Over the past year, our church has been studying the life of King David. David has always been a fascinating and complex figure. The stories which have been preserved describe him as both a warrior and poet; a Don Corleone godfather and a pious, sweet singer of psalms. At times, he is thoughtful and warm-hearted; other times impulsive and cold. Depending on who is telling the story David can come off as either a man of action who is a shrewd, political strategist or as a monkish man of solitude who is given to finding his soul beside still waters. To add to the intrigue, David – who violated most all of the ten commandments – is held up as the “man after God’s heart” and the standard by which later kings are judged.
While preaching through the David narrative (1 and 2 Samuel), I happened to read a biography on Martin Luther King. Often times people will diminish the greatness of King’s achievement because of his sexual infidelities. The suggestion is that because King failed in the one area, his entire moral compass can be questioned. 
The author of the biography makes a compelling point that can go a long way to humanizing our hagiographies and helping us to understand both who David is and who we are.
But such baser aspects in the Promethean moral protagonists in history – Gandhi himself, by the later testimony of associates, could be exquisitely vindictive, curtly cold to family and others close to him personally, with ‘an insatiable love of power and implacability in its pursuit’ – hardly diminish the splendor of such figures. Rather, they lend them a far grander human meaning than their eventual, depthless pop exaltations……we have not yet learned to accommodate in our understanding of such figures what the ancient seers, Sophocles and the King David chronicler and Shakespeare and Cervantes, knew – that while evil can wear the most civil and sensible and respectably rectitudinous demeanor, good can seem blunderous and uncertain, shockingly wayward, woefully flawed, like one of Graham Greene’s dissolute, shabby, God-haunted saints. And what the full-bodied reality of King should finally tell us, beyond all the awe and celebration of him, is how mysteriously mixed, in what torturously complicated forms, our moral heroes – our prophets actually come to us. (A Life of Martin Luther King, Marshall Frady).
Perhaps who ever did this, get’s the idea.
