We Can Learn from Herod by The Rev. Donald Hamer
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Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
Pentecost 7 – July 12, 2015
Mark 6:14-29
What We Can Learn from Herod
One of the things I love about the Revised Common Lectionary is that it provides us with lots of opportunities to focus on some of the great stories of the Bible. And today we have one of those great stories – the story of Herod ordering his soldiers to go to John the Baptist in the prison, cut off his head and bring it to him. Books, plays and even an opera have been written about it. And that could be it – a powerful ruler cuts off the head of one of his subjects on the whim of his daughter and wife, and we could leave it at that. But we lose some of the moral richness of the story if we only look at it skin deep.
To start, this is NOT Herod the Great, who was King when Jesus was born – this is Herod Antipas, his second surviving son. His father was so skilled a politician that he was the first to be known as “King of the Jews” and his descendants, including Antipas, became “tetrarchs”– a title with little authority – puppet rulers through the first century of the Christian era.
Mark places this passage immediately after the passage in which Jesus has sent out the 12 apostles 2 by 2 to heal the unclean spirits and preach a gospel of repentance, to cast out demons and to anoint the sick and heal them. Herod has heard about Jesus and the work of his disciples, and when the passage begins there is discussion about who Jesus is. Mark tells the story of John’s beheading as a flashback to what Herod has already done, and it is clear that Herod is haunted by the fact that he was responsible for the Baptizer’s death. So haunted, in fact that he believes that Jesus is actually John the Baptizer who has been raised and has come back.
The flashback story focuses on the person of John and the person of Herod. On the one hand there is John the Baptizer – one who is comfortable living on the margins of society. He lives in the wilderness, wears camelhair clothing and subsists on wild honey and locust-beans. He is a prophet calling people to repentance in preparation for one who is to come who is greater than he, and he is willing to risk arrest and death for that cause. There is a lesson about the nature of prophecy here – prophecy can serve as both a warning and a promise. Remember that the role of prophets in Scripture is not to be fortune tellers, but rather to look at the circumstances and to make people aware of the consequences that will follow if that behavior is not changed. John the Baptizer wonderfully combines both warning and promise – a warning about the need to repent and a promise about the coming of the Kingdom in the person of Jesus.
Then there is Herod Antipas. Unlike John, his very identity is to be at the center of power and living a life of comfort and security. He is caught in a web of social, personal and moral dilemmas. He has a title but little power; he himself is subject to the pressure of his Roman superiors. As such, he wants to please them, and both his family and political allies with whom he surrounds himself apply additional pressure on him.
And so John the Baptizer presents a unique problem for Herod. He has challenged Herod’s morals, and Herod’s authority itself, for having married his brother’s wife Herodias, something not permitted under Jewish law. Herod, under pressure from his wife and others to take action, imprisons John. And yet at the same time, he is somewhat protective of him. He is intrigued by this odd prophet. Mark tells us in verse 20 that Herod feared John, “knowing that he was a righteous and holy man” and so Herod protected John from his wife’s desire to have him killed. But Mark goes further to show a human, more sensitive side to Herod. In verse 21 he writes that when Herod heard John preach, “He was greatly perplexed, and yet he liked to listen to him.” There is something in John’s message that speaks to Herod’s higher values and engages those values, creating an internal tension in Herod in which he has to balance the pressure of his family and political circles and yet remain faithful to – or at least mindful of – his own personal standards and inner values. He recognizes in John the kind of human authenticity to which he too is called, but he is too caught up in the demands to meet the expectations of his kingship in which he realizes he does not securely hold the power that his title would suggest. Herod knows enough about truth to recognize his own unfairness – his one great flaw is his insatiable need to be in control – having it, protecting it, keeping it.
And so this story of Herod and John is not just a struggle of light versus darkness, but one of political power versus prophetic faith.
Mark highlights this point again in verse 26, when his daughter Salome tells her father that she wants the head of John on a platter. Mark writes that Herod “was deeply grieved, yet out of regard for his oaths and for his guests, he did not want to refuse her.” He becomes a victim of his own making -- forced into the position of reacting to the events around him rather than being pro-active and making things happen.
On the surface of this story, John is the only one whose life is at risk. Herod makes his public image and pride more important than regard for the life of a righteous man. And yet Herod, too, has something at risk here. In the foolish abuse of his power by casually ceding it to the whims of his teenaged daughter, he has destroyed his relationship with John, which will continue to haunt him in the person of Jesus – the same Jesus whom Herod will once again meet during Jesus own trial several years later. In ordering the death of the prophet, Herod may well have lost connection with his own soul.
Prophets and those in authority often are at uneasy odds. Those in authority are comfortable with the way things are: What’s not to like? They are in control! And the role of the prophet is to engage those in authority in the prophet’s cause by showing them what is wrong with the present state of affairs and the negative consequences that will be sure to follow if things are not changed. By pointing out the danger to the authority’s self interest in preserving the status quo, as John did to Herod, the prophet engages the authority in the prophet’s own cause, even if it is a cause with which the authority disagrees or a warning that the authority does not want to hear.
We have many parallels to the John and Herod relationship in our own history and experience. King Henry VIII and Thomas Moore, who set a moral standard that Henry could not meet and lost his head for it. Many of the saints who are memorialized in the Episcopal Daily Office companion, Holy Women, Holy Men were prophets in their own time, truth tellers and whistle blowers who challenged privilege and the injustice of the status quo, who demanded we examine abuses of power, who challenged ignorance in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement were prophets who made the civil leaders of their time very uncomfortable indeed. The moral courage and the visual images of their crusade ultimately proved more powerful than the violence that was waged against them under the authority of the state. We have witnessed the latest chapter of that crusade in the wake of the murders in the AME Zion Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The horror perpetrated by a young man who was enamored of the Confederate Flag as a symbol of white supremacy jolted our national consciousness about the continuing racism in our society. But I would contend that it was the grace showed by the survivors of those murdered in immediately forgiving the murderer – the very next day, immediately and without reservation -- that made them modern day prophets. They are prophets to the truth that love will always trump violence, that God’s grace is stronger than the power of evil in our world. And it was the power of that prophetic witness that has caused the unexpected and almost unbelievable – the swift and certain move of southern states – South Carolina in particular – to remove the confederate flag from public display as a symbol of honor. Did anyone see the passionate speech of another modern-day prophet, Rep. Jenny Anderson Horne – a Republican representative from the Charleston area and a descendant of President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis? She was in tears as she told her fellow lawmakers that this was not about heritage – it was about doing what is right. She bore witness to the difficulty and the pain involved in confronting one’s own position of comfort in light of new circumstances that scream out, “Wait a minute! Stop and reflect! This is wrong!”
The prophetic word is one that points us to truth and breaks through the denial of those who profit or otherwise benefit from what our culture presents as the status quo. It can be recognized by its appeal to the principles for which Jesus stood and for which he died for us: equality; justice; freedom; love and charity toward others; lifting up those who are on the margins of society and respecting the dignity of every human person. Those values that we reaffirm each time we renew our baptismal vows.
And yet we – each of us – need to acknowledge and confess that our human inclination is to prefer social stability and equilibrium, what scientists call “homeostasis” – things staying in a comfortable balance that doesn’t upset the norm. Let’s face it – whatever our political stripes, we like what we are used to, what we know. It’s like comfort food. And yet, our society, our world, our church are on the move, and God is always tapping on us to pay attention; not to FOLLOW the world, mind you, but to ENGAGE IT AND TO challenge IT. . Truth to tell, we are usually pretty comfortable with injustice and inequality so long as we ourselves are comfortable and our lives are not directly touched. That is because it is our human nature to prefer stability and the security it bring us to what is usually the messy, chaotic, vulnerability-inducing process of personal and social transformation into which God calls us.
John challenged Herod to imagine alternatives to the only world he knew, and Herod failed the test. The modern-day prophets challenge us to imagine alternatives to “normal” when “normal” stands in the way of the coming of the Kingdom even though it is what we are most comfortable with. Jesus himself left behind many who found him both odd and interesting, perhaps even perplexing. Like them, we know if we listen long enough, we, too, will be brought to a point of decision we would just as soon avoid. We would rather remain in our comfort zones.
Hearing, and heeding, the prophetic word has consequences. Hearing, and heeding, the prophetic word leads to changed, even transformed, lives. With enough followers, Jesus can lead us to a changed world. Amen.