Not for the first time—or,
I suspect, the last—I disagree with the lectionary’s slicing up of our
scripture into bite-sized chunks. Oh, I don’t disagree with the need to slice things up . .
. after all, if we read the whole thing each Sunday, we wouldn’t have time for
my pithy and cogent observations. And before you say “what’s your point?” let me just say that the
lectionary ends our passage with verse twenty nine, and for reasons that will
hopefully become clear, I chose to read through verse thirty two.
Anyway, this is another
strange interlude, kind of like last week’s, a break in the main action, which
has been following Jesus around as he goes about his ministry, healing folks
and casting out demons . . . last week, the break in the action involved Jesus
coming home and getting no respect, and sending the disciples out, two by two,
to continue his mission. And while we concentrated last week on the homecoming,
and the scandal that ensued, this week’s passage is arguably more related to
the sending, and its establishment of the disciples as, as Paul would put it,
members of the body of Christ.
Mark is generally
considered to have been the first
gospel written, and it’s certainly the most direct and straightforward. But
nevertheless, Mark was a master at creating meaning by juxtaposition, by which
episodes he chose to place next to which others,
and this is no exception: It’s not an accident that he places the story of the
execution of John right after that of the commissioning of the disciples.
It’s constructed in the
same way as a previous episode, the story of the dual healings of Jairus the
synagogue official and the hemorrhaging woman. Remember? Jesus lands on the
Jewish side of the Galilee Sea and he’s met by Jairus, who tells him his
daughter’s deathly ill, and could he come to the house and heal her? And when
Jesus and his followers head that way, a woman who’d been bleeding for twelve
years—and thus was massively
unclean—touched his cloak on the sly. And Jesus stops to heal her—aka make her
clean—and they hear the official’s daughter has died, whereupon Jesus goes to
Jairus’ house and heals her anyway.
And the juxtaposition of
these two healings makes additional meaning, meaning that either story alone
wouldn’t convey. First, it makes a statement about who Jesus’ ministry is for: it’s for both the
comfortable insider—personified by the synagogue official Jairus—and the
ultimate outsider, a woman (doubtless unattached) who has been considered untouchable in the same
sense as the Indian caste of the same name (actually, since Gandhi, they’re not
called that anymore). Second, the fact that it’s embedded within and interrupts
the story of Jairus’ daughter hints at their relative importance: in Hebrew
literature, the take-home lesson, the most important
one, is often placed at the center of the action. And finally, there’s the
connection of the woman’s twelve-year unclean-ness with the little girl being
twelve years old. Do these two stories together say something about the nation
of Israel which, after all, had twelve tribes?
And Mark uses a similar
structure here to point to the importance of John’s beheading: the first
part—the commissioning of the twelve, which we read last week, is interrupted
by the tale of Herod and his execution of John the baptizer. And it’s even more obvious because of
Mark’s rather clumsy narrative device: he says Herod gets wind of Jesus and
thinks he’s John the Baptist resurrected and he should know, ‘cause he’s the
one who had him killed in the first
place. Then Johns beheading is recounted as a flashback. Mark has to work to include the story of
John’s beheading.
So here’s the sequence:
Jesus sends the apostles out, two-by two, Herod hears about it and we are told about John’s
execution, and then the apostles return, exhausted,
to tell Jesus what they’d done. And the ministry is so tiring, so stressful, that they need to
go on a little retreat to rest up. Thus, the execution of John is embedded in
the story of the disciples’ commissioning, it interrupts it, in fact. And it’s
very placement and function as an interruption of the main narrative
underscores its importance.
The scene is a party that
Herod has given in his own honor—hey: somebody’s
gotta do it—and all the hangers-on, hangers-out, stars and wanna-be stars,
celebrities and wanna-be celebrities, yes-men, yes-women and toadies—especially the toadies—were
there, lounging around in Herod’s ballroom, drinking Herod’s booze and hitting
on his wife’s ladies-in-waiting. In fact, everybody who was anybody, or wanted to be
anybody, was there: Roger—the dodger—Asclepius, star of stage and proscenium,
was over by the window, hair pomaded to an impossible height, along with his
fifth—or was it sixth?—wife, who was almost wearing a diaphanous confection
that would have embarrassed Lady Godiva. On the opposite side was Bill—the
shill—O’Rivera, the prime-time anchor at Hare News, the Governor’s favorite
network. Bill was thinking that the party was so boring he’d have to make
something up—hardly rare
at his network—and was plotting over whom to slander.
Herod himself was bored:
he’d long ago grown tired of his toadies’ antics, and he kept nodding off, head
slipping off his hand, and starting himself awake. His guests pretended not to
notice, because after all: he was the man upon whom all their fortunes lay, who
had the ear of the emperor and the power of life and death over them all. He could do whatever he
wanted.
The governor perked up his
ears when they led his daughter Herodius in, and she was all decked out in her
best toga—and was as cute s a bug’s ear to boot. Herod had a soft-spot for the
little girl, and could deny her nothing, including the dance lessons the fruits
of which she was about to demonstrate. And she did it so winsomely, so preciously, that the
governor was completely overcome, along with all his wits and common sense, and
he said: “I’ll give you whatever you want, even up to half my kingdom.”
Now, Herod fancied himself
something of a scholar, which was why he’d kept John the Baptizer around so
long. They’d get in these long theological discussions about all these arcane
subjects which nevertheless were endlessly fascinating to Herod, and he kept
putting off and putting off John’s execution for treason, for telling him what
he should and shouldn’t do, because after all: he wasn’t going anywhere and he
could kill him whenever he wanted, whenever he got bored with him, which would happen sooner or
later, because Herod got bored a lot.
But because Herod was something of a scholar,
he remembered his history, to wit: what happened the last time a ruler promised
somebody up to half his kingdom. It was King Ahasuerus, who ruled one hundred
twenty-seven provinces from India to Ethiopia. He went so gaga over Queen
Esther that he told her “What is your request? It shall be given you, even to
the half of my kingdom.” And the upshot of that
was the loss of one of Ahasuerus’ favored advisors and oh yes: the incidental
salvation of the Jewish people, which Ahasuerus could care less about, but
there it was.
Even though he knew the
story, as every Jew did, in the glow of pride at his little girl’s performance,
he promised the same thing as Ahasuerus, but he thought: what the worst that
could happen? After all, Esther was an adult woman; daughter Herodias only a
little girl. What’s the most she could want? A complete collection of My Little
Pony’s? There’s a Toys ‘R Us down on the Damascus Road. A real pony? Herod had a whole
farm of them in
Siluria because . . . well, don’t ask. The point
was that yes, Herod had behaved rashly, maybe even foolishly, but hey: how bad could it be?
Of course, Herod wasn’t
reckoning on his wife’s interference, and this is where the biblical proclivity
to blame the woman for everything
comes into play. So many times in the Bible a man’s foolish or evil behavior is
blamed on a woman that I’m surprised that the saying isn’t “behind every woman
hides a man.” Who really knows why she asked for John’s head? Was she angry
with him for calling her adulterous marriage what it was? Was she in some way
getting back at
Herod for taking her from Philip? Because make no mistake: women were chattel, possessions, and she likely
had no more say in the matter than she could’ve flown to the moon.
Maybe she was just
exercising what power she could, which wasn’t much, but whatever it was, the
story goes that big Herodias instructed little Herodias to ask for the head of
John the Baptist. And Herod was deeply
grieved, he hated
to do it, just hated
it, you understand, because he really liked
John, he liked to listen to him, but hey: an oath was an oath, he couldn’t be
seen as a weakling
in front of all his guests,
now could he? What would the media think? He could see the lead story on Bill
O’Rivera’s newscast now: King Herod revealed as a welsher. Film at eleven. Much
better to be seen as tough on crime, or on terrorism, or whatever John could be
labeled by . . .
So he did it, or had an
underling do it: he sent a soldier down to do the deed, and the dripping head
was presented to the little girl, complements of her daddy, and Shen in turn
gave it to her mom who, presumably, mounted it on her living room wall. And the
disciples came and took his body, and laid it in the tomb, much like the Christ
he had foretold would soon be.
And of course, that’s what
this episode is: a foretelling,
in literary terms, a foreshadowing,
of the story of Jesus, who—like John—was executed at least in part for speaking truth to
power. Every healing, every cleansing, every demonstration
of the power available in this mysterious Kingdom of God through the equally
mysterious Spirit of God, every miraculous deed we’ve seen so far in Mark’s
gospel was a shot across the bows of the religious establishment and the Roman
government. Each transgression of religious and civil law—no difference,
remember—brought the authorities—both Jewish and Roman—closer to a killing
rage. If they executed John just for telling Herod he’d sinned, how much more
would they execute Jesus for all his in-your-face transgressions?
Well, I guess you can only
be killed once, although a beheading seems like a much easier way to go than
suffocating on a cross. And it goes to show you that Christianity didn’t start
out being “safe,” as Peter and Thecla and Paul and Justin would discover. In
point of fact, It’s why Mark very carefully—if somewhat clumsily—embedded an
act of high cruelty within the story of the sending of the twelve. It serves as
both a warning and a promise that the Christian faith can and will be costly
even, as Paul would write, unto death on a cross.
I think if you are
following Jesus, if you are doing what he did, using the same methods and
tactics and theology that he did, there’s a good chance you’re going to at
least get roughed up once in awhile. If the faith we practice is faithful, why isn’t it
dangerous? Herod isn’t the only one who should be careful what they promise:
when we promise to
follow Christ, shouldn’t it mean all the way?
Of course, the same as it
ever was, the flesh can be weak while the spirit is willing, and that’s why
faith means, in the words of the old hymn, standing on the promises. The
promise that Jesus will be with us, even unto the ends of the earth. The
promise that he will send an advocate, a comforter, who will teach us with
sighs too deep for words. And the promise that he will abide in and with use
even as God is in and with him. And if that isn’t a promise one can stand on, I
don’t know what is. Amen.
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