The Reverend Luther Zeigler
Emmanuel Church
July 15, 2012
Every Sunday
morning we sit in church together and listen to lessons from the Bible, trying
to discern how these ancient texts, written so long ago and in such different
settings, can still speak to us in our own time and place. And let’s be honest: such a task can often be a struggle,
particularly when we are given such sharply divergent texts as we are this
morning. On the one hand, we have a
reading from the Letter to the Ephesians that is a deeply theological and
poetic reflection by Paul (or one of his students) on God’s purposes for us and
the world; and on the other, we have a sordid tale of corruption, intrigue and
murder from Mark’s gospel about the unseemly death of John the Baptist. The question that frames my sermon this
morning is this: What do these very
different readings have to do with one another, and what possible relevance do
they have to our lives today?
Let’s begin
with the lurid tale since, being human, that is where most of us are secretly
drawn. This is the story of Herod
Antipas, one of the four sons of Herod the Great. Although Mark refers to Herod Antipas as
“king,” probably out of deference, he really isn’t one. Technically, he is more like a governor who,
upon his father’s death, had been given authority over the Galilee. Jesus likely would have been one of his
subjects and much of John the Baptist’s ministry takes place within his
lands. Herod Antipas desperately wants
to be king, like his late father, and spends much of his life lobbying to
become so.
In addition
to craving power, Herod also craves women.
Even though Herod is already married, he desires his brother Phillip’s
wife, Herodias. Herodias shares these
feelings and leaves her husband, Phillip, to marry Herod. The problem is that she doesn’t divorce
Phillip first (because women couldn’t initiate divorce under the law at the
time). Consequently, as our story opens,
Herod is married to two different women, one of whom, Herodias, finds herself
married to two different men, who happen to be brothers. Got that?
Into this
picture enters John the Baptist. Now, if
we know one thing about John the Baptist, it is that he is slightly crazy. Remember this is the guy who appears at the
very beginning of Mark’s gospel, clothed in camel’s hair and eating wild
locusts and honey, wandering the wilderness, proclaiming the coming of God’s
Kingdom, and pointing to Jesus. And a
big part of John’s craziness – and the reason we call him a prophet – is his
penchant for speaking his mind, telling it like it is, calling people on their
hypocrisy, and urging them to change their ways. So, when John the Baptist meets up with Herod
in our story and gets wind of his recent marriage to the already married
Herodias, you can guess what happens.
John tells Herod straight out:
“It is not lawful for you to marry your brother’s wife.”
To his
credit, Herod fears John, recognizing that he is a holy man who speaks the
truth. And while Herod doesn’t like hearing
John’s condemnation of his marriage to Herodias, his conscience prevents him from
doing John any harm because deep down he probably knows John is right.
Herodias,
however, has a very different reaction.
She is livid at John for trying to undermine her marriage, and she quite
literally wants his head. But since she
is herself powerless, Herodias is forced to hatch a secret scheme to trick her
husband into getting rid of John. And so
she uses the pretext of Herod’s birthday party as the stage upon which to exact
her vengeance. Herodias coaxes her
young and beautiful daughter, Salome, into providing entertainment at old
Herod’s birthday banquet by doing an exotic and sexually charged dance to the
great delight of Herod and all his buddies.
Indeed, Herod’s lust becomes so whipped up by Salome’s seductive charms
that he essentially pleas with her in front of all his friends: “Ask me for anything you want and I will give
it, but please just keep dancing!”
And here is
where Herodias lays her trap. She
whispers into her daughter Salome’s ear:
Ask him for the head of John the Baptist. Salome complies. Now Herod is in a bind. He doesn’t want to execute John, but he has
publicly committed to granting Salome a wish, and a ruler has to keep his word
or risk losing his claim to authority.
He can’t appear to be weak. And
so, Herod begrudgingly orders John’s execution.
The depths of Herodias’ anger, however, are so deep that she not only
wants John killed, but specifically asks for his head, so that she can
humiliate and mock him even in death.
It is quite
a story, its plot every bit the equal of a classical tragedy. It is a tale of the many ways in which power
can corrupt the human soul: of how the
powerful can be tempted to think they are above the moral law that guides the
rest of us, of how ambition often blinds us to what is good and right, of how sex
can be one more tool in our thirst for power over others, of how prone we are
to deceive even those closest to us when it works to our advantage, and of how
truly vicious we can become when others get in the way of our plans.
And lest we
think that we moderns have somehow progressed beyond this ancient tale of
corruption and gruesome display of power, we need merely consider what King
Assad is doing right now to people who oppose his regime in Syria, of what Robert
Mugabe is doing in Zimbabwe and the Congo, or what Khadafy did to his opponents
in Libya, or what Papa Doc Duvalier did to his people in Haiti, or even what
our own forebears did to native Americans on our soil during colonial times and
to African-Americans during the darkest days of American slavery. While the story of John the Baptist’s
beheading is an extreme one, to be sure, its lessons about the corruptibility
of the human soul are as true today as they were then.
But Mark
tells this story in his gospel not merely to teach us a lesson about the morality
of power, but also to foreshadow what is to come in the life of Jesus. For John the Baptist is not the only truth-telling
voice crying in the wilderness who will be crushed by the powerful for his
prophetic witness. God will indeed send
his own Son to speak even more eloquently and forcefully against the brokenness
of this world, and like John, he will be confronted by Roman ruler, conspired
against by others, executed in a hideous and humiliating way, and mocked in his
death. The story of John’s plight at the
hands of Herod points us, in short, toward the Passion and Jesus’ crucifixion
at the hands of Pilate.
Were this
the only story we had from Mark’s gospel, we would be left with just another
tragic story of human susceptibility to the corrupting and corrosive effects of
power, and of how terrible things can happen to those who stand up for good in
this world. But John’s beheading is not
the end of the story, and every gospel story must be read through the lens of
the Resurrection, and of God’s vindication of everything that is good, just,
true, and beautiful in that mighty act of life’s victory over death. And it is in precisely this sense that our
epistle reading today from Ephesians provides the counterpoint that rescues us
from a narrative of tragedy.
For if
Mark’s account of John the Baptist’s imprisonment and death is a bleak and
depressing story of what happens when humans are in control, and of the havoc
they can wreak when given power, our lesson from Ephesians is a triumphant and
joyous testimony to what happens when we recognize that God is in fact in
control, and of the depths of God’s determination to use His power to clean up
the messes we make, to straighten the crooked paths we walk, and to make whole
all that we break and have broken.
There is,
you see, a deeper, truer, and ultimately redeeming narrative that underlies the
sordid events of human history, and that is the narrative written by God in the
life, teachings, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And whether we know it or not, we are a part
of that story because, in Christ, God has, out of pure love, adopted us as his
own. The mystery of His will, and his
plan for our future and the future of all that He has created, is that God will
not allow the corrupting ways of human power to have the last word. We merely need to allow ourselves – our
hands, our hearts, our bodies, our selves – to become the instruments of Christ’s
love in the little time we have on this earth.
We need to set our hope on Christ’s story, not on Herod’s.
This is the
hope that has sustained Christians over the centuries, from the earliest
martyrs of the faith to the saints of more recent vintage, people like Dietrich
Bonhoeffer and his witness against anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Rosa Parks
and her witness against racism in America, Desmond Tutu and his witness against
apartheid in South Africa, Dorothy Day and her witness against poverty in our
cities, and to all the anonymous Christians throughout history who in much
smaller ways have lived out their Christian faith by embracing the good,
opposing injustice, pursuing peace, and celebrating the beautiful.
So, as we
leave this place today and return to the individual stories of our own lives,
to their ups and downs, successes and failures, joys and disappointments, we
should be emboldened by these promises God has made in Christ to make our lives
meaningful and whole in ways that we often are not able to see from our limited
perspective. And, as we watch the news
tonight and see again on our television screens one example after another of
the foibles and failures of our human condition, and of the occasionally awful
things we can do to one another, we should not let ourselves become
discouraged. Because God is feverishly
at work writing an ending to our human drama that will redeem all that seems
lost. Be thankful to know that the end
of the story is assured: the good news
of God’s love in Christ will overwhelm the Herods of this world every time. Amen.
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