Bratton (Sourton), Trinity 6, 15 July 2012
Corton Denham, Trinity 6, 12 July 2015
The haunted king - we’ve seen plenty of those in literature: the ghost of Hamlet’s father announcing ‘murder most foul’, and demanding revenge; Roderick in The Fall of the House of Usher, a monarch ‘assailed by evil things’.
The haunted king - we’ve seen plenty of those in history - King George VI tormented by his terrible speech impediment and the melancholy and dark moods which it caused; Winston Churchill whose successes were closely shadowed by a depression which he called his ‘black dog’.
And today - King Herod, Herod Antipas, client king of the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus and John.
Herod the king was seeing ghosts. He thought that John had come back to haunt him - in the shape of Jesus. As Mark records it,
Some were saying, 'John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in [Jesus].' But others said, 'It is Elijah.' And others said, 'It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.' But when Herod heard of it, he said, 'John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.'
Herod thought that Jesus was the dead man John, returning to haunt him.
We can suppose that the neurotic king may have been haunted by John since the day that he imprisoned him. Haunted by a guilty conscience, because he knew that John was a righteous and holy man.
Or perhaps Herod’s haunting began on the day that he ordered John's beheading. Haunted by a fear that John would come back to condemn him, and to get his revenge.
Herod regarded John as righteous and holy because the Baptist called people to repent of their sins, including Herod, who he called to repent of his unlawful marriage; and Herod noted that John’s version of righteousness and holiness involved vengeance on those who would not comply. John had preached of one who would come after him wreaking righteous revenge on the unrepentant: who ‘will take his winnowing-fork in his hand, and [who] will clear his threshing-floor and [...] gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.’ Herod would have identified this with Israel’s strong tradition of righteous judgement, as expressed by the prophets of old like Amos who foretold that the exploitive King Jeroboam would die by the sword, and Herod would be well aware of the contemporary voices preaching an apocalyptic scenario where on a coming day a judgemental God would wreak violence on those who had offended him.
John’s call on Herod to repent of his unlawful marriage makes him look like a contemporary religious conservative concerned only with the personal morals of people in the public eye; but Antipas also had political reasons to put John the Baptist to death, for Antipas feared the prophet's seditious influence [1]. We can be confident that like Amos before him John’s message challenged the public behaviour of kings which exploited the common people and impoverished them. Herod Antipas’ power was based on a system of heavy taxation and a shift from traditional to commercialised agriculture, and the poor became poorer under his rule. [2] Herod knew that if John continued to speak against this he could incite the people to rebel - he had to be silenced.
Though Herod was drawn to the message of John, though he felt the strength of the truth of John’s judgements, to hold onto power he had to keep John out of the public realm, and because of his wife’s grudge against the Baptist, he had to do away with him.
But Herod was clearly haunted by John’s judgements. And after John’s beheading Herod began to hear voices. When Jesus came along speaking like the prophets of old, siding with the poor and exploited in the land, condemning the powerful who cause the poor to suffer, Herod took this as an echo of the words of John. And because the judgements of the prophets and John led to inevitable violent retribution, Herod trembled at what he heard Jesus say.
But Jesus was no ghost - he was a man in history whose words indeed challenged the domination system of his day, who championed the cause of the poor and exploited in the face of the Roman and ruling elites in the land.
But Jesus was not John either - for he didn’t fulfil the apocalyptic scenario John preached: he did not come armed with weapons and fire; he wasn’t the judgemental God wreaking violence on those who had offended him, nor did he call on such a God.
The surprise for Herod and for those peasant revolutionaries who aggressively opposed Herod, was that Jesus came peaceably, he came with an agenda which replaced burning flesh and spilt blood with an offer of bread and wine. He came bringing people together around meal tables, people of all backgrounds united in fellowship in ways which had never been possible before. He came proposing a new kingdom, based on love and fellowship. He renounced the violence of exploitive rulers and apocalypse-seekers and showed them all a new way.
Just as he had ordered the killing of John, Herod Antipas played an active role in the execution of Jesus, for the message of Jesus was just as politically damaging to Herod as John’s had been. Perhaps more so, for whilst Herod could understand John’s doomsday scenario - both men’s worldview dominated by the myth of redemptive violence - the message of Jesus was of another kind altogether, and the king couldn’t bring himself to his table.
Herod Antipas fell from power after battles over land, and the Emperor Caligua sent him Gaul, where he and Herodias lived out the remainder of their days in exile. We can only speculate on whether he was as haunted by the ghost of Jesus as he had been by John.
But if Herod had heard reports of the resurrection of Jesus, and if he had understood the words of Jesus as much as he had the words of John before him, then maybe Herod would have understood that Jesus has no ghost except the Holy Ghost, and is able to call people to join his company even today.
The haunting of John is for those who fear condemnation and destruction for what they’ve done. The table of Jesus is for those who embrace his invitation to eat and drink and enjoy their place in the fellowship of all who know they are absolutely forgiven and unconditionally loved, now and for all time.
Notes
[1] Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Book XVIII, Chapter 5 cited in Wikipedia.
[2] Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jesus against Christianity, p.188-92. This sermon is clearly influenced by Nelson-Pallmeyer’s thesis about Jesus rejecting apocalypticism and the concept of a vengeful God, and thus rejecting the idea (embraced, according to Nelson-Pallmeyer, by many theologians of nonviolence) that God’s ultimate act will be of retributative violence.
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