Sweeping the Spiders Away

“Sweeping the Spiders Away”—June 27, 2016

“But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord, and the Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him, and said to him, “There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. ²The rich man had very many flocks and herds; ³but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. He brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his meager fare, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. ⁴Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was loath to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb, and prepared that for the guest who had come to him.” ⁵Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man. He said to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die; ⁶he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” ⁷Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; ⁸I gave you your master’s house, and your master’s wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would have added as much more. ⁹Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight?” [2 Samuel 11:27b-12:9a]

When someone brushes your shoulder unexpectedly and says to you, “You had a spider on you!”, have you ever noticed that there is both fear and relief at the same time?  Your brain has to process both the fact that you had a secret arachnid crawling up your back, and the good news that someone else has taken care of it for you and swept it away to go bother someone else or go save a pig with web-based advertising somewhere else.  There is relief and discomfort at the same time, and they are interconnected, because the relief is the relief of the uncomfortable truth that you are just finding out about: namely, that something with four times as many legs as you have was lurking unbeknownst to you toward your neck.

Forgiveness is, in a very important sense, like that dual rush of fear and relief from someone telling you they have brushed the spider off your back.  And that’s because being forgiven also requires that we face the uncomfortable—in fact squirm-inducing—reality that we have wronged someone else.  To hear someone else say, “You are forgiven,” brings us face to face the with the honest truth that we NEEDED it in the first place.  It means I admit that I have broken relationship with someone else, and by grace, they are restoring the relationship rather than leaving it broken.  There is grace in the same instant as there is hard truth.  There is relief in the same instant as there is discomfort.

And just like with the friend who brushes off the spider from your back, the relief is only possible at the point of facing the squirmy truth.  I won’t be relieved that the spider is gone until I know at the same time that there was, after all, a spider.  And I won’t appreciate what it means to know I am forgiven until I have been compelled to see, even kicking and screaming, that I was in the wrong… that I hurt someone… that, to use the old phrasing for it, sinned against my neighbor.

All of that is to say that the grace we call forgiveness includes opening our eyes to see the uncomfortable truth about ourselves first, and then in the same instant creates a new reality in which our sin is put away.  Maybe you could even say that the grace of being forgiven is what makes it possible for me to hear the truth that I messed up again in the first place, much like your friend doesn’t usually say, “Hey, there’s a spider somewhere on your body, but I’m not going to tell you where it is or help to get it… I’m just going to let it hang there and drive you nuts.” 

The story of David being confronted by Nathan tells us the same.  Without rehashing the whole soap opera, King David had done what nearly everybody does when they get a hold of power—he let it inflate his ego to the point where he thought he could do anything he wanted.  And in fact, he then had an affair, covered it up, and had the woman’s husband killed to contain the scandal when the initial cover-up didn’t work.  Well, you can’t fool God, and so God sent the prophet Nathan to do what prophets do: to speak truth to that power. 

Nathan forces David to come face to face with his actions, and to own them rather than to keep hiding them and running from them.  Nathan forces David to see what he had done.  He does it graciously, and even subversively by telling his little parable of the man with the ewe lamb, to get past David’s defenses.  But he did, in fact, open David’s eyes in a way that David needed.  There is forgiveness, to be sure—by the end of the story, Nathan will say to the king, “Now the Lord has put away your sin.”  But that statement of forgiveness is only possible as David is brought face to face with the reality of that sin first.  Otherwise he will be stuck trying to cover up and hide his actions rather than having them swept away.

Chances are, our day to day sins are not quite so melodramatic as David’s.  But we still have the same need to face what we have done as we receive forgiveness for our mess-ups.  When I wrong you, I need to know it—not so that I will suffer a certain amount and thereby earn a second chance—but because when you forgive me, I will not appreciate the gift of your grace to me unless I realize what you are wiping away off of my back.  If you keep trying to pretend there is no spider because you are afraid it will make me squirm to know it is there, it doesn’t make the spider go away.  What I need is for you to be honest with me, and to say to me, “Steve, you screwed up.  This hurt me.  This didn’t work…. Those words were cutting rather than curing… that action was self-centered and rude...”  or whatever else I’ve done.  I need to know that if I am going to understand the depth of your grace when you forgive me. 

And the same is true with us and God as well.  We all need those people who will help us face the ways we have broken relationship, hurt others, treated people as objects, let hate fester in our hearts, and fallen for idols.  We need those people who, like Nathan, will be real with us and hold us accountable.  We need those voices of sisters and brothers in Christ who will open our eyes—first, to see the spider… and second, to see that it has been swept away and taken off of our backs, in the very same instant.

Today, instead of more of the same old hiding, covering, and running, who are the people you can seek out who will help open your eyes to the need for grace… and who will also speak that grace into your life by announcing God’s forgiveness?  And how might you be one of those voices for someone else who has got something with a lot of legs crawling on their back, too?

Lord Jesus, open our eyes to see what we have been carrying on our shoulders for too long… to face it, and then to see as well that you have swept our sins away at the same time.