A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
Sunday 25 October 2026
Psalm 51.1–9
Matthew 21.33–41
that every theatre company knows by heart.
his uncle has murdered his way to the throne,
but he can’t prove it,
so he has the travelling players perform a play
that mirrors the crime.
“wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”
where I’ve become their Theatre Chaplain,
I’ve come to think this is one of the oldest truths of theatre.
that an argument never could.
and then the lights come up
and we realise the story was about us all along.
a prophet called Nathan walked into the court
of the most powerful man in Israel
carrying nothing but a story,
and he caught the conscience of a king.
“In the spring of the year,
the time when kings go out to battle” (2 Samuel 11.1).
but this year the king has stayed at home in Jerusalem
and sent Joab instead.
now sends others to do the dangerous work.
and sees a woman bathing.
David sent messengers.
He took her.
the verbs of power.
Samuel warned them what kings do: they take
— your sons, your daughters, your fields,
the best of everything (1 Samuel 8).
the man after God’s own heart,
doing precisely that.
because the church hasn’t been kind to her.
But the text says nothing of the sort.
as the law required (11.4).
the text doesn’t put her on the roof;
it puts David there.
what choice is there?
It’s an abuse of power,
and many would rightly call it rape.
sent to the king:
“I am pregnant.”
And manage it he does.
hoping he’ll sleep with his wife
so the child can pass as his.
a foreigner, an outsider in Israel’s army —
proves more faithful than the king.
while his comrades sleep in the open field,
not even when David gets him drunk.
put him where the fighting is fiercest,
then pull back.
sealed,
back to the battle.
along with other soldiers whose names we’re never told.
she bears a son,
and as far as the court is concerned
the matter is closed.
displeased the Lord” (11.27).
It’s almost quiet.
God saw.
Joab knew; he’d carried out the order.
because that’s how courts work.
who’ve learned that their safety
depends on not noticing.
He arrives with a case for the king to judge.
one rich and one poor.
but one little ewe lamb,
which he’d bought and raised.
It ate from his plate
and drank from his cup
and slept in his arms,
and it was like a daughter to him.
he couldn’t bring himself to take from his own flock,
so he took the poor man’s lamb
and served that instead.
the man who has done this deserves to die” (12.5).
David the just judge,
champion of the poor,
defender of the little lamb.
David’s defences would have been up
before the sentence was finished —
it was wartime, soldiers die.
he’s already convicted himself
out of his own mouth.
so long as the villain is somebody else.
out there,
in a story about a rich man in a certain city.
is see it in himself.
We just arrange the furniture of our minds
so that certain things stay in shadow.
a finger wagged along the pews.
and how a whole system closes ranks
around the taking.
in public inquiry after public inquiry:
those who raised the alarm disbelieved or investigated,
those who’d been harmed kept in the dark,
an institution’s good name put ahead of the truth.
is always Nathan’s:
who is the man? Who is really to blame here?
that has learned not to notice.
have been of churches protecting the powerful
while those who’d been harmed were told to keep quiet
for the sake of the gospel,
and ours isn’t a tradition with a clean record.
who, in the structures we belong to,
are we not seeing?
while we found it easier not to look?
and it’s no accident who he tells it to.
in the days after Jesus has overturned the tables.
have just demanded to know by what authority
he’s doing these things (Matthew 21.23).
with a story.
anyone who knew Isaiah 5
would hear the song of God’s vineyard here —
and the landowner leases the vineyard to tenants
and goes away.
and the tenants beat one,
kill another,
stone another.
they do the same.
kill him and the inheritance is ours.
and kill him.
and asks them to judge.
what will he do to those tenants?”
“He will put those wretches to a miserable death,
and lease the vineyard to other tenants” (21.41).
they reach straight for death.
they haven’t yet realised
they’ve been hearing themselves described,
and are passing judgment on their own behaviour.
they realised he was speaking about them (21.45).
announced that Nidal Hasan,
who murdered thirteen unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009,
is to be executed by firing squad in December —
and that the execution would be livestreamed.
in almost a century.
‘that there are serious consequences’.
although the execution will,
but the announcement itself tells us something.
because thirteen people were killed.
told the BBC he wants Hasan to look him in the eye
and know he failed.
and nothing in the gospel asks us to look away
from what was done to him.
as millions watch?
but follow it online?
was reported in real time around the world?
of course they were.
and whom it serves.
gives back no one who was lost.
unite us in following the enacted violence,
and reassure the powerful
that their verdict is righteous.
by the roadside,
outside the city wall,
precisely so that everyone would understand
there are serious consequences
for defying the empire.
out of the vineyard, outside, to be killed —
just as Jesus himself would be,
outside the city wall.
staged as a lesson for the watching crowd.
not among the watchers, but on the cross.
it isn’t Jesus who supplies that violent ending.
the instinctive human answer.
the human verdict hanging in the air
as though it were the end of the story.
“The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone” (21.42).
he points beyond it.
outside the city wall, on a cross at Golgotha,
God’s answer wasn’t a miserable death for the wretches.
the rejected one raised,
not to take revenge,
but to become the cornerstone of something new.
and to the psalm that tradition places in his mouth
after Nathan’s visit.
according to your steadfast love…
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me” (Psalm 51.1–3).
No “mistakes were made”.
“I have sinned against the Lord,” he says
(2 Samuel 12.13).
“Against you, you alone, have I sinned” (51.4).
What about Bathsheba,
and the soldiers who died beside Uriah?
that turns entirely towards God
and conveniently away from the people we’ve harmed —
making it all about my soul and my standing with heaven,
but never quite getting round to the victim.
at the centre of the frame.
the God who stands with the one who’s been wronged.
but precisely because God is with Uriah.
runs through the people we’ve harmed,
not around them.
“David was the father of Solomon
by the wife of Uriah” (Matthew 1.6).
both there in the ancestry story of Jesus.
be written out of the record.
is the memory of a loyal foreigner who was killed
and a woman who was taken.
with the wrong still visible.
and not a God who looks only to condemn.
“the thing that David had done” —
and who sees it with steadfast love.
Nathan’s very next words are:
“The Lord has put away your sin;
you shall not die” (12.13).
and the rest of David’s story is grim with them.
and the one we’re so quick to pronounce on others,
as the tenants did —
isn’t God’s last word.
by a prophet,
by a story,
by a colleague who won’t stay quiet,
by the slow, honest work of our own consciences —
we’re not being found out
by a God who’s waiting to destroy us.
whose seeing is already mercy.
is the same truth that says “you shall not die”.
is the God who creates in us a clean heart
and puts a new and right spirit within us (51.10).
all the way down.
all the way down.
has become the cornerstone.
and it is amazing in our eyes.
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