He Must Not See My Face

After three years away, the king’s son was coming home.

So Joab got up, went to Geshur, and brought Absalom to Jerusalem. The king had said yes. The exile was over. Absalom was back in the same city as his father, under the same sky, inside the same walls.

Then the king added one sentence.

He may return to his house, but he must not see my face.

The door was open. The face was turned away.

Absalom had run because he killed his brother. The reason sits in the chapter before, and it should be said once, carefully, and left with the one it happened to.

Their half brother Amnon raped Absalom’s sister Tamar. Afterward, the text says, Tamar lived as a desolate woman in the house of her brother Absalom. When David heard, he was furious. The record doesn’t say he did anything more. Two years later Absalom had Amnon killed at a feast, then fled to his mother’s father, the king of Geshur, and stayed there three years.

What happened to Tamar belongs to her. It isn’t a lesson, and this chapter won’t use it as one. It’s here only because nothing that follows makes sense without it. Years later Absalom named his own daughter Tamar. The text gives that one line and moves on.

The record is honest about what David felt while his son was gone. And King David longed to go to Absalom.

He longed to go. He didn’t go. Three years passed that way.

His general, Joab, saw it, and sent a woman from Tekoa to the king with a made-up story about a son of her own. Inside the story she put a sentence about God that was really about the king’s house. Yet God does not take away a life, but He devises ways that the banished one may not be cast out from Him.

David saw what she was doing and gave in. Go, bring back the young man Absalom.

So Absalom came back. To the city. To his own house. Not to his father.

Now Absalom lived in Jerusalem two years without seeing the face of the king.

Two years. In the same city. The record never gives the distance between the two houses, and it doesn’t need to. Whatever the distance in streets, the father had drawn the real one himself, and it was the width of a face.

Absalom tried to get through it. He sent for Joab to carry a message to the king. Joab didn’t come. He sent a second time. Joab still didn’t come. So Absalom had his servants set Joab’s barley field on fire. That got him a visit.

What he said when Joab arrived is the most direct sentence in the whole story. So now, let me see the king’s face, and if there is iniquity in me, let him kill me.

He was asking for a face, not a pardon. He said he’d take the verdict, whatever it was, if he could just have his father look at him.

Joab went to the king. David summoned Absalom, who came to him and bowed facedown before him. Then the king kissed Absalom.

That’s all of it. A bow and a kiss. The text records no word from either of them. After five years, three away and two across town, the reunion takes one verse, and nobody in it speaks.

The very next chapter opens with Absalom out at the city gate early in the mornings. Whenever someone came with a complaint for the king, he’d tell them their claim was good and nobody at the palace would hear it. Also, when anyone approached to bow down to him, Absalom would reach out his hand, take hold of him, and kiss him.

The kiss he got from his father once, he now gave to everyone who came through the gate. The text doesn’t connect those two kisses. It only puts them a few lines apart, and leaves the reader to notice. In this way he stole the hearts of the men of Israel.

Four years later he raised a rebellion from Hebron. Then a messenger came to David and reported, “The hearts of the men of Israel are with Absalom.” David left Jerusalem in a hurry, to keep the city from being put to the sword.

Even then, with an army coming after him, David’s order to his commanders was about his son. Treat the young man Absalom gently for my sake. The text makes a point of saying everyone heard it.

It didn’t matter. In the battle, Absalom rode his mule under a big oak, his head caught fast in the branches, and the mule kept going. One of David’s soldiers found him hanging there and wouldn’t touch him, because he had heard the king’s order. Joab didn’t wait. He took three spears and drove them into Absalom while he was still alive in the tree, and ten of Joab’s young men finished it. They threw him into a pit in the forest and piled stones on top.

Meanwhile the king sat between the two gates of a city, waiting. A watchman on the wall saw a runner coming. Then another. David had one question for them, and it wasn’t about the battle. Is the young man Absalom all right?

When he understood the answer, he climbed to the room over the gate.

The king was shaken and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept. And as he walked, he cried out, “O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

A little later the text adds, But the king covered his face.

This is reading between the lines, and the text doesn’t draw the line itself. The man who once said he must not see my face ends the story with his face covered, and no son left to see it.

It did not end well, and this book won’t pretend it did. There’s no scene where the two of them sit down and talk it through. The bow and the kiss in Jerusalem are the closest they ever came.

No stones at either of them. David loved his son. Everything he says about his son proves it: he longed for him for three years, ordered him treated gently in the middle of a war, and wanted to die in his place. Absalom wanted his father’s face badly enough to burn a field for it, and then went a hard way when he got only a kiss. The love was never in question. The face was.

A door that’s open while the face stays turned away isn’t a light left on.

Where this meets your week

Let back in, but not seen. Maybe the one you’re waiting for can come home now. There’s a place at the holidays, maybe a key. David opened his city and his son’s own house, and for two years Absalom never saw his father’s face. Next time they’re in the room with you, turn and look at them while they talk. Keep looking until they’re finished.

The message under the fire. Absalom sent for Joab twice and got silence, so he burned a field. Not every loud thing someone does is a message. Some are. If the one you’re waiting for has done something lately that’s hard to make sense of, ask yourself whether part of it might be a way of saying see me. You don’t have to like the fire. Answer the part underneath it.

The kiss with no words. Maybe there’s been a reunion of sorts. A hug at a funeral. A handshake at a wedding. Then nothing. A kiss without words isn’t nothing, but it isn’t a conversation either, and in this story it wasn’t enough. Write down the sentence that your last embrace left out. Then find a way to say it.

Gentle, from a distance. David cared enough to order his son treated gently, and he sent other men to carry the order. If your love for them mostly travels through other people, a message through a brother or sister, a word to a friend, a check in the mail, carry one piece of it yourself this week.

Turn your face.

One warm sentence to the one you’re waiting for, with no conditions in it. Not “when you’re ready.” Not “if you would just.” Not a question they have to answer. Something like “I think about you, and I’m glad you’re in the world,” in your own words. Say it out loud, or write it and send it.

This is the move the text never shows David making while there was still time. You can make it this week.

The woman from Tekoa said it to the king’s face, years before the gate. God devises ways that the banished one may not be cast out from Him.

David found a way to bring his son back to the city. He never found the way back to his face.