing grace into the very places we thought were beyond saving.
May 26, 2026
2 Samuel 13:1–39
The sword that Nathan said would not depart from David’s house begins its long work in chapter 13, and the narrator tells the story with brutal restraint. Amnon, David’s firstborn, becomes obsessed with his half-sister Tamar. His cousin Jonadab, called "a very crafty man," coaches him in a deception that lures Tamar into Amnon’s bedroom under the pretense of caring for him in his "illness." Tamar’s protest is articulate, theological, and ignored: "No, my brother, do not violate me, for such a thing is not done in Israel; do not do this outrageous thing." Amnon rapes her, and then — in a turn the narrator notes with horror — "the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he had loved her." He throws her out. Tamar tears her robe of many colors, puts ashes on her head, and lives "a desolate woman" in her brother Absalom’s house. The chapter does not minimize her grief or move on from it quickly.
David hears of it and is "very angry" — but does nothing. The silence of the father is one of the most damning beats in the whole chapter. Absalom says nothing either, good or bad, to Amnon — and waits two years. Then, with a sheep-shearing party as cover, Absalom orchestrates Amnon’s murder, instructing his servants to strike when Amnon’s heart is merry with wine. The royal family fractures. Absalom flees to Geshur, where he stays three years. David mourns Amnon, then is comforted concerning him, and then — the chapter ends with the painful line — "the spirit of the king longed to go out to Absalom." A father’s grief, a father’s silence, and a father’s longing, all tangled together. The sword Nathan named has only just been unsheathed.
John 16:5–17:5
Jesus returns to the promise of the Helper, and explains why his going away is to the disciples’ advantage. "If I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you." The Spirit will convict the world concerning sin, righteousness, and judgment, and will guide the disciples into all the truth, glorifying Jesus by taking what is his and declaring it to them. The disciples mutter to each other about Jesus’s "little while," and he answers tenderly: "Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy." He uses the image of a woman in labor — anguish that becomes forgotten in the joy of a child born — to describe the cross and the resurrection. "No one will take your joy from you."
The discourse ends and the prayer begins. John 17 is the great high priestly prayer, and it opens with Jesus lifting his eyes to heaven and praying not for rescue but for glory. "Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you." He summarizes his mission in a single line that has been quoted ever since: "This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." He has glorified the Father on earth by accomplishing the work given him to do. And then, before he prays for the disciples or for the church across the ages, he asks for the restoration of what was always his: "Glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed." The trinitarian eternity behind the cross opens up for a moment, and we are allowed to overhear.
Psalm 68:1–6
Psalm 68 begins with Moses’s old battle cry as the ark moved out: "Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered." The opening verses paint God as one who routs his foes — they vanish like smoke, melt like wax before fire — and as one who is the joy of his people: "But the righteous shall be glad; they shall exult before God; they shall be jubilant with joy." The two pictures belong together. The God who is a terror to evil is a delight to those who love him.
Then the psalm sharpens the picture of who exactly this God is for. He is "father of the fatherless and protector of widows… God settles the solitary in a home; he leads out the prisoners to prosperity, but the rebellious dwell in a parched land." The God who rides through the deserts is also the God who notices the orphan, the widow, the lonely, and the prisoner. His power is bent toward the powerless. The image of God settling the solitary in a home is one of the gentlest sentences in the Psalter, and it sits inside one of its most martial psalms — exactly because the strength of God is finally for the sake of love.
Today’s readings hold a question we would rather not ask: what does God do with the wreckage we make? The household of David is unraveling — a daughter desolate, a son murdered, a brother in exile, a father immobilized between grief and longing. The chapter does not tie itself up neatly. It leaves us in the same place it leaves David: aching. And then John 16 speaks directly into that ache: "You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy." Not "your sorrow was not real," but "your sorrow will turn." The labor pains become a child.
The high priestly prayer locates the turning point. The cross is not a tragedy that surprises God; it is the hour for which Jesus came. The glory Jesus had before the world existed is restored on the other side of the cross, and in that restoration eternal life becomes available — eternal life defined not as endless duration but as knowing the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he sent. Tamar’s grief, Absalom’s rage, David’s silence — none of it is the last word. The last word is a Son glorifying a Father by going through the worst of what human sin can produce and coming out the other side.
Psalm 68 brings the news close. The God who scatters his enemies is the father of the fatherless and the one who settles the solitary in a home. He is the answer to the desolate woman in Absalom’s house, even when her own father is silent. He is the joy that the disciples’ sorrow will turn into. He is the home for everyone who has been thrown out, exiled, or left to live alone in the ashes. May the God who arises and scatters all that is dark also be, for us today, the gentle God who notices the lonely and brings them in.
May 27, 2026
2 Samuel 14:1–15:12
Joab, reading David’s longing for Absalom and his political paralysis, engineers a reunion through a wise woman from Tekoa. She comes with a fabricated story — a widow, two sons, one killed the other, the family demanding the surviving son’s life — and David, predictably, rules in favor of mercy. Then she springs the trap: "Why then have you planned such a thing against the people of God? For in giving this decision the king convicts himself, inasmuch as the king does not bring his banished one home again." David sees Joab’s hand in it immediately and grants the request. Absalom is brought back to Jerusalem — but with a heartbreaking restriction: "Let him dwell apart in his own house; he is not to come into my presence." For two years Absalom lives in the city without seeing his father’s face. Half-pardon is not pardon. It is wound left to fester.
Absalom finally forces the issue by setting Joab’s barley field on fire, and is at last admitted to the king. David kisses him. The reconciliation looks complete, but the wound has had four years to sour. Chapter 15 opens with Absalom acquiring chariots, horses, and fifty runners, then rising early and standing by the city gate to intercept anyone with a case to bring before the king. To each he says, "See, your claims are good and right, but there is no man designated by the king to hear you." He kisses them when they bow. "So Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel." After four years he asks leave to go to Hebron — the city where David himself was first anointed — and the conspiracy is launched. Messengers go out through all the tribes: "Absalom is king at Hebron." The sword in David’s house has now turned on David himself.
John 17:6–26
The high priestly prayer moves outward in concentric circles. Jesus has prayed for himself; now he prays for the disciples in the room, and then for those who will believe through their word. The prayer for the disciples is full of intimate description: they have kept God’s word, they have received the words Jesus gave them, they know in truth that Jesus came from the Father. Jesus prays not that they be taken out of the world but that they be kept from the evil one, sanctified in the truth, the word of God being the means of sanctification. "As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world." The church’s mission is grounded in Christ’s mission.
Then comes the prayer for us — for everyone who would believe through the apostles’ word across two thousand years. "That they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me." The unity of the church is not a strategy but a witness; it is meant to mirror the unity of the Father and the Son. The prayer rises to its climax in two of the most beautiful sentences in the New Testament: "I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me." The love of the Father for the Son is the same love poured out on the church. The chapter ends with a longing: "Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory."
Psalm 68:7–14
The middle of Psalm 68 retells the wilderness journey in vivid imagery. "O God, when you went out before your people, when you marched through the wilderness, the earth quaked, the heavens poured down rain, before God, the One of Sinai, before God, the God of Israel." The exodus is recounted not as ancient history but as the pattern of how God acts — going out before his people, shaking the earth, providing rain in abundance, restoring his weary inheritance.
Then a striking line: "The Lord gives the word; the women who announce the news are a great host." The image is of women heralding victory while kings and their armies flee. God scatters kings, and the spoil is divided even by the women at home — a picture of a victory so complete that the ordinary household shares in it. The God of Sinai is the God who fights and wins, and whose victory is announced first not by generals but by the women God has equipped to herald the news.
The three readings together press one of the deepest themes of the whole Bible: the difference between a king who divides his family and a King who prays his people into oneness. David, partly out of love and partly out of paralysis, leaves Absalom in a half-state — pardoned but not received, in the city but not in his father’s presence — and the half-state becomes a coup. Jesus, on the night before his own death, prays not for the cosmetic unity of an institution but for the participatory unity of the Father, the Son, and the church, "that the world may know that you sent me."
These are radically different kinds of leadership. David’s silence and partial gestures unravel his household. Jesus’s prayer binds his household together with the very love that has eternally bound the Father and the Son. And the psalm fills in the picture of who this God is: the God who goes out before his people, who shakes the earth and pours down rain, whose victory is so complete that even the women at home receive a share of the spoil. The exodus pattern is not over. It is still the way this God works.
The pastoral implication is not subtle. Wherever we have done what David did — pardoned without receiving, said the right thing while withholding our face — there is invitation today to go further. Wherever we have done what Absalom did — let four years of wound become a rebellion of the heart — there is invitation today to lay it down. And wherever we have wondered whether the prayer of John 17 includes us, the answer is yes: Jesus is praying for everyone who would believe through the apostles’ word, and the love the Father has for the Son is the same love already poured out on the church. May we let the God who goes out before his people lead us today, into the kind of oneness that makes the world believe.