Preaching text: Mark 6:14-29
One of my favorite films of all time is Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. It was a surprise for me to like this movie so much. I realized I loved it when I had it on in the background about once a week while I’d be home doing various other tasks. It’s an adventure movie, set on the high seas in the Age of Sail.
One scene was brought to my thoughts this week because of our Gospel lesson today. The Captain and his best friend, the ship’s doctor, are having a very heated debate in the captain’s quarters over the flogging of an insubordinate sailor. The exchange goes like this.
“Men must be governed.” That is, of course, the core of human civilization. The opposite is barbarism and (as the captain puts it) anarchy. But he also concedes that government is often quite flawed. And, of course, that’s exactly what we see in our Gospel lesson today: the poor government of King Herod that leaves an innocent man dead.
Government requires one thing in order to function and that is power. The power to enforce laws and keep order. That is why it exists. Sadly, as history has taught us, that power is also often exercised capriciously, unjustly, and cruelly. But what I find perhaps most disturbing about the story of the death of John the Baptizer is that it is not a tale of the abuse of power but rather one of the failure to understand power.
Mark tells us clearly that John dies because King Herod is too embarrassed to withdraw his pledge to his daughter. Think about that for a second. He is the king. He has functionally absolute power under Roman law to execute his rule however he sees fit. What’s truly to stop him from saying to his guests, to his daughter, and to his wife, “Nope. That’s the one thing I won’t do. I won’t kill John the Baptist.”
You see Herod really doesn’t want to kill him. Mark tells us that Herod respected, feared, and even listened to John. But this powerful king has caved once before to the whims of his vindictive wife by imprisoning John and now here again by killing him. Is the king or is he not? Herod himself doesn’t seem to know. He doesn’t understand his own power. That's what makes him weak.
Contrast that to his wife who knows exactly what she can do with the power SHE has. She plays Herod like a fiddle, manipulates him and gets precisely what she wants. In between the two of them is the daughter, the dancer, the machine by which the wife twists the king around her finger.
So what does all this mean to us? Despite this story being set in an absolute monarchy government of ancient times, there is a lot here for us who live under a modern constitutional democratic republic. To understand that, I want to do a little mental exercise. One trick you can do with Jesus’ parables is ask yourself “Who am I in this story?” and one’s interpretation of that parable often changes and expands by moving from character to character. While this story before us today is not a parable, I think it benefits from that same exercise.
Most of us, I think would like to feel we’re John the Baptist, the martyr, the holy man. But what if we’re not? What if we’re Herod, unaware of our true power? What if we’re the wife, using the power we have to gain what we desire, no matter who it hurts? What if we’re the daughter, naive and unaware that everything hinges on us?
I believe that we are all three as citizens of this great nation. All too often we are ignorant of our true power as a part of our government by the people, for the people, of the people. All too often, when we do exercise power, it is to our own selfish benefit instead of to the aid of our neighbor. And all too often we surrender our power and let others tell us what to do, not realizing that we can stop evil dead in its tracks.
As Christians, we are called to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We are called to make real to people the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord, one who came to save the world and all the people therein. We do that by healing the sick, caring for the poor and forgotten, by embracing the outcast and outsider; by showing people in very real and concrete ways that God loves them.
One of the most potent places you can do that is in the voting booth. We have an immense gift in the form by which we are governed in this land. Now, I am NOT going to tell you who to vote for. I have my biases, and they’re no secret to anyone, but everyone here does. I am going to tell you why you should vote. Because you, my friends, are powerful. You have been given that power to decide how our government will run. You have given that power to determine what sort of people will represent us. You have been given that power to even become one of those people yourselves if you so wish.
On top of that, you are a Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ and called by him to spread the Gospel and do justice, compassion, and kindness in the world. We are both citizen and disciple and you cannot and should not separate one from the other.
It is quite clear what will happen if we do. Evil will thrive and remake the world as it will. I saw a vision of that from another film; from the new Wrinkle in Time that came out back in March. In the Madeline L'Engle book and in the film, there is a scene where the child heroes have come to the planet of evil, to Camazotz, and the first thing they encounter is a nice suburban neighborhood. But then they notice the houses are all the same. The yards are all the same. The children playing out front are all the same. They bounce their balls all at exactly the same time.
The neighborhood scene can be seen at timestamp 0:43.
When L'Engle wrote the book, the threat was the enforced conformity of Soviet Communism. Now this bland boring sameness is threatened upon us by the nativism and bigotry of America. Ironic, perhaps, that we swing from one extreme of the political spectrum to the other, but the end result is the same. Bland boring dull conformity, no diversity, no variance, everything safe and same, but a far cry from the world God created.
Do not be ignorant of your power like Herod. Do not use your power for the wrong reasons like his wife. And do not surrender your power by allowing others to use it in your stead as the daughter does.
Every one of us here wants a just land, a land of peace and prosperity. We want this land to reflect our Christian values and norms. Now, we may not always agree on how to get there. But I’d like to believe that no matter who we vote for or what party we support that our ultimate goal is the same. And even in these contentious and divided times, I don’t want to surrender that belief, although the temptation to do so is often quite strong. Cynicism and apathy are fertile ground for the Herods and Herodiases of our day to thrive. And the world they will create and are creating is far cry from what God envisions.
“Men must be governed.” But what sort of government do we want? One that caves to our vices and selfishness or a land of justice and equity in line with our faith and beliefs, a line where the things Jesus taught and did matter? What would Jesus have you do with the power you are given? I leave the answer to you. Amen.
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