Year B,
Pentecost 8 Mark 6:14-29 During
Advent, we hear the story of John’s the Baptist’s miraculous conception and
birth…usually a few weeks before the story of Jesus’ miraculous conception and
birth. The miracle of John’s conception
is that his parents were older and had long since given up on the idea of
having a child. The circumstances were different for Jesus’ conception, but the
parallels are hard to miss. The Gospel
of Mark doesn’t include the story of either John or Jesus’ miraculous
conception and birth. Mark just left those out.
For Mark, the way to know Jesus, and maybe John as well, was through his
death and sacrifice. While Mark is the
shortest Gospel, the story of John’s death is fairly extensive. It’s also unusual
because it’s one of only three scenes in the entire Gospel of Mark, where Jesus
isn’t present. So why—why would Mark
feel the need to include this rather gory story? Does it teach a lesson? Does
it help us understand Jesus better? I don’t think so.
One of
the mistakes we can easily make when reading the Bible is assuming that the
stories are morality tales—that every story can help us differentiate between
right and wrong, just and unjust. Yet in
this story, the good guy gets killed and there are no consequences for the
gruesome killing. There is a reason that
it doesn’t appear in many children’s bibles—at least not the ones I have seen. There is also a reason we hear a lot of
sermons about John’s birth and very few about his death. It’s an odd and disturbing story. However,
for Mark, the death and the sacrifice of Jesus and John are incredibly important
to our faith and it’s helpful to look at the parallels between the two.
John was killed by Herod Antipas. There were a number
of Herods in that time and it would be easy to confuse Herod Antipas with the
Herod who ruled when Jesus was born.
That was Herod the Great. The Herod in our reading today is his
son. He had less power than his father
because he was only in charge of a quarter of his father’s kingdom. Despite the fact that Mark called him King
Herod, that was not his title. He was not a king. He wanted to be a king and even petitioned
the Roman Emperor for that title, but he never got it.
We can see from our reading that he wasn’t a strong
leader. He clearly had some respect for
John and even liked listening to him, despite the fact that John openly
condemned him for his marriage to his current wife who he stole from his step
brother. The basis of John’s critique
was that marrying your brother’s wife would have been against Jewish law. Even to non-Jews, this marriage was
considered immoral because Herod divorced his wife so he could marry his
brother’s wife.
Yet despite the fact that Herod liked John and
considered him a holy man, he was easily trapped by not only his wife’s
manipulations, but his own need to please and his fear of looking bad in front
of his guests. The text says, “The king
was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for his guests, he did
not want to refuse her.” That means that he didn’t want to be embarrassed in
front of his friends and the important people of the community. He lacked fortitude. An historian named
Josephus who wrote in the first century, wrote about John the Baptist’s
death. According to Josephus, Herod was
worried that John was too powerful and was a threat to his own power. Herod was an insecure man and a weak leader.
Jesus’ death was a little more complicated…perhaps
just because we have a lot more information.
There were numerous groups of people conspiring to kill him. Yet in the end, the person who made the
decision was another Roman appointee—Pilate.
Pilate is depicted as man who was also swayed by the crowds. The Gospels
portray him as not wanting to crucify Jesus, but being convinced by the Jewish
authorities and the crowd. Some Gospels seem
to indicate that he was trapped and controlled by the Jewish leadership. The reality
is that Pilate could have done whatever he wanted. He didn’t have to listen to
the Jewish leadership. He simply didn’t have the backbone to stand up to the
mob. He too was insecure and anxious about the threat to his authority.
The bad
news is that there is no shortage of examples of weak, insecure and immoral
leaders today. It would be tempting to
read this story of the death of John and say, “Well political leadership has
always been corrupt, what can we mere mortals do about it?” It’s true John was
killed. Nobody could have stopped that from happening. But let’s not forget the last line in our
reading for today. “When (John’s)
disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a
tomb.”
Imagine the kind of courage that must have
required. John was killed because he
challenged the authority of a powerful and volatile leader. His disciples must have known that in
claiming his body, they were claiming their devotion to him. It was a risky
move. While we hear little of John’s
followers in the rest of the Gospel, we know from other sources that they
didn’t go away. Their commitment didn’t
wane and that must have been extremely dangerous. This was an act of defiance and faith. Where Herod showed weakness and fear. John’s disciples showed courage and
love. In the face of corruption they
refused to be corrupted.
Mark
doesn’t tell us Jesus’ reaction to the news of John’s death. Right after this story Jesus takes his
disciples to a deserted place. Some
think they went to this deserted place to rest, but my guess is they were also
grieving. And they might have been
seeking a safe place. Jesus knew his
death was inevitable, but he also knew he had more to do and this was not the
time for him to die. He understood that the death of the prophet who described
himself as Jesus’ forerunner meant that his situation just got more perilous. Yet it was hard for Jesus to get away from
the crowds. They found him and instead of dismissing them as the disciples
suggested, he fed 5000. That was Jesus
response to the violence and instability around him. He served his people.
We
don’t always have control over what is happening around us. Even the most powerful in our world
don’t—we saw that in the shooting yesterday. Yet we do have control over how
we respond to injustice and violence.
There are times when we are meant to speak out like John the Baptist,
even when the truth is dangerous. There
are times when we need to show solidarity with those who have been brutalized,
murdered and unfairly treated like John’s disciples did when they claimed his butchered
body. There are times when we need to show people boundless compassion like
Jesus showed to the crowds that followed him.
This story of John’s beheading is gruesome and
horrible. There is no neat and tidy message in this story. Much like there in no neat and tidy message in
our political climate today. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something
here. No matter what horrible things are
happening, we are never powerless. There
are always ways to react and they are not the same ways for the same
people. What we cannot do it NOT
act. We must respond with hard truth,
with love, and with compassion.