Dawn's Early Light
Scripture Reading: Mark 6:14-29
My best friend Dave is an investment banker…actually, a retired investment banker because when you work in investment banking you can retire at age 51 to play golf every day. As he once explained to me, there are two sides to investment banking: origination and execution. As Dave worked his way up the corporate ladder, there was a time when his title was “Head of Execution,” which I found endlessly amusing when I saw it on his business card (it certainly carries more cachet than “pastor”). Much to my disappointment, however, his job title was much more exciting than his actual job duties, which entailed making recommendations for or against lending additional money to existing clients. Boring!
I share this anecdote to offer a ray of light and levity to what is an undeniably dark passage that features a head and an execution. We read today of the unjust arrest, imprisonment, and execution of John the Baptist, a servant of the Lord and a prophet, by Herod, a godless tyrant. Herod wields political power in a way that serves his own interests and those of his inner circle. He throws lavish parties for the well connected at his private estate while he and his wife nurse grievances against their perceived enemies.
At one such party—for his own birthday, no less—Herod’s stepdaughter performs a dance that so pleases him that he promises her anything, up to half of his kingdom. Owing to his own vanity and loose lips, his attempt to appear generous backfires when the girl, at the urging of her mother, asks for John’s head on a platter. Not wanting to break his carelessly made public vow, Herod reluctantly has John executed and his head brought to his stepdaughter just as she requested. When John’s disciples hear about it, they come and take his body and lay it in a tomb. This is the world of the Lord!
Where is Jesus? Only his name appears in this passage, but he does not.
I mean, that’s the passage in a nutshell. Where is the good news in that? Where is Jesus? Only his name appears in this passage, but he himself does not. What is Mark’s point in relating this gruesome story?
The passage begins, “King Herod heard of it, for Jesus’ name had become known.” The “it” refers to the activity of Jesus’ disciples. As we heard last week, after his hometown of Nazareth had rejected him, Jesus sent his disciples into the towns and villages around Nazareth proclaiming repentance, casting out demons, and anointing the sick. Now word of Jesus has reached Herod in his seaside palace, far from the rural agricultural community of Nazareth and the surrounding region.
Herod does not like what he hears. He gets wind of the deeds of power that are being done in Jesus’ name all throughout Galilee and he responds not with joy but with dread. His first thought is, This is the work of the man that I executed. “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.”
John had been a vocal critic of Herod, not of his policies that favored the wealthy, nor his close relationship with Rome, nor his contempt for Jewish religious practices despite himself being Jewish. To be fair, John may well have taken Herod to task over those things. It would certainly be in keeping with his fiery character, but Mark doesn’t say. What draws John’s ire, according to Mark, is Herod’s marriage to Herodias, the wife of his half-brother. She had divorced her husband to marry Herod, who had divorced his wife to marry her. Oh, and she was also his niece. The family dynamic is complicated, to say the least, filled with incest, infighting, betrayals, and lust for sex, money, and power.
For calling out the immorality of Herod’s marriage to Herodias, John is arrested, imprisoned, and executed at the urging of Herodias. The voice of the one who cried out in the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord is forever silenced. A passage that began with talk about the power at work in Jesus ends in powerlessness as John’s disciples come to claim his body.
Call it a guilty conscience or call it superstition, but Herod attributes to the murdered John this power that he hears associated with the name Jesus. He cannot conceive of another explanation for the wonders that are being done in Jesus’ name. As far as Herod is concerned, these signs and wonders are not about Jesus—they’re all about John.
Herod isn’t alone in failing to recognize that Jesus’ ministry represents something new, that it is a manifestation of the kingdom of God let loose upon the world. Some see in Jesus the presence of Elijah, the prophet whose return was expected before the coming of the messiah. Others are saying that Jesus is a prophet like one of the prophets of old, like Isaiah or Jeremiah. We should note that in Jesus’ lifetime, it had been more than 400 years since the last of the biblical prophets appeared. That must be why there is a buzz in the air that history is repeating itself.
It’s human nature to look for patterns in events. We want to be able to understand the world and we want the world to be understandable. We think that if we can understand what happened in the past, then we ought to be able to predict what will happen in the future. This is why people study history.
Although centuries had passed since there was a prophet in Israel, through the Scriptures the people understand what a prophet looks and sounds like. They understand the role of a prophet. A prophet calls people to repent of their wrongdoing. A particularly powerful prophet, like Elijah, may even perform signs and wonders. Isn’t that what Jesus is doing?
Herod and others in this passage want to put Jesus into an existing framework that makes sense to them. That’s why they label him a prophet. “He is John whom I beheaded,” or “He is Elijah,” or “He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.” But just because God has used prophets this way in the past does not mean that Jesus is simply the latest and greatest prophet on God’s team. He’s not. Jesus is much more than a prophet.
Jesus doesn’t merely call us back to God’s way; Jesus himself is the way.
In the communion liturgy, during what’s known as the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, you hear me say, “You sent prophets to call us back to your way.” That’s true, but Jesus doesn’t merely call us back to God’s way; Jesus himself is the way. John recognizes this, which is why in the Gospel of John he says of Jesus, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” John is the voice crying out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” John is the one who points to Jesus who is the way, the truth, and the life.
Like all the prophets before him, John called people to repent and return to the way of the Lord, i.e., to the law. But Jesus doesn’t call us to heed the law, he fulfills the law. We are not judged by our ability to keep God’s word. Thank God! Instead we are judged by the grace of the one who fulfills the law on our behalf, doing for each one of us what none of us could do for ourselves.
John performed a ministry of baptism for the forgiveness of sins. But Jesus baptizes with the Holy Spirit, and he himself takes away the sin of the world once and for all, hoisting it upon his shoulders as he hangs from the cross.
After we hear about prophets calling us back to God’s way, the next line in the communion liturgy reads, “Then in the fullness of time, out of your great love for the world, you sent your only Son to be one of us, to redeem us and heal our brokenness.” In the fullness of time. I’ve never really thought about that phrase until now.
The New Testament writers had two words for time. Chronos, from which we get the word “chronology,” meaning a sequence of events, refers to chronological time—the seconds, minutes, and hours measured by a watch or the days of the week on a calendar. Then there’s kairos, which is more about the appropriate time for something to occur. For example, earlier in Mark, Jesus begins his ministry by saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.” He’s referring there to kairos.
Both chronos and kairos factor into the life and work of Jesus. Jesus is fully human and fully divine. As fully human, he is subject to chronos, i.e., the ticking of the clock. He is born, lives, and dies according to the same calendar whose pages mark all of our days. As fully divine, his resurrection, while occurring within time, resounds for all time. It ripples into the past, reaches into the present, and reverberates into the future. It has a beginning but no end. It fills time.
This is getting a bit mystical, so let me say that the point I am driving at is that even as sin and death appear triumphant in the present, as they did under Herod’s reign, as they do whenever violence is normalized, the kingdom of God is already breaking upon the world. The very next passage in Mark is Jesus feeding the 5,000. And so, as Herod is throwing a private banquet for his inner circle of sycophants, Jesus is feeding the masses with just five loaves and two fish. Even as John, a servant of God, is executed in a prison cell, Jesus, the Son of God, has come to set the captives free. Even as darkness stretches over the land, dawn’s early light breaks upon the horizon.