The Chronicles of a Great King - Joab: Uneasy Lies the Head

Hilton Head Island, SC – February 12, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls    
I Samuel 19:1-8   
A Sermon by John M. Miller                                                                                                                                     

 

Text - "So go out at once and speak kindly to your servants; for I swear by the Lord, if you do not go, not a man will stay with you this night; and this will be worse for you than any disaster that has come upon you from your youth until now." - II Samuel 19:7

 

    He is in the midst of a great political and military fight, the fight to save his throne from enemies all around him. He can sleep only fitfully, and he is becoming increasingly edgy.  He is Henry IV of England, as portrayed by the greatest of all the playwrights, and Shakespeare has his Henry say, as he struggles to fall into the blessed release of slumber, "O sleep, O gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, that thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down and steep my senses in forgetfulness? ...Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose to the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude, and in the calmest and most stillest night, with all thy appliances and means to boot, deny it to a king?  Then happy low, lie down!  Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" (Henry IV, Part II, Act III, Sc. 1).

 

    Our other monarch, the one whose grim fortunes we have been following for six weeks, is in much the same fix.  David, the king of Israel, has just lost his favorite son Absalom in a battle, a battle Absalom fought against him, against David, his own father.  The rebellious son made a play to capture the crown, and David's commanding general, Joab, his Old Blood and Guts Patton, went out against Absalom and ordered him killed, even though David had strictly charged everyone not to harm Absalom.

 

    However, Joab knew with dispassion what David, because of his emotional involvement, refused to acknowledge, that Absalom would never relent from his efforts to usurp the throne. Furthermore, Joab knew Absalom could never be the ruler David was.  Whether David liked it or not (and David didn't like it; it grieved him to the very depths of his soul), Joab was determined that Absalom should be dispatched to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.  And that is what happened.  Joab commanded his troops to kill Absalom when they captured him, and now David was inconsolable.  He could not overcome his profound sense of loss.

 

    It was at that moment, when the knowledge of his son's death was only hours old and the news gripped his heart with its icy and unrelenting hand that Joab came to the king and spoke to him as the official court Dutch uncle.  You have covered yourself in shame today, the general told his monarch; you have heaped abuse on everyone who loves you and is loyal to you by this perfidious display of grief over a son who sought to seize your power.  If you don't get your act together, and do it right now, said Joab, you can kiss your kingdom farewell forever.

 

    Listen very carefully: anybody who ever was in charge of any organization or institution, anybody who ever held the reigns of political or economic or any other kind of power, desperately needs people with the courage and honesty of Joab.  Advisors who give only pleasant advice are of no use at all; the head that wears a crown, either literally or figuratively, is lost unless he has at least one or two people beside him who will always tell him the truth, even when it hurts like bloody blue blazes to hear it.  And Joab was absolutely right; if David had not gotten up from the welter of grief in which he was wallowing to appear before his confused and frightened subjects that very hour, he might well have lost his throne.  Uneasy indeed lies the head that wears a crown.

 

    Early last fall, after only three football games had been played, the head football coach at the University of Wisconsin was fired. I always liked him, first, because he was a graduate of the high school I attended, and second, because the team had won three-quarters of their games under his leadership. But big-time college sports require nearly unblemished records from their head coaches or they may be cast aside with little or no warning. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

 

    It has never been easy to be in charge of any type of organization, but it maybe has never been harder in our lifetime than it is right now.  The world is in a period of rapid and unpredictable transition, and leaders of government, business, education, service, and even religion are having a hard time maintaining the appearance of control, let alone progress. Whoever is the President of the United States always has severe critics, especially in highly partisan times. Rearguard would-be generals question everything, from whether he is approving too much military assistance to Ukraine to whether he should have ordered the huge Chinese surveillance balloon shot down over Montana rather than off the Carolina coast.

 

    Often we make a critical error of judgment about those who are in positions of authority.  We want to like them even more than we respect them, but liking and respecting are two different things. 

 

    George Patton was one of the most beloved generals during World War II by the men whom he commanded, and one of the biggest headaches to those who commanded him, particularly Dwight D. Eisenhower. One of the most memorable scenes in the movie Patton is when the aggressive general struck a GI in the Sicilian campaign who was suffering from what would be called “shell-shock” in World War I and PTSD after Afghanistan and Iraq. In his book Patton, Montgomery, Rommel, military historian Terry Brighton described that incident, saying that reporters demanded Ike immediately relieve Patton of his command. Brighton wrote, “That was unfair to Eisenhower. Any other commander would have dismissed Patton at once, but Ike considered him indispensable to the war effort and called him ‘one of the guarantors of our victory’” (217). So General Eisenhower put up with Patton’s antics until shortly after the war ended, and Patton was killed in a traffic accident.

 

    Those who are placed in positions of high authority need not be nice to be great, but they cannot be great without exercising their authority.  One of the most pressing inner tensions in anyone who is in any position of leadership is the conflict between wanting to be liked and understanding the necessity to lead.  No one can always accomplish both at the same time, and in fact often it seems impossible to do either, let alone both. Furthermore, if we knew everything every great leader ever did, we probably would no longer consider them great. People who have absolutely no skeletons in their closets have neither the capacity nor the inclination to be superlative leaders.

 

    Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, because that person must be strong enough to withstand the inevitable stinging barbs of both reasonable and unreasonable criticism.  Uneasy lies the head because no one can ever be totally certain that the course he or she is following is the proper one.  Uneasy lies the head because in the midst of the turmoil of leadership there are personal thoughts and feelings which can blur one's vision and blunt one's determination.  David didn't want to go out to face his people after the failed palace revolt by his son Absalom, but Joab convinced him that he must.  He did, and his throne was spared.

 

    Uneasy lies the head whose eyes see past the immediate situation, whose gaze is on the horizon, who seeks to effect a reality neither visible nor tangible to the people he is trying to lead.  Most people are mostly concerned about themselves, their families, and the people immediately close to them, but leaders must think the large thoughts and dream the expansive dreams and prepare the bold plans. That is what Joab was urging David to do on that day thirty centuries ago when he sat curled up in a corner, grieving the loss of his beloved, headstrong son.

 

    As we have gone through this sermon series on King David, you have heard me refer to him again and again as the greatest of the kings.  With all the terrible things he did, and with all the terrible things that happened during his reign, you may have wondered how on earth can he be reckoned the most magnificent of all the Israelite monarchs?

 

    That is a very understandable question.  From the biblical standpoint, his greatness is not to be discovered in his political and certainly not his personal prowess, but in his spiritual inclinations. Whenever he encountered difficult and ambiguous circumstances, which he did for every period of his life, he always remembered to turn to God for direction in how to proceed.  Although he was self-reliant, his ultimate reliance was on the King of Heaven.  When David felt threatened by his untimely and unsought death, he wrote, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want" (Ps. 23:1).  When he reflected on the nature of God, he said, "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Thy name in all the earth!" (Ps. 8:1)  When he felt that God had abandoned him, he said, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" (Ps. 22:1), but he said it to God, he turned to God, his heart was drawn to God. Thinking about what it means to worship, David wrote, "I was glad when they said to me, 'Let us go to the house of the Lord!'" (Ps. 122:1)

 

    After the insurrection by Absalom, a man named Sheba tried to unite the men of the northern part of David’s kingdom against him. Once again Joab rallied his army to overthrow the enemies of David, and once more the kingdom was saved.  

 

    St. Augustine said, "Hope has two beautiful daughters.  Their names are anger and courage: anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are."  David was heartbroken, hurt, and angry when his favorite child had been killed in violation of his orders, but fortunately he had a general, Joab, who turned David’s thoughts from himself to the good of the nation of Israel, whose future precariously hung in the balance on that long-ago sad day. In the forty-year reign of Israel's greatest monarch, there were many things which angered him: in others, in himself, and even in God.  Many of the Psalms, the hymnal of ancient Israel, are David's reflections on the vicissitudes of human existence.  But in all of it, there was an abiding hope, the hope that somehow life could be improved, that better decisions could overcome bad ones, that better behavior could mitigate poor behavior.

 

    Leadership is never a solitary activity. It requires the advice of others who are close to the leader. It was literally a godsend that David had Joab to tell him that he must put his personal feelings of deep loss behind him for the sake of his kingdom. But only David, as every other leader, could choose to follow that wise counsel. The kingdom of Israel, and its king, were saved yet again.

 

    Because of his many sins, God forbade David to build the temple.  It was surely one of the greatest disappointments in his life, of which there were many.  Nevertheless, as a symbol of his hope, David purchased the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite as the place upon which his son Solomon would construct God's house.  The Jebusites were the Canaanite people whom David defeated when he conquered Jerusalem, and Araunah's threshing floor was on a high plateau overlooking the Kidron Valley.  Tradition says it was located on the crest of Mt. Moriah, the place where Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac eight centuries earlier.  When Solomon's temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE, it was on that same threshing floor where Ezra re-constructed the second temple in the fifth century, and when the Romans destroyed that temple in 70 CE, the Muslims built the Dome of the Rock there in the eighth century CE.

 

    Life was always filled with both sorrow and aspiration for David. God never promised it would be easy, but He did promise to be with the Israelites in all the struggles which lay ahead of them. He also promises to be with us in whatever we may be called to face. And in the providence of God, our own Joabs are there to assist us along the way. Parts of David’s story are parts of our stories as well. In Jonathan, Michal, Bethsheba, Nathan, Absalom, and Joab, we see displayed aspects of the life of a great man, warts and all, as Oliver Cromwell said, who was not a tenth the man that Dovid was.