16th July 2006Fifth Sunday after Trinity
Fr Julian Browning
Mark 6 : 14 - 29
I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist
God's goodness takes every form, at any
time, in any age, God chooses us. He creates a new people.
All over England preachers are running for the safety of the
Epistle, where the good news is to be found, one of the most beautiful
passages in the Bible, Paul's great
hymn of praise, proclaiming that our destiny to be sons and daughters of God is
sealed, pledged, guaranteed. That we can know what heaven is like, it is our
inheritance through Christ, and this is all God's plan.
A great start to our service,
then suddenly you have to listen to St.Mark proclaiming the sordid story of the
Herods, the neighbours from hell. Few stories can have so many hideous details
compressed into a short passage. Salome, Herod's daughter, asks for the head of John
the Baptist on a charger, a large dish of some sort. We may be reading more into the
story than is actually there. Few writers would take as their theme St.Paul keeping up
his correspondence. But the story of Salome has been turned into plays, pictures, and
operas, with burning themes of perverted lust, necrophilia, jealousy, guilt, and the
movement in the story is the shifting of the blame for the murder of John the Baptist
from father to daughter, to mother. At the end of the story the actual head of John the
Baptist is passed from father, to daughter, to mother. Nobody tells the truth. Nobody
sees the truth except for John the Baptist who has seen the Spirit like a dove descend
on Jesus. The story is horrific because here in the Gospels one of God's prophets is
murdered apparently on the whim of a dysfunctional family working out their
grudges, finding an opportunity to get away with it without taking responsibility. Did
Herod have to keep his promise to give his daughter whatever she asked for? Who
knows? Who cares? We are now entering territory rather nearer to home, the
fantasies which take people over, so that they no longer care what they do, random
murders, sheer evil out of the box and on the rampage. The epistle is all about a
wonderful divine plan into which we fit very neatly, “a plan for the fulness of time,
to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth”. God is in charge of
things. Today's Gospel is about the moral anarchy in which we live our lives, for you
and I are Herod, clinging to our power, frightened of God's holy prophets and what
they might say about us. And frightened too of what others think of us. Herod
murdered John because he didn't want to lose face in front of the important guests
he'd invited to his birthday party, or so he thought, poor fellow. The story of the
murder of John the Baptist is the only passage of any length in any of the Gospels
not focused on Jesus. It's not about him. It's about us.
St.Mark wants us to take to heart this horrible tale, and for maximum effect he slots
it into his story between Jesus's sending out of the disciples into the surrounding
villages (which we heard last week) and their reporting back to Jesus of their
successful mission. There's a parallel universe here, a warning to the disciples, and to
you and me. It's not all good news. The gospel is preached, men and women are
healed, evil spirits are exorcised, but the threat of opposition is not far away.
Christians must be realists, not fantasists like the Herod family. We are called to see
the truth in ourselves and in each other. But there will be opposition to the truth, both
from within ourselves, and from the outside, from others, and from forces which
appear random or beyond all control. That is the real world. That is the world in
which Jesus lived and died. That is our world If our faith means anything to us, if our
worship and prayers have any validity, they prepare us for life and death in that
world.
Now we know who we are, now we know what might happen to us, we can listen to
what I can only describe as the music of the Epistle. In the Greek this whole epistle is
just one sentence, pouring out blessings and thanksgivings to God for his gifts to us:
redemption, forgiveness, wisdom, faith. God's goodness takes every form, at any
time, in any age, God chooses us. He creates a new people. The Herod family were
stuck in a little triangle of fear and deceit. Christians, the followers of Jesus, can
break free of these destructive patterns because we know ourselves to be first and
foremost children of God. Paul then takes us one step further, to what is perhaps our
first steps in the kingdom of God. He tells us what to do. He tells us the only
response we can make is to give God thanks and praise. That is why what happens
here is so important. Worship goes against the spirit of the age because to pragmatic
minds it is a useless activity. The modern response is, 'What can we do, what can we
do to prove ourselves and pay God back for what he has done for us?' Well, there's a
great deal to be done, but it's not going to pay God back, because God has not put us
under an obligation in the first place. God has let us into the mystery. If we want to
go there, if we want to be part of his plan, “the plan for the fullness of time”, helping
to build the kingdom of God, then we can do just that, by following Jesus Christ. We
“have heard the word of truth, the gospel of salvation”, and our answer is praise, and
glory, and worship. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.