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Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost – July 11, 2021
Mark 6:14-29
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the gospel of our Lord?
I was tempted to read our liturgical response to the gospel reading for this morning in the form of a question! “Gospel” means “good news,” and it is hard to see what is good about this story. “Gospel” is also word used to describe the biblical genre of the four “spiritual biographies” we have of Jesus, but there is very little of Christ in this story – at least on the surface.
In hearing this passage, it can feel like we have stumbled into a soap opera, or something you might see on HBO Max. There are sordid and confusing and complicated family relationships. There are lustful stirrings. There is manipulation and murder.
This is the gospel of our Lord?
In order to understand this sordid episode, let me give you some background. Herod the Great (so-called) was the Jewish puppet of the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus’ birth. He’s the guy who slaughtered all the baby boys in Bethlehem in a desperate attempt to eliminate what he saw as a threat to his throne with the rumored birth of a newborn king.
Well, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. One of Herod’s sons, Herod Antipas, came to be another puppet ruler of the Roman Empire. On a visit to Rome he met Herodias, who just happened to be married to his brother, Philip. Well, Herod and Herodias hit it off. What a cute couple they would make with their matching names! Though they were both married, they each divorced their spouses and married each other. Herod’s first wife, herself the daughter of a king, was understandably upset and went running back to her father, who then went to war against Herod! Lots of people were upset about this – both because of the gross immorality of Herod running off with his brother’s wife and because of the resulting military skirmish – but one man in particular spoke out against it. His name was John the Baptist.
Now Herod found John the Baptist to be an interesting person. He liked listening to him. He knew he was a righteous and holy man. He even feared him to a degree. But his wife, Herodias, despised John. She hated John for daring to publicly call them out on their unlawful marriage. She was so mad about it that she wanted him dead. At first Herod wouldn’t go that far, but he did go ahead and arrest John and put him in prison. Marriage is all about compromise, right?
But then came Herod’s birthday party. He invited lots of powerful people for a birthday banquet. Herodias’s daughter, Herod’s stepdaughter, performed a dance at the party. (I know our translation says “Herod’s daughter, Herodias,” but other translations are more clear that this is the daughter of Herodias, Herod’s stepdaughter, Salome.) This dance got everyone’s attention. Given what we know about this family and the culture of the time, this probably wasn’t Shirley Temple doing a tap dance. This was very likely a young woman dancing in ways that kept the men in rapt attention.
At the end of the dance, the lecherous Herod made a big show in front of his powerful friends of promising to give Salome anything she wanted. He even offered to give her up to half of his kingdom. Obviously Salome was being manipulated by her mother, and so she asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Herod was “deeply grieved,” the scriptures tell us, but, feeling pressured by the oaths he had made in front of his important guests, he gave the gruesome order, and they brought John’s head on a platter and brought it into the banquet.
This is the gospel of our Lord? It sounds more like an episode of Game of Thrones! Why are we hearing this today? Why did the framers of the lectionary see fit to include this as a reading we would hear on Sunday morning? (And why didn’t I ask Pastor Marc to preach this week?) And for that matter, why did St. Mark, who tells the story of Jesus so sparingly, see fit to include this story in his gospel? And how in the world is this God’s Word for us today?
Scripture describes the world as it truly is, that’s for sure. Like with Grandpa Herod, human life continues to be snuffed out for selfish reasons. Like with Herod Junior and second wife Herodias, people continue to walk away from marriages when someone else catches their eye. Like with Salome, young women continue to be ogled and trafficked and abused by people they should have been able to trust. Like with Herod Antipas, people will do horrific things in order to save face with their peers. Like with Herodias, no one likes to be confronted with their sin, and they will go to great and wicked lengths to silence those voices doing so. This whole sordid affair aptly describes the sinful, broken world we live in and the depravity of human nature of which we are a part. Sometimes we are its victims, sometimes we are its complicit bystanders, sometimes we are the perpetrators.
This still isn’t the gospel of our Lord, but we’re getting closer – because Mark’s willingness to portray the world as it really is reminds us that it is precisely this world that our Lord entered into. It is this world that God so dearly loves, quite in spite of itself. It is this world and its fallen human race that Christ came to save.
Last week St. Mark went out of his way to tell us that Jesus was rejected in Nazareth. Now this week, picking up right where we left off in Mark’s gospel from last week, he tells us this horrible story about John. And as with last week, Mark has a reason. He has a purpose. Mark is beginning to drop hints about how Jesus would save this broken world. He tells us this particular backstory because it so powerfully foreshadows what Jesus himself would endure. Jesus, like John, would be arrested. Jesus, like John, made some people mad for calling them out on their sin. Jesus, like John, would be brutally executed by a reluctant official who was bowing to the pressures of a crowd. Jesus, like John, would be laid in a tomb. What sparked this story was Mark remembering that Herod thought that Jesus was John, raised from the dead! Herod was wrong on the details, of course, but he was saying more than he knew, wasn’t he? Just beneath the surface, Jesus is all over this story!
After his own brutal execution, Jesus himself would rise from the dead. The grave could not hold him. The ugliness of this world could not keep him away.
And so know this: no matter how sordid or sinful or messy or painful or soap-opera-y your story might be, it isn’t too much for Jesus. He has come for you. He has come to heal you. He has come to forgive you. He has come to redeem you from the broken parts of your story. By his death and resurrection he has conquered sin and death in order to give you his kingdom, which comes with a new life and a new hope and a new future.
THIS is the gospel of our Lord.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church