July 11, 2021 “Jailed” – Mark 6:14-29

Mark 6:14-29
“Jailed”
July 11, 2021 – Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

This March two sheets of paper were auctioned for $130,000. They came from a logbook for a jail that was torn down 35 years ago. The price was because Martin Luther King Jr.’s signature appears on them in several places. On April 12, 1963, King was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for disobeying circuit court Judge W. A. Jenkins Jr.’s blanket injunction against “parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing.” King spent eight days in that jail. While there, he wrote a letter that became one of the great statements of the Civil Rights Movement. I’ll come back to that letter later.

In our text for today we find the greatest prophet of the Bible also in jail. Like Martin Luther King Jr., John the Baptist had been arrested for protesting against people in power, specifically “King” Herod Antipas, who ruled the region of Galilee, and his unlawful wife, Herodias. John’s imprisonment is a flashback from the present in Mark’s story, because Jesus and his miracles were stirring Herod’s conscience about what he did to John.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins with a ghost before the castle of Elsinore. The spirit of murdered king Hamlet haunts those on guard. His son prince Hamlet listens to the ghost to learn his father was murdered by the king’s brother Claudius so Claudius could marry the queen and assume the throne. From beyond the grave, the apparition charged young Hamlet to seek revenge for his father’s murder and betrayal by his mother.

Herod too feels haunted by the ghost of a man he murdered. Last week we heard how Jesus sent out his disciples to preach and heal. They talked about Jesus widely enough that reports came back to Herod about Jesus’ own teaching and miracles.

Mark tells us three popular views on Jesus. They appear again at the end of chapter 8: Jesus is either: 1) John the Baptist risen from the dead, 2) the second coming of Elijah, or 3) someone like one of the ancient prophets. That’s how people explained Jesus’ power and miracles. But for Herod, there’s only one explanation in verse 16, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.”

Herod’s confusion of Jesus with John is the product of a guilty conscience. He had John in his prison, but was perplexed about him. He wanted to execute him, but the thought of doing it pained him. It took a trick played on him by his new wife and stepdaughter to push him over the edge to murder.

Why does Mark slip this long account of the death of John the Baptist into his Gospel? He’s telling us about Jesus, right? Mark is the “action Gospel.” It’s the shortest, most succinct story of Jesus among four. But in this part, not even directly about Jesus, Mark’s version is longer than the rest. Matthew 14 tells us the story too, but shortens it. Luke gives us just Herod worrying that Jesus was John raised from the dead. John’s Gospel focuses on John the Baptist at the beginning, but tells us nothing about John’s death.

So why this long, sordid story about a dancing girl and a head on a plate? Oscar Wilde turned it into the play Salome, which Richard Strauss made into an opera. Salome, Herodias’ daughter, was fascinated with John the Baptist and tried to seduce him. When he rejected her, she connived with her mother to murder John, only to be seen at the end of the opera crooning her sick love to John’s severed head. But what’s in this story for Mark? For Jesus? For us?

We are, in fact, in the middle of another of Mark’s story “sandwiches” that Kendal talked about, even though the second slice of bread here is pretty thin. Last week’s Gospel at the beginning of the chapter told how Jesus sent His disciples to preach, cast out demons, and heal people. Next week picks up with verse 30 as they return to Jesus to report, telling Him “all they had done and taught.” The disciples go out, the disciples come back. Slipped into the center of that story, is the jailing and death of John the Baptist.

Our text, then, is stuff that goes in the center of a sandwich. It’s low-carb, high-protein food. Despite Mark’s long treatment, there’s no padding, no “bread” here. As far as the Gospel of Jesus Christ goes, what happened to John is a thick, solid slab of lean, rare meat, meant for us to chew on a while.

Now, before we start chewing, this Herod is one of four Herods in the New Testament, Herod Antipas. Antipas was the son of Herod the Great, the one who tried to use the wise men to find and kill Jesus when He was a toddler. Herod the Great had no less than ten wives. Antipas was a son of the fourth wife. That sets up some of the convoluted relationships that are part of this story.

Antipas first married the daughter of Aretas, king of Nabatea, east of the Dead Sea. But as we see in in verse 17, he started eying his half-brother Philip’s wife Herodias. Philip was Herod the Great’s son through his third wife. So Antipas persuaded Herodias to divorce Philip. He in turn divorced the daughter of Aretas and married his brother’s wife while his brother was still alive. Which was totally contrary to Jewish law and morality.

To top it all off, like some of the relationships in Hamlet, there are incestuous overtones to this whole business. Herodias, as you might guess from her name, is also part of the family. She, it turns out, was Herod the Great’s granddaughter through his second wife, which makes her Antipas’ niece. Feel free to say “Yuck!” at this point.

Neither Antipas nor Herodias was pleased when John showed up, as we’re told in verse 18, to tell Antipas, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” Like Amos speaking to King Jeroboam in our Old Testament lesson today, John came to tell the king something he didn’t want to hear. Like Amos, it didn’t endear John to the king.

Jeroboam sent Amaziah try to get Amos to leave, but Herod put John in prison. Herodias had left the weaker, poorer brother for the richer, more powerful one. She likes her depraved life and John is messing with it. So she held a grudge against John. She wanted him not just jailed but dead. Her husband had just enough spiritual sensitivity that he recognized, in verse 20, that John was “a righteous and holy man.” So at first Herodias didn’t get her way. John simply stayed in prison.

Surprisingly, at the end of verse 20, we learn Herod “liked to listen to” John. Here’s a guy telling him his whole life is corrupt, yet he can’t stop listening. Herod was “perplexed,” but he kept John alive, kept hearing him preach.

Like many who don’t get their way, Herodias nursed her grudge against John. She didn’t want her happy, comfortable life ruined by a country preacher who claimed to speak for God. She bided her time and waited for an opportunity, which shows up in verse 21.

In Hamlet, you may remember, the prince has the opportunity of a little entertainment in the castle to demonstrate the guilt of his uncle Claudius. Traveling players put on a production which includes a bit about a queen whose husband is murdered by poison poured in his ear. Hamlet says, “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”

For Herod it wasn’t a play; it was a dance. His taste in women didn’t just stray to his niece. He was ready to watch in some depraved way her teenage daughter, his stepdaughter, dance for him and his friends on his birthday. Josephus is where we learn the stepdaughter’s name was Salome.[1] Caught up in the spectacle, probably drunk, Herod offered Salome up to half his kingdom in verse 23. Since the Romans never actually gave this Herod the title of “king,” he was just a governor. He had no kingdom to give.

Herodias, though, stepped in to get her revenge. She sent the girl back to ask for John’s head on a platter. Like Hamlet wavering back and forth with his “To be or not to be…” Herod still had mixed emotions about it. He was “deeply grieved” we read in verse 26, but also like Hamlet, in the end he decided to commit murder. He ordered John’s head cut off and brought to Salome, who in turn gave it to her mother.

It’s a great tragic story. It makes a great opera. It could be a good television mini-series for those of us who like entertainment full of passion and pathos. But we’re still left with the question of what’s in it for us as Christians? Why did Mark sandwich this ugly episode into His Gospel for followers of Jesus to read down through the ages? What are we supposed to learn from all this?

To begin with, it’s a glorious example of a faithful person “speaking truth to power,” as we might say these days. John is a perfect model for anyone like Martin Luther King Jr. who wants to stand up to corruption and immorality among powerful people, whether in government or business. John represents the bravery of living by your convictions and telling the truth when it needs to be heard. Let’s remember John whenever we are tempted to be silent about some evil or injustice.

We also might reflect on the negative example of Herod Antipas. His weak, wavering heart felt the pull of righteousness, but in the end he gave in to lust, pride, and the easy way out. As much as we want to be like John the Baptist, we don’t want to be like not-really-a-king Herod.

Yet there’s more meat here than John’s courageous example or Herod’s cowardly failure, more to chew on. John’s story speaks to the heart of the Christian faith, about what Jesus came to do for us, and what we can expect when we follow Jesus.

Just before this, Jesus sent His followers out to preach and heal, warning them that some towns would not welcome them. People would reject them just as Jesus Himself was rejected in Nazareth. Out they go. But before we read of them coming back, Mark tells us about John, the man sent to pave the way for Jesus, being murdered by evil people.

Verses 12 and 13 of this chapter tell us the disciples were successful. They preached repentance, they cast out many demons, they anointed people with oil and God healed. But before Mark lets us know of their report to Jesus, he warns us that following Jesus isn’t always that easy. The road of faith is dangerous. There will be opposition.

Mark sets up the trajectory of the whole Gospel here. John came preaching the Good News, calling people to God. He suffered and died. On center stage, Jesus came preaching the Good News, welcoming people into the grace and love of God. Jesus suffered and died. What’s the next step? Followers of Jesus will go out preaching the Good News, sharing the grace and power of Jesus. What should we expect will happen to them? To us?

That’s tough meat in the middle of the sandwich. Chew on our own place in this story. If this happens to John and Jesus, we should not expect to follow in their steps without our own struggles, our own confrontations with evil. If we live and speak the truth in Jesus’ name, even if we don’t lose our heads for it, we may expect to be misunderstood, to be rejected, to get kicked in the teeth and beaten for holding onto what is good and true.

It’s hard for us to swallow such meat here in our air conditioned comfortable sanctuary just as things seem to be getting better around us in regard to the pandemic. We like to think people as evil and opposed to God as Herod or Herodias are pretty rare, a few “bad apples.” Unlike Martin Luther King Jr., no one is putting us in jail. But maybe we’re missing an opportunity because of that.

Strange as it seems, God has frequently used jail time for His servants to give them opportunity to do His work in other ways, sometimes by writing. In the 6^th century the Christian philosopher Boethius was imprisoned for a year before his execution. He wrote about how God allows evil in the world, but happiness is still possible. The original Martin Luther translated the Bible into the language of his people while cooped up in Wartburg Castle. John Bunyan began his beautiful Pilgrim’s Progress while in the Bedford jail. And Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that incredible Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Those who imagine that King Jr. was somehow different, gentler and less radical than current Black Lives Matter protestors might want to read what he actually wrote in this jail letter. In it he agrees with St. Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all. He points out that “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Before Critical Race Theory was ever developed in the 70s, King wrote about Birmingham’s “white power structure,” what is now called “systemic racism,” that left Black people with no alternative to breaking unjust laws like a judge’s edict against protesting. And he argues that the white church has often supported and encouraged power structures that keep the status quo of racism.

King also looked to Jesus for his primary model of how God’s people stand up to the power of evil. He called on himself and others to be like Jesus, to be “creative extremists” “for love, truth and goodness,” while recognizing that suffering and even death was often the end for such extremists, for men and women who behave like John the Baptist and like Jesus Himself.

Let John in jail remind us of all those things, of evil in power in both high and low places, of sisters and brothers in Christ who suffer for standing against it, of places in the world like Iran and Eritrea where Christians are in jail for their faith right now.

Let John in jail also remind us of those in jail here in our own nation, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, by far, and the largest number of prisoners. My sister has been corresponding for fifteen years with a young Hispanic man in the Snake River Correctional facility in Ontario, Oregon. He committed his crimes as a minor, but he was tried as an adult. He has very little hope of release for another 25 years. Yet he’s trying to change his life, even trying to do his own writing about God and about the Bible. My sister’s friend’s story is being repeated over and over around us right now, today.

The great hope, of course, is that the hearts of evil people in power might be changed, that judicial and social systems might be made more just, that the grace and love of the Gospel might triumph over the force and violence of evil. Yet the very necessity of Black Lives Matter and the persistence of mass incarceration as a solution to social problems in this country, make that hope seem pretty dim.

However, we must not ignore the last verse of our text, verse 29. Mark tells us that John’s disciples came for his body and laid it in a tomb. End of story. John’s only way out of jail was death. That’s it. Evil certainly won that round as it does so many.

Yet for anyone who knows the big story that Mark is telling, those final words about John should jump off the page. They “laid him in a tomb.” We all know that, later, other disciples would lay Jesus in a tomb. But that was not at all the end of the story. God raised Jesus out of His tomb, and He triumphed over Herod and Pilate and the Roman Empire and all those who conspired to arrest and kill Him.

John himself may have died in that very hope. In Matthew 11 verse 2, we read how, while John was in prison, he started to have doubts, doubts about Jesus. John sent his own disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come…?” John wanted to know if he had wasted his life. If Jesus was not the one God had promised, then John was in jail without hope, for no good purpose.

But here’s the message Jesus sent back to John. Quoting promises from the prophet Isaiah, Jesus told John’s followers to tell him what they had seen “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear…, and the poor have good news brought to them.” But into that list of miracles and teaching Jesus slipped one more grand miracle that was not written in Isaiah, “the dead are raised.” We heard just two weeks ago from Kendal how Jesus raised a little girl from the dead. Now Jesus was telling, maybe reminding, John of that, that even death is not the end of hope.

The short-range hope in the face of jail is freedom. With Jesus and with Martin Luther King Jr., the Christian hope is what Isaiah also wrote, “to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.” We challenge the evil powers of this world partly in the hope of setting free those who are jailed unjustly.

Yet in the long run we know that no one is really free while even one innocent or unjustly sentenced person sits in jail, or worse, is condemned to death. So we also aim toward a day that may be as hard for us to see as it was for John, a day when the dead will be raised by the same power which raised Jesus from the dead, a day when no one will any longer sit in darkness, and all the jail doors are broken down. Let us pray and work for that day.

Amen.

[1] Jewish Antiquities, Book XVIII, chapter 5, 4.