The story of the beheading of John the Baptist has captured the artistic imagination—Herod’s feast, his daughter (or step-daughter, or niece, depending on who you ask), her dance (the “dance of the seven veils” being not a Scriptural description of this event, but popularized in English by none other than Oscar Wilde), and the Baptizer’s head being delivered on a platter are all depicted in countless paintings, in plays and operas—set in the American visual imagination perhaps by Rita Hayworth’s 1953 performance in the film Salome—the young girl’s name, again, not taken from Scripture, but this time from the historian Josephus.
However this story is depicted, though, let’s call it what it is—it’s a horrible story, a really gruesome series of events. A feckless ruler living in blatant violation of law and tradition—having married his brother’s wife, not, it seems, out of deep love or to protect a vulnerable person left alone after her spouse’s death—but rather to satisfy an appetite. A spineless king who knows that John is a righteous and holy man, but arrests him anyway for political expediency. A foolish king who does what the powerful should never do—promise to give someone anything they ask for.
Herod’s banquet shows us the workings of a kingdom where human life is cheap—where the pinnacle of existence, at least for the privileged, is the fulfillment of cheap desires, and where those on the wrong side of power can find their lives snuffed out for no reason other than a weak leader trying to save face at a birthday party.
It’s hard to see the good news here.
It’s important to note, though, that Mark gives us this account of Herod’s banquet and John’s murder as a flashback—and, like all flashbacks, this moment of retrospection tells us a great deal about where we are in the present part of the story.
Jesus, you’ll remember, has launched a particularly successful ministry of teaching and healing throughout Galilee and the regions surrounding it. Last week we heard about him sending out his disciples two by two into the region, and next week we’ll hear about what happens when they come back together and report on their activity. Mark puts this flashback in between those two bits—a way of saying “meanwhile, elsewhere…”—a way of showing how word of Jesus’s message has reached even the centers of power.
We know that John the Baptist has proclaimed this Jesus of Nazareth as the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit, the one whose sandals John is not worthy to stoop down and untie. But Herod doesn’t know this. When he hears about this itinerant rabbi, this Galilean carpenter who has come seemingly out of nowhere with astounding teachings and miraculous power, Herod’s guilty conscience kicks in—he thinks that he’s hearing stories about the prophet he executed, that John the Baptist has come back from the dead—that the threat John posed to his power is still there.
Because Jesus is a threat to Herod, just like John was. Jesus and John are threats to Herod’s kingship—not just because they decry his illicit marriage to Herodias—but because they challenge the very worldview he represents: the worldview that says that power exists for its own sake; that privilege permits any excess, any cruelty; that nothing matters more than position, possessions, reputation. Jesus threatens Herod because he shows—not just in teaching but in his deeds, in his acts of healing—that every person’s life is sacred, that no person—not the woman with the 12-year hemorrhage, not Jairus’s daughter, neither you nor me—that no person is beyond God’s reach. That we are all, each of us, beloved children of God.
This truth—that God loves you, fully, recklessly, unconditionally—turns on its head the logic of this world, the logic that quantifies human value in terms of economic potential or labor output, the logic that says the powerful can reorder the world to fulfill their own desires.
The alternative Jesus offers to Herod’s version of kingship is perhaps most visible in the banquet scene where Jesus is host—where Jesus brings his disciples together for a sacred meal on the night before his death. Herod offers his daughter as an unseemly entertainment; Jesus offers his very self as the bread of life and cup of salvation. Herod will do anything to protect his reputation and his power; Jesus will lay down his life so that we may have abundant life. Herod’s story is full of manipulations and cunning and intrigue; in Jesus’s story, God’s love for humankind and Jesus’s perfect obedience to his Father’s will lead to resurrection, new life, forgiveness—the world reconciled to God.
And friends, Jesus’s story is ongoing. It’s a story that you and I are invited into again and again, every time we gather before the altar—a story that’s been told for 100,000 Sundays—the story in which God’s love for you, for me, for all of us, is strong enough to overcome death, strong enough to overcome our weaknesses and our sin, strong enough to overcome our death-dealing world and our self-serving pretensions. Jesus invites you, even now, to meet him here, to receive the bread and the wine that is his body and blood—to be loved by God, and to live now and forever in that kingdom of grace, abundance, and blessing.