Seventh Sunday after Trinity, 15 July 2018
Austwick, Clapham
When Herod heard about Jesus, he said, ‘John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.’
This is the story of a haunted king. For Herod was seeing ghosts. He thought that John had come back to haunt him - in the shape of Jesus.
But we can be sure that even before Jesus came on the scene, Herod was haunted by John; even before that ugly game of pass the platter in the king’s banqueting hall where John’s severed head ended up in the hands of revengeful Herodias; even before Herod threw the prophet into jail for condemning him for his unlawful marriage, Herod was out of his mind for he could not get John out of his head.
For John had pursued King Herod mercilessly. Like a hunter he walked up Herod’s life, flushed out the badness in the king, disturbed what the king had been hiding: his fear of being judged with vengeance. [1]
John was in the mould of the prophets of old, like Amos, whose God would wipe out errant kings and peoples without blinking. [2] The Baptist called people to repent of their sins; he preached of One who would come after him wreaking righteous vengeance on the unrepentant: who, with a winnowing-fork in his hand, would ‘clear his threshing-floor and gather his wheat into the granary; and burn the chaff with unquenchable fire.’ [3]
So even when he had him in his cell in chains, Herod feared John, Mark tells us, knowing that John was a righteous and holy man, and so Herod protected him. Herod was drawn to John’s fiery talk: Mark tells us that ‘he liked to listen to him’. And yet ‘he was at a loss when listening to him’; ‘he was greatly perplexed by what he heard’. [4]
The picture emerges of a king torn - between behaving loyally towards his wife and his court, on the one hand, and on the other his sense of what was righteous behaviour - and how he would be ultimately judged by One more powerful than him. This is the Herod depicted by Gustav Flaubert, Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss as befuddled by both drink and lust, and in bitter conflict with his wife. This is Mark’s Herod, haunted by John. [5]
The concept of the "King's two bodies”, the body natural and the body politic, goes back to medieval times. It is a political theology which distinguishes the king's natural body with its physical attributes and weaknesses from the king's other body, the spiritual body, which symbolises his office as majesty with the divine right to rule: hence that well known statement, “The King is dead, long live the King.” [6] It is the struggle of every king to hold these two bodies in balance - for the failings of the physical man can cause the falling of the spiritual head, as in the case of old King Jeroboam whose lust for power led him to stray from his spiritual roots in the House of David and caused his eventual downfall - you can read all about it in the First Book of Kings. [7]
And similarly here we have Herod Antipas, an expansionist ruler renowned for constructing his great capital city Tiberias on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee; an administrative innovator who oversaw a shift from traditional to commercialised agriculture, under whose harsh rule the poor of the land became much poorer. [8] Herod was a strong and fearless leader - yet here we see him dazed and confused in the presence of a ragged wilderness prophet, and reduced to trembling by the possibility that Jesus was the dead John come back to wreak revenge on him.
If it had been John returning, then Herod’s fears may have been fulfilled. For these two men operated in the same world - a world of consequences, of eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth, a world of harsh judgement and even harsher retribution.
What Herod was not to know when he heard about Jesus coming on the scene was that this was not John at all. What Herod would not understand was that this One who came after John did not come seeking righteous vengeance on the unrepentant: there was no burning chaff with unquenchable fire with Jesus.
Jesus was not John - for he wouldn’t fulfil the apocalyptic scenario John preached. He wasn’t the judgemental God wreaking violence on those who had offended him, nor did he call on such a God. When Jesus called on God he called him his loving Father. When Jesus flexed his arms it was not to wield a winnowing-fork; it was to allow the nails of his executioners, sanctioned by Herod, to pierce his own hands on the cross.
Jesus came from another world altogether than the world which John and Herod understood and in which they danced their antagonistic dance. It is possible that Herod could neither admire nor fear Jesus because he just could not comprehend Jesus’ message, a message of absolute love for neighbours, allies and enemies alike, which Jesus manifested on the cross when he asked his Father to forgive all those who had conspired to put him there, Herod Antipas among them.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote,
If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, ... who is connected with my own nature. But if God determines where (God) is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find (God) must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands. This is not according to our nature at all, it is entirely contrary to it. But this is the message of the Bible. [9]
Some time after Jesus’ crucifixion Herod Antipas fell from power through battles over land, and the Roman Emperor Caligua sent him to Gaul, where he and Herodias lived out the remainder of their days in exile. We can only speculate if Herod heard reports of Jesus’ resurrection and what he may have made of that. [10]
What if we imagine that, contemplating the message of the cross, Herod found himself forgiven? That for the first time ever Herod realised that he was loved by a God who only judges in love, and in the spirit of the resurrected Jesus Herod was released from his haunting by John? What if, no longer fearing condemnation and destruction for all he’d done, Herod accepted God’s invitation to eat and drink and enjoy his place in the fellowship of all who know they are forgiven and unconditionally loved, now and for all time?
If we recoil a little from the idea the Herod may have been released from judgement at the end of his days, if we would rather Herod stayed condemned and went to his grave still haunted by his wrongs: well, that may be because we ourselves are still caught up in that world of judgement and retribution which John and Herod inhabited.
But worshipping here this morning brings us back into the world of the loving Father God: a world where we don’t have to dance that antagonistic dance any more. Our hymns, our prayers, our liturgy, our sharing of the bread and wine, invite us to accept that God offers us absolute forgiveness, which means we need never be haunted by our ghosts again, as he releases us to live a life liberated by his unconditional love.
Notes
A rewrite of Mark 6 - Herod the haunted, preached in Devon, July 2012 and Somerset, July 2015.
[1] “Walking such paths, you might walk up strange pasts … in the hunter's sense of ‘walking up’ meaning to flush out, to disturb what is concealed.” Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood, Dan Richards, Holloway, p.4.
[2] Amos 7.7-15.
[3] Matthew 3.1-12.
[4] Mark 6.20, sourced from NRSVA and David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation.
[5] Wikipedia: Herod Antipas: Legacy.
[6] Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology.
[7] 1 Kings 12-14 details the background to the prophecies in Amos 7.7-15.
[8] Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Jesus against Christianity, p.188-92. This sermon leans on 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.
[9] Quoted in Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.
[10] Wikipedia: Herod Antipas: Exile and death.
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