Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

July 16, 2006

Sermon by Pastor John Maboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. Mark. [Mark 6:14-29]

King Herod heard of [the disciples’ preaching,] for Jesus’ name had become known. Some were saying, “John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in him.” But others said, “It is Elijah.” And others said, “It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.” But when Herod heard of it, he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.”

For Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because Herod had married her. For John had been telling Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not, for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him. But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers and officers and for the leaders of Galilee. When his daughter Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it.” And he solemnly swore to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.” She went out and said to her mother,” What should I ask for?” She replied, “The head of John the baptizer.” Immediately she rushed back to the king and requested, “I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.” The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her. Immediately the king sent a solider of the guard with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison, brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl. Then the girl gave it to her mother. When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.

The Gospel of the Lord.

It’s a horrible story. It’s an awful, awful story. It’s a story of lust, jealousy, adultery, conflict, enmity, treachery, revenge, and murder. It’s almost as bad as one of the episodes of Desperate Housewives.

Herod, we’re told, was a king, but not really a king. History tell us that he was rather what the Romans called a tetrarch, which meant that he was one of four rulers set up by the Roman government to rule over a small portion of Palestine called Galilee, the northern part.

Now, Herod had a brother, whose name was Philip, who was also a tetrarch in a different region in Palestine. Philip, his brother, had a wife whom Herod liked; her name was Herodias. And somehow—we’re not told exactly how, perhaps by hook or by crook—he was able to separate Herodias from her husband, brought her to Galilee, and married her. We don’t know if they were technically married or if they were just living together. But whatever the case, John the Baptist, who was preaching in the region, had no qualms about publicly denouncing Herod and Herodias’s relationship as wrong. Neither of them liked it much that he was preaching this way, but it says that Herod was afraid of John, for he thought he really might be a prophet, and he used to actually like to listen to him. Herodias, on the other hand, hated John and wanted him dead.

So the occasion comes where it’s Herod’s birthday, and he throws a banquet for all of his high officials and several dignitaries. During that banquet, Herodias’s daughter—who in this account is called Herodias, but whom other sources call Salome, so I’ll use the name Salome—it turns out Herod liked Salome a lot, his grown stepdaughter. Salome proceeded to dance for the guests, and apparently it was quite a dance. Herod was absolutely smitten, beside himself, lost his mind, stars in his eyes. At the end of this dance, Herod says to her, in front of all the guests, “I will give you anything you ask,” and then he swore an oath, “Anything you ask of me up to one-half of my kingdom I will give to you.” Young Salome didn’t know what to ask for, so she went and asked her mother, “What should I ask for?” Without batting an eye, Herodias says, “The head of John the Baptist.” Salome rushes back and tells the king, “I want the head of John the Baptist on a platter, here and now!” Herod, it says, was full of misgivings. He did not want to do it. He was afraid, perhaps he felt some guilt, maybe even there was a spark of humanity in the man. But he did not want to do it. However, out of concern for looking respectable in front of his guests, he did not want to break the oath he had just made, and so he ordered the beheading, and it was done. And that is how John the Baptist died. End of story. It’s a awful story. There is no joy in it, no hope, no salvation anywhere to be found in the tale.

I was reading this week an article from the Christian Century, which is a theological magazine for pastors. And this commentator called this one of the terrible texts of the Bible, and said, “You would be forgiven if you just ignored it this Sunday and preached on something else.”

But don’t you want to know what the other terrible texts are? What is our fascination with terrible texts, with terrible things? We tend on Sunday mornings to dress up the Bible a bit by what we decide to read and what we decide not to read. But there are some really ugly bits in the Bible, some of them we never read on Sunday morning. There are bits full of hate, and murder, and incest, and violence, stories without any observable moral or happiness at the end.

We have a Wednesday-morning Bible-study group—some of you are here—which meets during the school year, and during that time we have the opportunity and the time to look at some of these nasty bits in the Bible. Now, I want to assure you that these are some of the finest people in our congregation, but you should see how they light up when we get to those parts. Or could it be that the Bible-study leader lights up at those parts?

What is our fascination with the terrible texts with terrible things? I want to suggest to us that our fascination is not a bad thing. We need stories and images that present to us the shadow-side of life. It’s important that not all of our stories end happily or resolve in a good moral, or see that every evil is punished and every right deed vindicated. Why? Because that ain’t the way life is, and it’s not the way we are either. We need stories and images that present to us those parts of ourselves that we would rather not acknowledge. We need the story of Herod having John beheaded because it’s our story every bit as much as the story of, say, the Good Samaritan. It must not be overlooked or eliminated because there is no illustration of goodness or kindness or justice or redemption in it.

A favorite author of mine is a Jewish psychologist by the name of James Hillman, and he has commented in one of his books on a particular Christian influence that he observes in our culture. He says that the belief in the resurrection has come to mean that people want to see resurrection everywhere; every tragedy made right, every sorrow turned to joy, every injustice redressed, every problem finding a solution, every story ending up. And we wonder why depression is such an epidemic in our culture: because joy is made out to be the normative state of life and continuing sadness or melancholy is made out to be an illness.

What do you think? Was John the Baptist a joyful, cheerful kind of guy? Can you imagine him singing the song, “The sun will come out tomorrow”? I have never gotten that impression about John the Baptist.

Some of us will remember back to 1992 when Ross Perot ran for president. His running mate was a fellow by the name of James Stockdale, who was a retired vice-admiral in the Navy. He was one of the fighter pilots who were shot down over Vietnam, and he ended up in that place euphemistically called the “Hanoi Hilton,” where he was horribly tortured and imprisoned for seven and a half years, four of those in solitary confinement. And he observed this—he said of the prisoners, “Those who expected things to get better did not survive; whereas, those who took every single day for what it exactly was, did.

The awful story of John the Baptist is actually a gift. It’s not candy coated. It’s ugly. But it reminds us how often it is in our world that speaking the truth to power results in injury or death. How easy it is, like Herod, to lose ourselves in the grip of lust, and fear, and guilt, hurting people profoundly without exactly intending it. How, like Herodias, revenge can take us over, possessing our every thought, convincing us that we can only be satisfied if that person gets what they deserve. Or how, like Salome, the feeling of power causes us to manipulate someone, just because we can.

A gruesome evil occurs in this tale out of a mix of fears and desires that we can fairly easily imagine, because we’re not strangers to any of them. My point is this: the point of looking closely at something horrible like this is to be able to see ourselves in it, because if we assume that evil arises from something wholly other than what we are, if we can’t imagine participating in something that we would call evil, then it is very much more likely that we will be blind to our own participation in evil when it occurs. Or at least we will easily excuse ourselves.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is hard medicine. In it, the only passageway to the kingdom of God is through repentance, continual repentance. The kingdom of this world is built on righteousness because, as we know, all power calls itself righteous. But the kingdom of God occurs in this world when people realized their lack of righteousness, and for that matter the lack of righteousness, really, anywhere. Then there can be forgiveness, then hostilities may come to an end. People are still being beheaded in our world. There is still great evil afoot.

In southern Lebanon, we read in the newspaper last week, a family of ten died in the shelling. And no one exactly intended it, not the government that ordered the offensive, not the commander who ordered the strike, not the soldier who pressed the button, not the people who built the bombs, not the investors in the company that the built the bombs, not the governments who support the government who ordered the strike. Nobody exactly intended it. All the decisions and the actions that preceded that event have been individually justified, in one way or another. But a family of ten died, caught in a cross-fire. No one person or group is responsible, and therefore all are implicated, including us, you and me.

If it is true that repentance, that is, the acknowledgement of our part in that which harms others, if it’s true that repentance is the coming of the kingdom and the end of hostilities, then may we learn repentance well; may we live it in our lives, and may we teach it to our children, for how much more hostility can this world stand?