Psalm 51 and Leadership

Wisdom from King David

These comments were first delivered to the Honors College Cohort of 2020 at the end of our first semester of learning on Zoom in the midst of the Covid-19 Pandemic. I rediscovered them this week and found them speaking directly to me. I offer them here that perhaps others might benefit from them…

It’s my privilege to offer a few comments on Psalm 51, one of the great penitential prayers of the Christian Church. As you may know, the book Psalms—or the Psalter as it is often called—is Christianity’s prayerbook. Christians read Psalm 51 every year on Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent, where Christians commit themselves to fasting and repentance for 50 days in preparation for Holy Week.

Our Bible tells us that Psalm 51 is “of David” after his sin with Bathsheba (told in 2 Samuel 12). If you don’t know the story, here it is in a nutshell. David was king over the united kingdom of Israel, and he was at war against the Philistines. In the first of many failings of leadership, David was not where he—as king—should have been: leading his armies. No, he was relaxing at his palace while his armies carried on without him. David is embodying the vice of sloth. While he was indulging himself in this way, he also had an affair with a married woman, Bathsheba, whom he got pregnant. Bathsheba’s husband—Uriah the Hittite—was one of David’s soldiers. To cover up his sin, David manipulated his military strategy to get Uriah killed in battle. David was then able to marry Bathsheba and thereby hide the illegitimacy of her pregnancy. God sends the prophet Nathan to confront David with his sin. David repents, suffers the consequences of his sin (loss of the child, war among his children, the war throughout his kingdom), and, so we believe, composed this Psalm of penitence and restoration.

So what does this Psalm have to say to us about leadership today?

First, leaders fail. This is stronger than saying that “no one is perfect.” David did not just mess up; he failed so profoundly that it betrayed everything he was and stood for. Leaders fail. Leaders do damage that has significant and far-reaching consequences. We all do it. I’ve done it. It all started for David (as it does for all of us) with a small compromise, a tiny crack in his integrity: he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. His failures as a leader had ripple effects for his integrity as a human being and for the sake of his kingdom. But this isn’t a despairing or hopeless psalm. So what else does it tell us?

David shows us that good leaders know themselves as they truly are (v. 3) rather than as they might be tempted to think of themselves. Good leaders desire integrity and beauty (or purity of heart) while knowing that these occur as gifts that God gives on the far side of failure. Leaders know that we access integrity and beauty, not by covering up our failings, but through “broken hearts” and “contrite spirits” that, in receiving God’s healing mercy, can experience again the joy of salvation.

What’s significant for leaders is not just the fact that David fails but rather that he repents. David repents because he trusts in the promise of God’s hesed, “steadfast love.” David recognizes that his sin will be “blotted out” by the mercy of God, but only if he submits to God’s merciful judgment as an expression of God’s steadfast love. Good leaders may fail, but as this Psalm reminds us, God, in God’s mercy, never allows sin and evil have the last word.

Like we’ve seen in our other texts this semester, it is not enough for a leader only to seem to be good. We aren’t Machiavellians. David needs a “new heart” and a “clean spirit”—they had to be created in David out of the chaos of his sin and failure. Much like the God who hovered over the waters of chaos in Genesis 1, now God hovers over the chaos, the wreckage of David’s failings, and, through mercy and steadfast love, re-creates David. By allowing himself to be re-made, David shows the virtue of docility.

Let me leave you with two parting observations about some subtleties in this psalm, this prayer.

First, the wise leader knows that there is no such thing as private failure and private sin. Like you will see when you read Plato’s Republic in the spring, there is an intimate relationship between the City and the Soul, especially for the leader. Who you are and who the people are are intimately linked. David’s sin desolated Jerusalem; his sin in the bedroom had ripple effects across generations. No sin is private. But neither is repentance. Notice how this psalm brings together the reformation of David’s character and integrity with the rebuilding and integrity of the City of Jerusalem. As David is remade so is Jerusalem. His redeemed failures become occasion for him to extend God’s mercy outward to others. Because he has experienced God’s judgment and mercy, he will “teach transgressors your ways and sinners will return to you” (v. 13). A good leader passes on the mercy he or she has received. A good leader shows that God is a God who can bring creation from nothing, life from death, and grace from failure.

Second, a leader knows that we overcome sin by focusing on God. Read through Psalm 51 again and notice the relationship between words for “sin” and words for “God.” They are inversely proportional. The beginning of the psalm focuses on sin and less on God. There are six mentions of “sin” and one mention of “God” in the first half of the psalm; this is inverted in the second half. We focus so much on sin that we can lose focus on God, but as the psalm shows us, to quote Dr. Konrad Schaefer, “the poet literally and literarily is emptied of sin and filled with grace…thus, with the confession sin is replaced by God’s presence” (129). Leaders trust that God’s grace is much bigger, stronger, and more powerful than even our most egregious sins and failures. Psalm 51 shows us that mercy, forgiveness, and grace are the first and last words of good—holy—leadership.