Sermon, Mark 6:14-29

Last week I posted my Sunday sermon here as an emergency measure when I couldn’t upload it for a day or two to my other site, where I usually post them. Since a couple of you here appreciated it, I thought that at least for this week I’d again post it here.

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Introduction
You’ve probably heard the famous story about the preacher
giving a children’s address.

“What’s brown, furry and climbs trees?” he asks the
children.

A little girl nervously raises her hand. “Please, I know the
answer should be Jesus but it sounds like a squirrel to me.”

How easy it is to get the wrong end of the stick.

So who is our passage about? Is it about Herod? John the Baptist?
Salome? Herodias?

I’m going to suggest that in the words of the little girl,
‘the answer should be Jesus’. The whole of Mark’s Gospel has Jesus as his
subject. The very first verse of the Gospel says it is the beginning of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Even in this story, where the apparent
focus is upon the scandalous murder of his cousin John, Jesus is the theme.

1. Kingship
There’s a very revealing description of Herod in verse 14.
Coming after the positive response to the ministry of Jesus and the Twelve in
the Galilean villages, Mark says,

‘King Herod heard of it.’

So what? King
Herod, that’s what. This is Herod Antipas, one of the sons of Herod the Great,
who tried to murder the infant Jesus. And he is not a king. He is a local ruler
for Galilee and Perea appointed by the Romans.
He wanted the title ‘king’ and had even modelled his court after the imperial
pattern. But the Emperor Augustus denied him the title, and dismissed him from
office in AD 39, sending him into exile, for the cheek of asking. [William
L Lane, The Gospel According To Mark, p 211.]

Mark, I believe, is not lacking information when he calls
Herod ‘king’. He knows only too well that Herod had pretensions to kingship.
Mark is writing about twenty-five years after Herod’s dismissal from office by
Augustus.

And Mark’s readers know this, too. Mark almost certainly
wrote his Gospel to Christians in Rome
who were suffering persecution under the Emperor Nero. They know Herod was not
granted the title of king, too.

So Mark is using the title ‘king’ for Herod in an ironic, if
not satirical way. Here is a man who had pretensions to kingship. He gathered a
court. He liked power, titles and respect. But he wasn’t a king.

And more to the point, Herod was hearing about the one who
was truly king, Jesus, and who showed a radically different way to be king.
Here is one who gathers no court of snivelling admirers and grovellers for
favours. He has a motley crew of twelve men from dubious backgrounds and with
flaky characters. And he’s going to start a revolution with them.

And here is a king who doesn’t need to plead for the title,
because he knows who he is. He knows he is ‘Lord’ and yet he doesn’t ‘lord it
over others’. He comes not to be served but to serve. He makes a nonsense of
conventional airs and graces when he takes a towel and washes his followers’
feet.

Now where does that leave us? It leaves us in what one
writer called ‘The
Upside-Down Kingdom’. Wherever we are in the world, we are called to
reflect this. Following the model of Jesus our king, it will affect how we
work. Not for the Christian the model of creeping to those above us in the
hierarchy and trampling on those below us.

It affects the way we do church. I wear a dog-collar on
Sundays out of concession to those who would be offended if I didn’t, but to be
honest, I don’t believe in it. Dressing differently makes me look superior, and
I’m not. It’s a worldly way of thinking, whereas under the reign of Jesus you
don’t become important by having a title, qualifications or position. You are
important because you are human and because Christ died for you.

It affects the way we treat anyone. Other people are not
commodities. They are not resources. They are people to be served in the name
of Jesus our king. Understanding the kingship of Jesus leaves us not with a
superiority complex that we are in on secret truth but with a question about
who I can serve in his name.

2. Knowing Jesus
What were people saying about Jesus? Everybody had an
opinion:

Some were saying, ‘John the baptizer
has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in
him.’ But others said, ‘It is Elijah.’ And others said, ‘It is a prophet, like
one of the prophets of old.’
[verses 14b-15]

What strikes me in these comments is how little they knew
Jesus. If anyone thought that Jesus was John the Baptist back from the dead
they could not have known anything about either of them, ‘since they did not
know that Jesus was a contemporary of John and had been baptized by him’ [Lane,
p212]. If they thought Jesus was Elijah, then it sounds like they knew John’s
preaching but not Jesus’ – you could read that into John’s message but Jesus
clearly said John was the new Elijah. And the suggestion that Jesus is one of
the prophets of old is a similar idea.

The long and the short of it is that they had very little
appreciation of who Jesus was. Jesus’ own followers struggled to identify him,
too. And even when they got it right, with Simon Peter recognising him as the
Christ, it was immediately bungled by the denial that the Christ should suffer.
Remember that earned one of ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’s least pastorally
sensitive responses: “Get behind me, Satan”.

And lack of knowledge about Jesus is a contemporary theme.
Many of us are aware how little our friends outside church circles know about
him. Some might have an understanding of his centrality to Christmas, but it is
surprising to realise how few know that Jesus is central to Easter. There are
those who believe that John the Baptist baptised Jesus in the River Thames, and
so on.

For all these reasons and more, our forthcoming Holiday Club
next month presents us with an opportunity to share more of Jesus with young
hearts and minds. The relationships we build and the epilogues we prepare for
the weekly Craft Club are part of the same picture. So too is the wider
involvement of the Christian Church in education, and I shall be taking
assemblies at Little Waltham Primary School once a month from September.

But we also need to examine ourselves. It can be shocking to
recognise how little we know, and our Time
To Talk Of God course has shown that although most of us have been
Christians for many years there are many basic things we know little about –
some key Christian doctrines, some basic Christian disciplines and our general
biblical knowledge, to mention but three.

So when we read biblical stories like today’s and encounter
people who had a defective view of Jesus, and when we meet people in our
society who also know little about him, we need to be very careful about our
own reactions. Yes, we need to be positive in finding ways to help people not
only know more about Jesus but also to know him. But again we have to guard
ourselves against a reaction that comes out of a superiority complex. If those
of us who claim to be his present-day disciples know very little about him and
his ways then there is a clear call to apply ourselves.

In fact it may well mean that we need to reorder things in
our personal life and in our church life. If our current priorities are not
leading to a deeper knowledge of Jesus and practical response in our lives to
that knowledge, then some things need to change. We may need to make hard
decisions about priorities. We may even need to choose between priorities.

What we certainly need to do is put an urgent premium on
developing small groups where we can get to grips with some of these issues. We
can learn more about our faith, ask the difficult questions and cajole one
another into spiritual growth. It’s not simply about learning a collection of
facts that would enable us to be Mastermind
contestants, specialising in Christianity. It’s about the practical application
of our faith – loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength – seeing such
small groups as another way to act out our Christian service in the world.

3. Guilt
How does ‘King’ Herod react? ‘[W]ith an uneasy conscience
disposed to superstition, [he] feared that John had come back to haunt him.’
[Lane, p 213]

But when Herod heard of it, he said,
‘John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.’
[verse 16]

It’s amazing what a meeting of guilt with Jesus will do.
Herod is petrified. And in the rest of the story we get Mark’s account of just
why Herod has a guilty conscience. He has entered into an adulterous and
scandalous marriage to his brother’s wife, which John has rightly condemned. He
has presided over an undoubtedly debauched banquet at which his step-daughter has
pleased a crowd of dirty old men by dancing lasciviously. He has made a rash
vow that his angry wife has manipulated and which ends up with John’s
execution. Is that enough guilt?

And so Mark has given us a detailed account of John’s murder
by the authorities. He will later do the same in greater detail about Jesus
himself. It is not without cause that Mark’s Gospel has been called ‘a passion
narrative with a long introduction’. In our story today we get John the
Baptist’s passion as a precursor to Jesus’ passion. This is what guilt does: it
kills God’s messenger.

John is executed, Jesus will be. It looks like the triumph
of injustice and the failure of God’s kingdom. But, as Brian McLaren puts it in
his latest book,

What if the only way for the kingdom of God to come in its true form – as a
kingdom “not of this world” – is through weakness and vulnerability, sacrifice
and love? What if it can conquer only by first being conquered? What if being
conquered is absolutely necessary to expose the brutal violence and dark
oppression of these principalities and powers, these human ideologies and
counterkingdoms – so that they, having been exposed, can be seen for what they
are and freely rejected, making room for the new and better kingdom? What if
the kingdom of God must in these ways fail in order to succeed?
[Brian McLaren, The Secret Message Of
Jesus, p 69f.]

And only this – what the apostle Paul called ‘the
foolishness of the Cross’ – will deal with the guilt that persecutes and kills
God’s messengers and God’s Son. Our high and holy calling is not to proclaim
pop psychology with a religious veneer or a slice of self-help thinly spread
with God, however much the Gospel does wonders for human self-esteem. Nor is it
our rôle to baptise our favourite political creed whether of left or right and
claim that it will bring in the kingdom, however vital the message of social
justice is. Our duty and purpose is to present a cross-shaped message.

And within that comes a calling to live a cross-shaped life.
Ours too will be the call to say uncomfortable things to the movers and shakers
of our society, and they may no more like it than Herod Antipas and Herodias
did. The signs are there: to take but one recent example, little over a week
ago a Christian discipleship course in Dartmoor Prison was closed
because it offended against ‘diversity policies’. What was wrong with it?
Firstly, it taught the sanctity of marriage and that was deemed to be
homophobic. Secondly, it was not multi-faith but explicitly Christian.

Like John’s disciples we may have bodies to bury – I pray
not literally but institutions, assumptions and ways of doing things may be
buried as constraints tighten and opposition increases. Nevertheless we need to
persevere with the call to serve as our King himself did, to learn more of him
and put it into practice – which will doubtless mean a call to that self-same
service and proclaiming the Cross in word and deed even in the face of
opposition.

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