Joab sees what David cannot seem to resolve: a heart pulled toward Absalom that never arrives anywhere (verse 1). He sends to Tekoa for a wise woman and puts a fictional grief in her mouth: a widow, a dead son, and a surviving son whom the clan wants to kill for it (verses 5-7). It is Nathan's parable all over again, a built story meant to catch a king judging himself before he realizes it.
David falls for it. He promises that the woman's son will lose not one hair (verse 11), and she turns the promise on him: 13"in giving this decision the king convicts himself, inasmuch as the king does not bring his banished one home again." Then she says something true about God that reaches past her fiction: we are like water spilled on the ground, and yet God devises means so that the banished one will not remain an outcast. It is a God who actively devises ways to bring the exiled home, and who does not leave the door unlocked and wait. The tragedy of the chapter is how far David's behavior falls short of the God she describes.
David sees Joab behind the scheme and grants the request anyway: 21"go, bring back the young man Absalom." What David grants is a location, a house in the same city, with no restoration: 24"Let him dwell apart in his own house; he is not to come into my presence." Absalom is back in the same city as his father and kept, for two full years, at the distance Geshur put between them, with a shorter walk.
The narrator pauses to tell us Absalom is the most beautiful man in Israel, without blemish from head to foot, his hair so heavy it is weighed once a year (verses 25-26). It is the kind of description once given of Saul (1 Samuel 9:2), physical splendor with nothing said of what lives inside. We are being shown a portrait with no commendation, and readers have long connected the detail with his death, when his head catches fast in an oak (2 Samuel 18:9).
Two more years pass with Absalom shut out of his father's presence. Then he forces the issue, as he has shown he can. He sets Joab's barley field on fire to get his attention (verse 30), and when Joab listens, Absalom says: 32"let me go into the presence of the king, and if there is guilt in me, let him put me to death." He would rather face a verdict than endure another day of undefined distance.
Then: 33"the king kissed Absalom." Four years of exile and silence resolve into one gesture, and the text will not let us make it more than it is. The kiss is formal where it should have been full, with the word son nowhere in the sentence. Forgiveness of a kind has been offered, and fellowship has not begun.
Another father in another story does not wait for his returning son to bow. He runs while the son is still a long way off, and throws a robe, a ring, and a feast around a son who had nothing to offer (Luke 15:20-24). That is the welcome the woman of Tekoa described and the welcome David, tangled in grief and justice, could not yet give. The God who devises means so the banished will not remain an outcast has shown what that devising looks like, and it looks nothing like a formal kiss at a safe distance.
Prayer
Father, thank you for being the God who devises a way home for the banished. Forgive us every time our reconciliation looks more like David's careful kiss than the running, robe-giving welcome you have shown us in your Son. Teach us to forgive all the way into fellowship, and not only halfway into silence. In Jesus' name, amen.