Proper Eleven, Year B
Mark 6:14-29
This is an amazingly interesting passage. I could spend all
of my time this morning just describing the back story and never get around to
the sermon itself. It is also a highly unusual passage, for two reasons. First
because this is the rare story in the Gospels that has almost nothing to do
with Jesus. He never shows up in the entire tale. At the very beginning he is
mentioned once, when Herod thinks that Jesus might be John the Baptist raised
from the grave, and then it veers off into a story about how it came to pass
that Herod killed John, and Jesus is never mentioned again. The second reason
is that it is unrelentingly dark. There is no good news in this story. It begins
talking about death and then it ends in death. It’s an awful story and
strangely out of place. The whole story is a memory of something that had
happened years earlier, and it is sandwiched in between two parts of another
story that are, oddly, nothing but good news…but I’ll come back to that in a
moment.
I’ll go through the entire story, piece-by-bloody-piece,
with enough back story that you know what is going on, but not so much that you
doze off, and then I’ll TRY very hard at the end to bring all of this to a
conclusion that feels at least a little
bit like a real sermon. You let me know when I’m done if I succeeded in that.
The first thing I need to say is about this guy, Herod, who
is the center of the story. If most of us think of someone named “King Herod,”
the first thing that comes to mind is the guy the three wise men went to visit,
with the big star in the sky, who killed off all the little babies under the
age of four to keep Jesus, “the king of the Jews,” from growing up. Well, that
guy is not this guy. That was this
Herod’s father. Herod had four sons (from a variety of wives) and one daughter
(though historians are notoriously silent about daughters. When he died, Rome
(which owned Israel back in those days) split up the “Kingdom” of Israel into
four sections and placed each of Herod’s sons over one of the sections (there
may also have been one section given to the daughter, but there is almost
nothing written about her). So, the Herod in today’s passage is “Herod
Antipas,” the son. He was not a real King, but he was a “Tetrarch,” a term that
simply means someone who rules over a quarter of the land. And the land he got
to rule over was “Galilee,” which most of us have heard of, and a place called
“Perea,” which most of us have not.
Incidentally, though he was not really a King, he always
wanted to be one and called himself King and tried to act like one. He had all
of the pomp and vanity of a King without any of the power and influence or
property. In fact, it may well be that the reason why Mark called him a “King”
was out of irony, because he always called himself that and Mark was poking fun
at him. More on that later, too.
So, even though he never quite made it to being a real King,
he did come very close to being like his father in one way. He did his best to
be just as much of a scumbag as his father was, and in that he may have
succeeded. I’m going to share with you this morning the four (and maybe five)
biggest sins of King Wannabe Herod Antipas.
Sin one: His first wife was Phasaelis, the daughter of King
Aretas IV of neighboring Nabatea.[1] He
acquired her by cutting a deal with her daddy to settle a border dispute. “You
give me your daughter and I’ll give you about three hundred miles of good
farmland along our common border.”
Now, I know that was not unheard of in those days, but it
has always seemed to me that if you are a king and you think that that is a
good trade, then she has got to be really worth it, or you have to be real, real ugly. (But that’s just my
opinion.) At the very least it shows that his heart wasn’t in his wife.
The second sin was a little more serious. It seems that one
day Herod was on his way to Rome for a meeting with the Emperor and he stopped
off to visit his brother, Philip and his wife, Herodias, along the way.
Incidentally, Herodias was also King Herod’s granddaughter, and named after
him, and that made her Philip’s niece,
which was not illegal, but complicated. So, while there, as it happened, Herod and
Herodias became “friends,” and she decided to accompany him on the long and
boring buggy ride up to Rome. Probably just to keep him company because it was
a long trip, but you know how things happen, and after about a month or so,
they sort of stopped checking into the motels each night and asking for two
rooms…if you know what I mean… And then after they finally got back home again,
she filed for divorce and married Herod.
It’s interesting to note here that Philip, Herodias’
husband, was the poorest of all of King Herod the Great’s sons. He had been cut
out of the will when his father died and received the tiniest piece of the
kingdom to rule over. It was kind of like Herod Antipas received Wisconsin and
Philip got Rhode Island (maybe just Pawtucket). So, when she met Herod, who
actually ruled over the center of the old Kingdom, she jumped at the chance to
move up in the world.
The only requirement that she put on Herod was that he
divorce his wife. However, when they got back to Jerusalem, they found out that
when Phasaelis got wind of the scandal, she snuck out and ran home to Nabatea,
which meant that Herod married Herodias without being able to get a divorce
first. So, in addition to being an adulterer, and a wife-stealer (is that a
word?) Pasaelis’ action also made him break his promise and become a bigamist.
That may be the only piece of justice in the whole story.
Now in addition to all of this being just a bit immoral, it
was also patently illegal. Adultery, divorce, remarriage, and then bigamy, were
all illegal in those days, and these
two hit the quadruple crown. But, as you know, Herod thought he was a King and Kings
can do anything, so he got away with it. They actually claimed that by virtue
of their being employed by Rome (and Herod was educated in Rome), they,
therefore, were Roman citizens (though it’s not clear historically that that
was true), therefore they could play by Roman divorce laws. And in Rome you
could do anything as long as it didn’t block trade routes or scare the horses…
By the way, this little sin also nearly lost him his entire country,
because after Phasaelis’ daddy heard that his daughter had gotten thrown under
the bus, he declared war on Perea, one of the two provinces that Herod ruled
over. And Hot Shot Herod, who always thought he was a King, sent his forces to
the border (all forty of them) to fight back and they got knocked on their pitooey.[2] (Aretas,
was, after all, a real king and had a
real army). Which means, more
seriously, that his vanity and lack of sexual boundaries made him willing to
risk and lose the lives of hundreds
of innocent people so that he could have an affair and break the law, and show
off how tough he was (or how tough he thought
he was).[3]
Pheme Perkins, who teaches New Testament up at Boston College, used to say that
“Willingness to sacrifice others to maintain honor, prestige, and power remains
one of the great temptations of persons in positions of authority.”[4]
And she’s right.
Sin number three. Herod Antipas’ father, Herod the Great,
had several massive building programs in his lifetime as ways of showing off
his “greatness” to the power people back in Rome. Herod the younger (who always
wanted to be a king) tried the same thing. He built up, almost from scratch,
two cities. One was Sepphorus, a major city that you’ve probably never heard
of, that was just about four miles north of Nazareth (hometown of Jesus) and
the other was on the Sea of Galilee. You can tell he built at least one of them
to suck up to Rome, because he called the city “Tiberias,” which was the name
of the new Emperor. Think of them as vanity cities. Never mind that they both
cost a gazillion dollars and that he broke the backs of thousands of citizens
of Israel, forced off of their farms to build cities for him at near-starvation
wages, or that he skimmed money off of the building appropriations to pad his
own bank accounts. For Herod, all that was important was that he looked good to
the important people back in Italy where his real audience was. He built and
built and built, and at the end of decades, hundreds of local people had died
in the projects and thousands were impoverished, but Herod got his fancy new
cities. Incidentally, in one of them, in Tiberias, he had a terrible time even
getting anyone to move there because he built it over a cemetery, and NO ONE
wanted to move into a home over the bodies of their ancestors. So he had to
populate the city with foreigners or pay lapsed, non-religious opportunistic Jews,
to move there for a fee.[5] Tiberias,
which we will see again in two weeks with the story of the feeding of the
multitude in John 6, became the most
hated place in all of Galilee after that.
So, sin number three, is massive, heartless vanity and
greed.
To get to sin number four, I’m going to have to step back
and say a few words about John the Baptist. We all know who John is: Cousin of
Jesus, born about the same time, mother was Elizabeth. He had his own ministry
and followers, and Jesus may even have been in John’s community for a while. He
was baptized by John and never started his own traveling itinerant ministry
until after John was killed.
John’s ministry was seen by both the religious and political
authorities as a major threat. To the Religious leaders, he offered a way into
a relationship with God that bypassed the strict rules and regulations of the
“Church” (I actually mean the Temple and Synagogue, but for our purposes, it
functioned about the same as a church in those days). The Priests and Sadducees
prescribed extremely stringent rules for worship that were so harsh that only a
very small number of people could obey them or even afford them. The result was
that people stayed out of church in droves. People would come to Jerusalem
three or four times a year to one of the festivals, like Passover or Pentecost,
but mainly to sell their crops in the market, and while there they might go and
sacrifice a dove in the Temple, but that was about the extent of their
religious involvement.
But along comes John, who stood out in the desert by the
Jordan River and says, “what you believe and what orthodox rules you obey are
not as important as your behavior and your relationship to the Kingdom of God.
Just go into the water, wash away your old life and take on a new one and
welcome into the kingdom.” That totally cut him off from the church. They hated
him. For one thing that kind of teaching cut into their profits from the
sacrifices. For another it threatened their leadership and authority. So, as
important as he was as a religious leader at the time (and he is mentioned in
some detail by the historians of his day), not one religious leader came to his
defense when he was arrested.
He also angered Herod and his cronies by his dabbling in
politics, both personal and public. For one thing, according to Luke, John was
preaching that if anyone had too many clothes, they should give some of them
away. And if they had too much money, they should give some of that away too.
If they worked in the IRS, they shouldn’t gouge their customers; if they worked
in defense, they shouldn’t take bribes. None of these things endeared him to people
in authority. There is also some evidence that he knew the scuttlebutt about Herod
Antipas’ building-program money scam and threw that into his preaching on
occasion. So, imagine that you were Herod and you were trying to be the BMOC in
Galilee and your people were restless and angry already, and here comes this
odd prophet guy who holds mass rallies of thousands and thousands of disgruntled
poor people, and preaches sermons about how rich folk ought to give away their
money and how you, Herod, shouldn’t have scammed that money from the poor
schleps who you forced off of their farms to come build for you. What would you do?
What he did was to
send out the National Guard one night and hauled old John to jail.
To make matters worse, John had also been blathering, to
anyone who could listen, about all of the unseemly details of the
Herod/Herodias marriage scandal. And that shot down any chance he ever had of
being best friends with Herodias. In fact, she hated him because his preaching was
undermining her own pyramid climbing by dumping her first husband for Herod,
King Wannabe. In fact she really
hated him. She had wanted to send out a couple of friends from the South Boston
Scartissi family to pick him up and have him mysteriously disappear with a new
pair of concrete shoes in the bottom of the Jordan River.
By the way, the nrsv
and many other translations say simply that she had a “grudge” against him. I’m
sure that’s correct, but the Greek word that they are translating there, enéchō, can also be translated “to be
intertwined with.” Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t it true that sometimes you can
hate someone so much that your very “being” becomes intertwined with the one
that you hate? Your life begins to be determined by the life of the one you
hate. You can’t let go of the person because you can’t let go of your hate that
connects you. I think a little bit of that was what was going on with Herodias
over John.
But before she got a chance to do something herself, Herod beat
her to it. He put John in the basement dungeon of a palace out in Machaerus, up
in the northeast corner of Galilee and Perea. Verse 20 says that by keeping
John in jail, Herod was “protecting him.” It doesn’t come out and say so, but I
suspect that who he was protecting John from was Herodias.
As it turns out, though, that wasn’t the end of the story.
Actually, in spite of John’s sharp tongue, Herod actually liked him. He liked
the way that John talked about religion and theology and politics. So, every
now and then, late at night, Mark says that Herod would sneak down to the
dungeon when the wife and kids were getting ready to turn in and were watching
“dancing with the Stars,” and the two of them would drink brandy and have long
talks (well, maybe not exactly like that, but you get the point). Mark says
that Herod never could quite understand what John was saying—it was a little
over his head—but he was still fascinated by it all and enjoyed their little chats.
Herodias, on the other hand, never quit hating John and just
bided her time waiting for the time when she could finally get to him.
One day—nobody knows for certain how many months or years
later—Herod held a big party, interestingly, up in the palace at Machaerus, for
the mayors, governors and military brass of Galilee. He called it a “Birthday
Party,” but Jews didn’t have birthday parties in those days, so, given the
guest list, it was most likely a big feast to buy favors with the other
dignitaries in his realm. It went on for days with truckloads of wine and food.
Finally after several days of this, one of the guys said, “You got any
entertainment up here, or just more liquor?” So, Herod sent out for Herodias’
daughter, Salome, to come in and dance for them. I don’t know if I’m now on sin
four or five, but any way you look at it, this
has got to be a sin. Salome was about twelve or thirteen at the time, and her
step-father was asking her to come in and do the nearly-nude “Seven Veils”
thing for a bunch of depraved, drunken politicians. I don’t know what she did for
them, or what they did to her afterwards (and I don’t really want to know), but
at the end of it all, Mark says that Herod had been “pleasured” (aréskō) by her performance. He was so
pleased that he offered her up to half of his kingdom in return. Of course that
was a stupid offer by any standard, but he was drunk, so what would you expect?
Now, Salome didn’t have a clue about what to ask for, so she
ran next door to where her mother had been waiting for her and said, “My
step-daddy just offered me anything I wanted up to half his kingdom. What
should I ask for?” And her mother—who had been waiting patiently for months now
to destroy the person she hated so much that her entire life had been
intertwined in the hatred—said, “I have just the thing. Go tell your
step-father to give you the head of John the Baptist.”
(Incidentally, have you ever wondered where the expression,this story. )
“to have your head handed to you on a platter” came from? This is it. It came
from
So, that’s the end of the story. Herod sent guards out to
John; they cut off his head and brought it back to the girl. She gave it to her
mother. Herodias was pleased because she finally got her way; Herod was grieved
because he wasn’t strong enough to go back on his stupid pledge and save the life
of his friend; and John the Baptist was dead.
So, what’s the moral of this story? Well, it’s not much
because this is one of the most unrelentingly dark and evil stories of the New
Testament. Almost totally bereft of good news.
However, there is one thing. It’s small, and it’s subtle,
but I think it’s important and I want to share it.
Remember what I said at the beginning about this story being
sandwiched in between the pieces of another story? Just before this one Jesus
sends out the twelve Apostles on a teaching/preaching mission. And after it the
Apostles come back and tell wonderful stories about how well it went. But in
between is this dark and grizzly story of the murder of John.
Ever wonder why that is? Have you ever wondered why this sweet
story of a successful preaching mission that ended nicely is interrupted by a
story of a very unsuccessful preaching mission that ended very badly? Maybe
that is the point. Many Bible scholars believe that this was just what Mark was
trying to say: He wanted his readers—who were going through uncertain times and
trials—to know that both can happen. Sometimes you will be called by God to
proclaim the good news of love and acceptance, you will be called to challenge
our nation’s leaders and stand up for the weak and the powerless, and it will
all go well. The people will change, the leaders will repent and the Kingdom of
God will be moved one inch closer. But then on other occasions, you’ll be
called to do exactly the same thing to the same people and speak for the same people and you’ll have your
head handed to you on a platter.
Maybe that is the
message that Mark wants us to hear. Sometimes the call to mission and teaching
and justice is a success and sometimes it is not. Sometimes you will prevail
and good will happen, and sometimes you will fail and stumble back. That’s the
way life is. Sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t. I think that
Mark intentionally jammed these two very deeply contrasting stories together on
purpose to say that failure is just as much a part of life as success is. Take
it in stride. We are called by God to be faithful to the very, very end. We are
not called to be successful.
Sometimes we will be and sometimes we will not, but in the end, never give up.
Never give up. Never give up.
Amen
[1] More commonly known today by historians as “Arabia,”
but “Nabetea” by the Jews, Greeks and Romans of the time.
[2] The Emperor of Rome had to send in troops to bail him
out, but before they could engage in battle the Emperor passed away and the
general in command pulled back to wait for instructions from the next Emperor,
who called the whole war off. Aretas won.
[3] K.C. Hanson and Douglas E. Oakman, Palestine in the time of Jesus
(Minneapolis: Augsburg/Fortress, 1998), p. 45.
[4] Pheme Perkins, Mark,
New Interpreter's Bible, p. 599.
[5] Jonathan Reid, “Excavating Jesus,” in Religion Today:
www.bibleinterp.com/articles/excavating_Jesus.shtml (accessed 2012).
