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 pittuey.[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, “to have your head handed to you
on a platter” came from? This is it. It came from this story. )
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).
