And You Thought Reality TV Was
Bad!
Mark 6:14-29
A Sermon Preached at Centenary United Methodist Church
Richmond, VA
Sunday, July 15, 2012
**********
Even in the face of
deceit, treachery, and murder, the kingdom of God is never finally thwarted,
but always advancing toward its fullness.
**********
It is not always easy to do the right thing; and it is often
easy to be quiet when something wrong is being done. Whether in business, church, politics, or
family, we have experienced more than one occasion when doing or saying the
right thing might risk for us the breakdown of a relationship or being
ostracized in some way. How do we
respond to the challenge to do what is right?
Do we calculate what others will think, what the cost might be, how
others might perceive us—or do we do the right thing even when it might cost us
a relationship, our job, or our lives?
Here in Mark’s gospel, we gain insight into two broad ways
of approaching the dilemma of whether to do what is right or what is
expedient. If we are honest, we may see
some of both of these approaches in ourselves.
This striking passage, which probably needs an R rating, comes in the
middle of two important events in the experience of Jesus and his disciples. Jesus has commissioned the twelve to go out
into the world to preach the gospel, heal the sick, and free people from the
power of evil. Then, the twelve return
to report to Jesus about how God has blessed them on this, their first
mission. Mark is not just filling time
in his gospel while the disciples are on the road—he is trying to teach us
something about the shape of Christian discipleship.
Jesus, through his
own words and deeds and the ministry of his disciples, was developing quite a
reputation. Herod couldn’t help but
wonder who this Jesus was, where he came from, how he got so much power, why he
was so popular, and whether he posed any immediate threat to him. His immediate thought was to interpret Jesus
through a concept familiar in the ancient world—he was simply John the Baptist
raised from the dead. Believing that the
ghost of a great person often took up residence in someone else, Herod couldn’t
help but wonder if John had come back from his grave to haunt him.
Herod had good reason
to worry. A prophet whose message had much
in common with Jesus had also gained a wide following. His name was John the Baptist. He had called people to prepare for the
Messiah’s arrival by repenting of their sin.
But John the Baptist had the temerity to challenge Herod, the king of Galilee on the conduct of his personal life. Herod had seduced his brother’s wife and
married her. This probably didn’t
surprise John or the people of Galilee. For Herod’s family had a long history
of cruelty, immorality, and dysfunction.
This Herod, Herod Antipas, was the son of another Herod—Herod the
Great. You remember him. When he heard about Jesus’ birth and the
claim that another king was on the scene, he demanded that all of the infant
boys under two years of age in Bethlehem
be killed. Herod the Great was married
many times. Toward the end of his life,
he became insanely paranoid and murdered member after member of his own family
until it became a Jewish saying, “It is safer to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s
son.”
The incestuous,
murderous nature of this family is astonishing, even by modern standards. Because of the numerous marriages, the family
genealogy is nearly impossible to sort out.
So, I want to read a bit from William Barclay’s commentary so you can
get some sense of why John, and undoubtedly other devout Jews, were so
disgusted with this family who ruled over them.
Barclay writes:
“First,
Herod married Doris, by whom he had a son Antipater, whom he murdered.
Then he married Mariamne, the Hasmonean, by
whom he had two sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, whom he also murdered.
Herodias, the villainess of the present
passage, was the daughter of this Aristobulus.
(Herodias, would have been the granddauther of Herod the Great).
Herod the Great then married another
Mariamne, called the Boethusian.
By her
he had a son called Herod Philip.
This
Herod Philip married Herodias, who was the daughter of his half-brother,
Aristobulus, and who was therefore his own niece.
By Herodias, this Herod Philip had a daughter
called Salome, who is the girl who danced before Herod the ruler of
Galilee in our passage.
Herod the Great then married Malthake, by whom he had two sons—Archelaus
and Herod Antipas who is the Herod of our passage and who was the ruler of
Galilee.
The Herod
Philip who married Herodias originally, and who was the father of Salome,
inherited none of Herod the Great’s dominions.
He lived as a wealthy private citizen in
Rome.
Herod Antipas—the Herod of this passage—visited him in
Rome.
There he seduced his wife Herodias and persuaded her to leave her husband
and marry him.
Now note who Herodias
was:
(a) she was the daughter of his
half-brother, Aristobulus, and therefore his niece; and (b) she was the wife of
his half-brother Herod Philip, and therefore his sister-in-law.
Previously this Herod Antipas had been
married to a daughter of the king of the Nabateans, an Arabian country.
She escaped to her father who invaded Herod’s
territory to avenge his daughter’s honor and heavily defeated Herod.”
[1]
You get the picture.
Herod Antipas, like his father Herod the Great, used his power to get
whatever he wanted from whomever he wanted it.
John had the audacity to speak the truth about Herod to his
face. Herod had John thrown in
prison. But something intrigued Herod
about John. He was strangely drawn to
the preaching of this prophet from the desert who’d had the courage to tell him
the truth. Perhaps he secretly
contemplated how his life might be different if he could have the courage to repent
of his own sin and go down a path different from that of his father’s.
One evening, Salome,
the daughter of Herodias, danced for Herod at the palace at Machareus, which
stood on a lonely ridge, surrounded by terrible ravines, overlooking the east
side of the Dead Sea.
Dancing in a way only
prostitutes would, Salome, with the approval of her mother, pleased Herod
greatly.
He was so enamored with this
sensuous display that he rashly promised her:
“Whatever you want, I will give you—up to half my kingdom.”
Salome went to her mother and asked her advice. Herodias told her, “Ask for John the
Baptist’s head to be brought on a platter.”
She did. And Herod, Mark says,
was deeply grieved. That’s an odd
response, isn’t it, for someone who had no compunction about taking his own
brother’s wife. Here is a moment of
decision for Herod. There is no reason
he cannot refuse this request. Yes, he
will look bad for a moment in front of his guests, and yes, his wife, Herodias,
might become so furious with him that she leaves him. But this moment is a moment where Herod can
make a break with the troubled past of his family and his own sinfulness and
start down a whole new path. And perhaps
he considers this—for he was deeply grieved.
But, the opinion of his guests about him, and his need to please his
wife, were in the end more important.
So, like his father before him who’d murdered his own sons, this Herod
concedes. John the Baptist is executed. His head is brought to Herodias on a
platter. What a birthday present!
Herod represents many things.
He is intrigued by John’s proclamation of the
truth about his life, but not willing to embrace that truth.
He is grieved over the prospect of John’s
death, but unwilling to lose faith with his guests or his family.
Thus, he misses the possibility of new life
because the cost is just too great.
He
cannot stand the thought of being seen by his guests or his subjects as
breaking a silly oath.
He cannot stand
the thought of his wife’s anger toward him because of his sympathy for one who
had called her way of life into question.
In the end, he cannot stand to be associated with this prophet who came
to point the way to Jesus, the one his own father had tried to crush when he
was only an infant.
Intrigued,
attracted, perhaps, almost persuaded—but in the end unwilling to make a break
with his past, his way of life, his standing in the community.
I doubt that any of us has been involved in things quite as
unseemly as Herod and his family, nor have we been in positions of great power
where we have faced the moral question of how to maintain our integrity and
hold on to power. But we are tempted
each day in ways we do not perhaps want to acknowledge. Maybe we are not tempted to murder—but we are
tempted to fail to see that because God has created all of us on this planet,
there is no human being outside of the scope of God’s concern—and therefore no
human being we can write off as having no claim on us. Maybe we are not tempted to do anything it
takes to gain and hold political power, but we may often fail to consider what
it means to say that Jesus is Lord over all things. And in light of that claim to consider
whether we are putting some other loyalty ahead of that—loyalty to family, or
business, or nation?
But, we are presented
another alternative—another way to respond to God’s claims on us. That of course, is John the Baptist. John is an odd, somewhat frightening
character to me. Frankly, I do not know
how comfortable I would be with John’s demeanor or his message. He strikes me as an intense, no-nonsense sort
of guy. He is consumed with being
faithful to God, and he wants others to be faithful to God as well. I am not sure how well his message would be
received today. We live in a time when
the most popular preachers who sell the most books are able to help us adjust
to the complexities of modern life rather than challenging them at their
core. We often prefer messengers who
show us how to cope with stress, how to manage anxiety, how to put faith to work
for our own prosperity. Many churches
are eager to find ways to help people feel comfortable with Jesus so they
out-Disney Disney. John the Baptist
comes along telling people that Jesus is coming to establish his reign upon the
earth and that unless you want to be left out, you need to repent. John calls people to line up their lives so
they fit God’s purpose, not to try to fit God’s purposes into their own sense
of their needs. I rather think John
might admire people who travel some distance each week to come downtown to
worship. It would remind him of all that time he’d
spent in the desert, trying to listen to God’s voice.
So, John stands up to
Herod.
He tells him his whole life is a
sham.
He makes him question
everything.
There are only two possible
words to describe someone like that:
stupid or courageous.
If a sermon is anything, it is to be a proclamation of good
news. This is a difficult text because
it’s hard, at least at first glance to find the good news. In this text, we come across a very messy
family situation that might make Jerry Springer blush. We read about a horrible, violent execution
at the end of a seductive dance that would make Dr. Phil ask, “What were you
thinkin’?”
Here’s a try at an attempt to find good news. First, even in this messy, unseemly situation
that involves incestuous family relations, a gross abuse of power, and a
grotesque execution with the victim’s head presented on a platter, God is
present. God is at work. I know it’s hard to see how immediately. But the fact that Mark tells us this story
means that it was important to early Christians who needed to know how God
brought salvation to the world in another person, Jesus, who lost his life
under circumstances that were just as unseemly.
The simple telling of this story in all its gory detail reminds us that
God is not absent from the messiest of human situations. “Where can I go from your spirit,” the
Psalmist asked. “If I descend to Sheol,
to hell itself, you are there.” The
corollary to affirming that God is present in such a situation is to remember
no matter how messy our lives or the lives of people we love become, God is
with us. That affirmation also comes
with a challenge and a summons for those of us who can hear it and bear it; a
summons to refuse to run from messy, uncomfortable situations, believing that
with God’s help, we might just be the vessel through which some measure of
healing and grace flows to others.
Second, there are times are efforts to confront injustice,
dysfunction, abuse of power will not always be met with open arms. Indeed, we may get ourselves in a good bit of
trouble trying to speak truth to power, or by insisting on obeying God’s call
rather than, like Herod, doing what is expedient.
Finally, in the end,
true
heroes of the faith are those people who find strength and courage to be
faithful even when it is costly.
That’s
what we learn from the prophets.
That’s
what we learn from John the Baptist.
That’s what we learn from Jesus.
That’s what we learn from Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin
Luther King, Jr., and Desmond Tutu.
With God’s help, we can become people with
the spiritual strength to stand up for the right even when that is not popular,
even when it may turn out to be very costly to us personally.
We believe our faithfulness, even if met with
great opposition, can be a vessel through God’s victory is attained.
Who
was United States Senator Edmund G. Ross of Kansas? I suppose you could call
him a Mr. Nobody. No law bears his name. Not a single list of Senate greats mentions
his service. Yet when Ross entered the Senate in 1866, he was considered the
man to watch. He seemed destined to surpass his colleagues, but he tossed it
all away by one courageous act of conscience.
Let’s
set the stage. Conflict was dividing our government in the wake of the Civil
War. President Andrew Johnson was determined to follow Lincoln’s policy of
reconciliation toward the defeated South. Congress, however, wanted to rule the
downtrodden Confederate states with an iron hand.
Congress
decided to strike first. Shortly after Senator Ross was seated, the Senate
introduced impeachment proceedings against the hated President. The radicals
calculated that they needed thirty-six votes, and smiled as they concluded that
the thirty-sixth was none other than Ross. The new senator listened to the
vigilante talk. But to the surprise of many, he declared that the president deserved
as fair a trial as any accused man has ever had on earth.? The word immediately
went out that his vote was shaky.
Ross
received an avalanche of anti-Johnson telegrams from every section of the
country. Radical senators badgered him to come to his senses. The fateful day
of the vote arrived. The courtroom galleries were packed. Tickets for admission
were at an enormous premium.
As
a deathlike stillness fell over the Senate chamber, the vote began. By the time
they reached Ross, twenty-four guilty votes had been announced. Eleven more
were certain. Only Ross’s vote was needed to impeach the President. Unable to
conceal his emotion, the Chief Justice asked in a trembling voice, “Mr. Senator
Ross, how vote you? Is the respondent Andrew Johnson guilty as charged?”
Ross
later explained, at that moment, “I looked into my open grave. Friendships,
position, fortune, and everything that makes life desirable to an ambitions man
were about to be swept away by the breath of my mouth, perhaps forever.”
Then,
the answer came, unhesitating, unmistakable: “Not guilty!” With that, the trial was over. And the
response was as predicted.
A
high public official from Kansas wired Ross to say: “Kansas repudiates you as
she does all perjurers and skunks.” The
open grave vision had become a reality. Ross’s political career was in ruins.
Extreme ostracism, and even physical attack awaited his family upon their
return home.
One
gloomy day Ross turned to his faithful wife and said, “Millions cursing me
today will bless me tomorrow...though not but God can know the struggle it has
cost me.” It was a prophetic
declaration.
Twenty
years later Congress and the Supreme Court verified the wisdom of his position,
by changing the laws related to impeachment.
Ross
was appointed Territorial Governor of New Mexico. Then, just prior to his
death, he was awarded a special pension by Congress. The press and country took
this opportunity to honor his courage which, they finally concluded, had saved
the country from crisis and division.[2]
Where
would we be if John the Baptist had not had the courage to speak the truth
without regard for his safety and security? Where would we be if Jesus had not entered
willingly into the messiness of our human lives and lived faithfully, even to
the point of his death on the cross?
What kind of impact could we make on the world if more of us were
willing to allow a little bit of that fearless, reckless, courageous
faithfulness rub off on us?
[1]
William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark in
The New Daily Study Bible (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press),
173-174.
[2]John Johnston,
Courage—You Can Stand Strong in the Face
of Fear (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books),
56-58.
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