Proper 10, Year B. July 11th, 2021. Mark 6:14-29. Herod Beheads John the Baptist
Synopsis: Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, arrested John the Baptist for preaching that his marriage to his brother’s former wife was not right in God’s eyes. This caused Herod’s new wife, Herodias, to desire John’s death. At Herod’s birthday, when he was drunk, she finally had her chance, and John’s head wound up on a platter at the dinner table.
Well… that Gospel reading isn’t a bedtime story you want to read your children. I asked my wife, “How am I supposed to preach a sermon about a King who steals his brother’s wife, an ‘erotic dancer,’ and a grasshopper-eating prophet?” She said, “Well, don’t lead with that.” She’s probably right, so I took her advice.
This one is not easy to preach or easy to hear. I like sermons that give me something to think about or sermons that make me say, “I needed that today.” This reading about John’s death doesn’t provide those warm fuzzies.
It’s not easy to find the spiritual application of the story; it’s a challenge even to know where to look to find the moral of the story?
The moral of the story certainly is not justice. John lived a good life before God and preached the truth, but In the end, it cost him his head.
So what is the reading trying to show us that we can apply to our lives in a post-pandemic world?
Background
Hold that question in your mind; we will come back to it.
This almost seems like this is a Star Wars movie. It’s as if we’ve been thrown into episode IV, but we need to return to Episode I to get the backstory.
We might benefit from a little bit of the back story to Herod Antipas and his relationship with John the Baptist.
Herod was the ruler of the region where John and Jesus lived. While vacationing in Rome, his brother’s wife caught his eye. One thing led to another, and it turned into a captivating soap opera. They apparently fell in love and ran off together.
One person’s treasure is another…. Well, let’s just say Phillip was apparently elated to see her go.
When Herod returned, John the Baptizer had a fire and brimstone Baptist sermon ready for him. John said it was wrong for him to steal his brother’s wife and marry her.
Then the predicament began; Herod liked John before his new marriage. The Gospels even say he listened to John with curiosity. But His new illegal wife, Herodias, loathed the prophet and patiently waited for an excuse to kill him.
That opportunity came when Herod hosted a birthday party for himself.
His stepdaughter, Salome, provided some entertainment and danced for Herod and the drunk generals, CEOs, and celebrities in attendance. I’m sure this dance was the box step.
The dance was so modest that it caused Herod to promise to give her anything she wanted… up to half his kingdom.
That sounds like the Flo Rida song from a few years ago, “I fell in love with a dancer.”
So Salome ran to her mother to ask, “what should I request?” That was finally her mother’s moment. She tried to get Herod to kill John, but he wouldn’t, but now Herod overextended himself. “The head of John the Baptist,” she said.
We know there was a conflict in Herod. He didn’t want to kill John. The reading said, “He feared John knowing he was a righteous man, and he wanted to protect him. For he liked to listen to John, even when it left him perplexed.”
But the text says that he went through with the execution anyway. Maybe it was to save face in front of his guests. It could have been a dedication to his word. Maybe he didn’t want to deal with his wife. Perhaps he knew his reputation would take a hit if he didn’t kill John.
We can see the conflict in the King.
Two Types of Truth Tellers
Allow me a parenthetical insert into this story. There are two types of people we usually can’t stand; the ones who lie to us… and the ones who have a gift of always telling us the truth.
I’ll never forget the first time I got in trouble for telling the truth.
It was thanksgiving lunch at my aunt’s house. I was about eight years old—old enough to hear plenty of Sunday school lessons on the importance of telling the truth.
My mother wanted to engage in the proper social etiquette and compliment the hostess on the food. “How’s lunch?” my mother asked me, anticipating that I would be her pawn in the etiquette game. I spoke my truth, “This turkey is dry as a bone.” I said.
That’s when non-verbal communication ensued between eight-year-old Rian and his mother. Later I received instructions to lie if necessary to save face.
Well, John didn’t like the turkey, told the truth about it, and he paid for it with his life.
Is there a moral to the story?
So, back to my original question, what should we do with a story about a King who stole his brother’s wife, threw a party for himself, promised a stripper half of his kingdom in front of a room full of drunk politicians, then had a conservative prophet killed to save face?
It’s tempting to just dismiss it as the tragic tale of John the Baptist’s death and admit there isn’t much we can glean from it.
One scholar I read last week said we just discard it as something that happened before the enlightenment—before we were developed enough to know better than to perpetuate such barbarism.
However, Let’s not write it off too quickly because some things never change, even 2,000 years later. At present, perhaps more than ever, we live in an age of corruption much like John.
People are still quick to treat marriages and relationships like disposable contracts and leave their significant other’s whenever it feels good.
So to say we have intellectually progressed past “such barbarisms” is naïve at best.
Who am I in the passage?
What if the story’s point is not as much about John’s death as it is about Herod’s missed opportunity?
The story almost reminds me of King Lear… Perhaps Shakespeare would call this “The Tragedy of Herod Antipas.”
See if you resonate: I have a tendency, you probably do too if you’re at the thanksgiving table of honesty, to place myself in the role of the hero. I like to see myself as John… the great prophet who speaks truth to power, who stands at the gates of the capital telling Herod of his sin.
The truth is I’m probably guilty of distancing myself from people who speak hard reality in my life. I’ve been guilty of trying to impress the important people in front of me to the detriment of those who really mattered.
I’ve even gripped about the preacher while others were too, even though secretly I liked him and listened to him.
The true tragedy of Herod is that when he faced difficult decision points, he took the easy path because it took less spirituality and less integrity. After the death of Jesus, his wife’s brother defeated him in a power struggle with the Roman emperor and convinced the emperor that Herod would lead a revolt against Rome.
Emperor Caligula banished him to Spain, where, Like King Lear, he slowly went insane before the emperor sent an assassin to kill him and his wife, Herodias.
Where is Jesus in the passage?
This is the only story in his Gospel that does not revolve around Jesus. No wonder it feels hopeless; Christ isn’t in it. I think Mark wanted us to realize that when Jesus isn’t the center of the story, the results are tragic and hopeless.
Where is that grain of truth? It’s that we’re all a little bit like Herod.
We’re complex, and we have various people and places and ideas tugging at our souls from a myriad of directions. We all write our stories. We all have twists and turns we did not expect that test our character. It’s who we are, and it’s the decisions we make in the times of tension that ultimately pen our history.
But we have the opportunity to write Jesus at the center of the story.
Amen.
It’s Okay to Leave Your safety Net
Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany
Simon Peter and his brother Andrew didn’t attend career day during their Sr. Year in High School. They never sat around a warm fire on a chilly evening and talked with their father about what they wanted to do when they grew up. There was only one option, they would be fishermen on the Sea of Galilee for their entire lives.
Today, some children know they will take over their family business after they have completed college and then earned an MBA.
Peter and Andrew were different; they never knew a childhood without labor on the Sea of Galilee. From the time they were strong enough to cast a net into the water and clean it afterward, they know their lot in life was to smell of fish, salt, and sweat.
Their friends, James and John, were born into the life too. Six days a week, they worked all night and half of the day. They were in a bubble, and except for going south to Jerusalem, they wouldn’t ever travel outside a few miles of where they were born.
That makes me wonder… did these four men, Peter, Andrew, James, and John, have a secret? Messianic expectations were at an all-time high in the 20s and 30s A.D. Did they daydream of getting away from it all in a new Kingdom where the Christ would rule?
I think they did, and I think Jesus knew it.
Before we go any further, let me point out something important: The disciples desired change: spiritual change, social change, political change, financial change, and most of all, religious change. Be careful what you wish for.
Excitement for a new beginning.
When we catch up to them in the first chapter of Mark, they are stuck in their predetermined lives, fishing the same waters they fished for decades before.
They were ready for change. So when Jesus comes along and says “follow me.” they do not hesitate, they do not overthink it, they do not form a committee to decide if Jesus really called them; Mark says, “immediately they left their nets and followed him.”
We can respect that kind of commitment. They still had to do three years of seminary and supervised ministry before they were ready to take the message of resurrection and love to the Mediterranean world. But in one moment, their mundane lives drastically shifted.
Jesus knew they wanted more from life than the smell of sardines. Jesus also knew their hearts were prepared for the Messiah’s arrival. They were the perfect candidates to be the first followers of Christ.
Sometimes life presents us crucibles, moments where the trajectory of our life is decided in one instant. Those four men made a choice for a new beginning…and that choice continues to… feed the hungry, heal the sick, affirm the shamed, comfort the fearful, strengthen the weak, and change the shape of the world.
Don’t miss your moment.
A Call to Kingdom Work
Following Christ wasn’t just about being part of his entourage, it was also saying yes to the hard work of the Kingdom.
All my life I’ve heard, “If the disciples had known what they were getting into, they would have had second thoughts.” I think we’ve had that wrong. There’s something in this text that tells us that these four men did know what they were doing. It’s been hiding in plain sight: “Follow me, and I’ll make you fish for people.”
Wait… they know what it means to fish.
They know how exhausting it is to have patience when the fish are not moving. They know strength is required to heave nets full of fish and sea creatures to the beach. They know the frustration of sewing linen nets back together every single morning after a night of fishing. And perhaps most importantly, they know the way people in town look at a fisherman who reek of salted sardines.
“Hey Peter, Andrew… I’ll make you do what you do now, except I’m going to add the complexity of humanity.”
They want to escape fishing, and when the opportunity comes along, they find out they will still be fishing… but this time it’s for for more difficult catch.
Those first four disciples knew that following Jesus meant hard work… real Christianity—not pseudo-faith—is not a behavioral checklist. It is accepting a call to a new beginning… and a call to the work of the Kingdom.
Letting Go of the Security Net
But there is one thing that I’m still trying to figure out about this text. Maybe y’all can help me out in a moment.
I find it odd that the Gospel writer says that immediately Peter and Andrew dropped their nets on the beach and followed Jesus. He also says that James and John were in a boat with their father and their servants. When Jesus called them, they left their father Zebedee in the boat with their nets and immediately followed him.
In a culture of patriarchal honor, abandoning one’s family seems like an insult to everything they hold sacred. They leave families, parents, jobs, and all other responsibilities, to wander around with an itinerant preacher.
They didn’t even have to think about their decision. What could cause a man to do that?
The Central Question… What does it mean?
They leave everything they know behind to follow Jesus. They surrender to possibility, with the full knowledge that this is the biggest risk of their lives.
Why?
What does it mean when four men, groomed from birth to live and die in one vocation, walk away without a moment’s notice to walk a tightrope across the Grand Canyon?
What is the spiritual lesson tied up in men leaving their nets on the beach to follow Jesus?
I don’t have the perfect answer. I have my suspicion… Could it be that following Christ actually means letting go of your safety nets?
Amen.
God Will Redeem the Difficulties
I read an article recently from the British Broadcasting Network about a town in Nigeria celebrating their tiny village’s renaming. The name was “The village of idiots.” Some 70 years ago, the people settled too close to a river known as “The idiotic river.”
One man from there said, “It was shameful telling people that I came from the “area of idiots.” So, the village elder decided to finally change the name. The area of idiots down by the idiotic river got a new name, “The area of plenty.” I think it’s safe to say that’s an improvement.
I couldn’t help myself… I had to read the comments. One particular kind-hearted gentleman said, “Now it’s the village of plenty… of idiots.”
There’s a lot in a name. Last week I had some fun and researched some… interesting… town names. There’s Nothing Arizona, and there’s Nowhere Colorado… But wait… there’s Hell for Certain, Kentucky. Perhaps you dated someone from there once or twice.
There’s knockemstiff Ohio. Apparently, it doesn’t refer to fighting, but it’s supposedly a reference to the power and the octane level of their moonshine. It will knock em’ stiff!
One of my favorites was Slapout, Oklahoma. Apparently, way back in the good ole’ days, limited inventory plagued the local store; it was always “slap out” of whatever you needed.
That brings us to today’s Gospel reading: Philip tells his brother Nathaniel, “We’ve found the Christ; he is Jesus of Nazareth!” Nathaniel says, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
Nazareth in the Culture
His suspicion was partly justified. In the 1st century, Nazareth wasn’t quite a gated community. It was Nowhere Galilee, and it was slap out of a good reputation.
Nazareth was infamous for not being the most welcoming of places. People saw the residents as “Those people from the north.” They were the backwoods knockemstiff moonshine runners.
To put it in the Star Wars universe… Nazareth is the outer rim planet of Tatooine.
“Hey Nathaniel, we found the Christ; he’s Jesus from Nazareth.”
Nazareth Earned its Reputation
Nazareth’s issues are even listed in the Gospels!
Luke says Jesus preached his first sermon in his hometown synagogue. While there, he had what bishop Russell would call “a run-in” with religious officials.
Jesus stood and read the Isaiah scroll where it says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring the Good News to the poor.” Then he sat down and said, “Today, you watched this fulfilled in your hearing.”
Now, there’s a mystery here. Was Jesus talking about the financially poor? Or… as I see it… was “the poor” actually those present who were spiritually anorexic?
We know it made the men of Nazareth so furious that they drove him out of town and tried to throw him over the cliff outside the city gates!
They were all justice and no mercy.
No wonder that Nathaniel says, “Can anything good come from Hell for Certain Galilee?
Nazareth: Underneath the Fig Tree
But then the text turns in a different direction that raises our curiosity. Jesus meets Nathaniel and tells him, “you’re a man of integrity, and you do not manipulate others for your own gain.”
Nathaniel says, “How do you know me? I certainly don’t know you.”
There’s sarcasm there; “You’re making this statement about who I am, but you don’t even know me.”
That’s when I saw something that I had never seen before. I always looked over it with each lectionary cycle. Jesus says, “While you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” Then Nathaniel says, “Rabbi, you are the son of God.”
The Jewish faith says the Torah is like a “Tree of Knowledge.” It produces the fruit of new teachings generation after generation. Those who studied the Torah were said to be “sitting under the fig tree.” Now that’s quite an abrupt change! First, it was, “Nazareth? Impossible.” Then it was, “Don’t judge me; you don’t even know me.” Now, out of nowhere, Nathaniel does a complete 180—”You’re the son of God.”
I spent about two hours researching the Talmud and Midrash, and what I found opened my eyes.
To “sit under a fig tree” meant to sit under the shade of a Rabbi’s teaching, enjoying the fruit of his instruction and wisdom of the Torah.[1]
Jesus knew Nathaniel was a student. That’s why he says, “I see all the work you put into the study of the Messiah. As a matter of fact, that’s what you were doing the moment Phillip called you to tell you about the Messiah—to you about me.”Then Nathaniel realizes that Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus opens his eyes about the Messiah, but he also opens his eyes about Nazareth.
Nathaniel ruled out Nazareth. It couldn’t possibly be a place of redemption! But when he meets Jesus, suddenly the dark areas on the map and the bad neighborhoods downtown do not matter to him anymore.
Jesus opens his eyes, and Jesus transforms Nazareth.
Transforming Nazareth
Now, let’s step back from the 1st century for a moment and pull it forward into our day. Let’s personalize Nazareth.
What about the places in the soul that cause us shame? Or the scars we carry but won’t reveal? What about the tears, the fears that we’re too embarrassed to show?
There is a Nazareth in each of our souls! The Good news is that when we encounter the real Christ, God can take a stain on a map and transform it into a story of redemption.
But let’s step back even more and put Nazareth in an even larger context—let’s look at it socially.
I wonder if Nazareth was a little bit like Selma, Alabama. I wonder if no one wanted to go to Nowhere Alabama because it was a place with a dark reputation and a darker history?
Jesus couldn’t be present in a place like Selma! But Martin Luther King Jr. showed us that yes, God can begin a march in Selma that transforms a nation. Dr. King showed us that the Gospel is good news to the captives. Dr. King showed us that Jesus, faith, hope, love, justice, and peace were the liberating powers of God that overcome oppression.
There are plenty of Nazareths in our society today. Some are personal… some are social… But like Nathaniel, when we encounter the real Christ, we can proclaim what I titled this sermon:
God Will Redeem Your Struggles.
Amen.
Sermon for second Sunday after Epiphany
[1] See underthefigtree.com; myjewishlearning.com and Talmud Bekhorot 45b for tree as a sign of one’s behavior, and “sitting under a rabbi” as an illustration.