The Mask and the Heart
By Bobby Neal Winters
In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there have been a lot of emotionally laden situations. In particular, I’ve been impressed with how in control of her emotions his widow, Erika, has been. She is a very composed, very impressive individual. I am not the first to notice this, but it can’t be said often enough.
In the wake of this, I’ve been thinking about King David a lot. And I do mean a lot. Not only a lot for most people but a lot for me. We’ve been surrounded by violence and death. But because of the stories the Bible gives us, we know our situation is not new.
David was also surrounded by death, indeed, by a lot more death than we are. He fought battles, but more personally, he lost children--which would have to be the worst of all--on several occasions. I want to talk about two of these.
Before we get into the specifics, let me say that David was a man who--at least at an unconscious level--understood how to create a particular sort of persona, how to project a certain image: David the Poet Warrior. And he was a Poet Warrior, don’t get me wrong, but we need to know there is a difference between being a Poet Warrior and projecting that image. It is possible to do one without doing the other. He did both.
In addition, he was also a human being.
The lost children I want to talk about are the child that was born of adultery between David and the wife of Uriah the Hittite and of David’s son Absalom.
The first of these deaths happened when the child, a boy whose name is not given, was a baby. According to scripture, the child was stricken because David had stolen Uriah’s wife (whose name isn’t given either, but we know it was Bathsheba) and killed Uriah.
While the child was ill, David openly fasted and wept for the child. His actions were extreme enough that when the child died, David’s servants were reluctant to tell him because they were fearful of what he would do.
As David was very tuned-in to his household, by their very quietness, he was able to tell that the child had died. When he elicited that information from them, ”[he] arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the Lord, and worshipped: then he came to his own house; and when he required, they set bread before him, and he did eat.”
When asked why he fasted and wept when the child was ill, but not when the child died, he replied, “I fasted and wept: for I said, Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live? But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? Can I bring him back again?”
It can be roughly summarized that he was putting on a show of grief, in hopes of a different outcome. He’d affected the persona of grief.
The second death I want to talk about happened to his son Absalam.
Absalam was not a baby. Far from it.
Absalam was in the process of leading a revolt against King David, he was riding along by himself on a mule and got his long hair caught in the limbs of a tree. While he was stuck there, some of David’s soldiers, acting against David’s orders, killed Absalam with spears.
Upon learning of this, David’s response was much different than before. He cried out: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”
Such was the strength of his emotion that Joab, his main general, had to caution him for fear of demoralizing the army. (For the sake of brevity, I am leaving a lot of backstory and nuance out of this. Read the book.)
I pick these two incidents to see the change that occurred to David over the course of the passage of time.
In the first of these, David put forth the face of mourning with an attempt to sway God Himself, who can see into every human heart, even that of a king.
In the second, David’s love for his son was so strong that in spite of the fact his son was in open, violent revolt against him, his grief upon his death overcame any ability to put forth the image required of a king.
Our leaders, the ones we like as well as the ones we don’t like, bear a burden: Very rarely can they be themselves. More precisely, they have to be very careful in the parts of themselves they reveal to the public. They wear a public mask.
But God sees the heart and will heal the pain.
Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.
