“Head On a Platter”

Mark 6: 14-29

Dr. Charles J. Tomlin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

July 15^th, 2012

There is nothing like someone getting their head cut off to get our attention these “dog days” of summer.  

In the first Bible I ever had, a visually oriented children’s “picture” Bible, there was a large page picture illustrating John the Baptist’s head on a platter.   It’s the one Bible picture I have never gotten out of my head.   After all those years, it’s still there in pale purple ink.   It’s more dramatic than when they shot J.R.  It’s even more vivid than the real Dallas and the murder of J.F.K.    For some reason I can’t explain, in my head it made a deeper and darker impression than the first time I saw Jesus on the cross.   Being mesmerized by this “head-on-a-platter”, I could not grasp why they called the Bible “the Good Book”.      

Our text for today centers upon Mark’s flash back retelling of the beheading of John the Baptist.  Herod ordered John’s death at the request of his stepdaughter.   She had just “danced” before his ‘gentlemen’ club crowd impressing them so much that Herod was willing to promise her anything.   She consulted her mother about what she should ask for and her mother, Herodias, wanted John’s head.  John had preached that it was wrong for Herod to have his brother’s wife and evidently, Herodias didn’t like it.  She was just waiting for the chance to say “off with his head”!

But what does this sordid and repugnant story have to do with our world today?   Well, for one thing, we don’t have to search very far into the news reports and politics of today to learn about how many people would just love to have someone else’s head on a platter, so to speak.    They are not just doing that in Palestine or Iran, but also in Aruba, in  Mexico, in America and most anywhere you look.   The uneasiness of our times invites all kinds of uncivil speech and uncivilized behavior to become the new norm.  Daily news reports and reality and non-reality TV constantly fill our heads with all kinds of negative language, images and actions of scorn, hate, ridicule, revenge, bullying and increasing fits rage and anger.   And if you haven’t heard, they are even bringing Television’s favorite villain back.   J.R. Ewing and Dallas is returning to the airways.   I guess the new watchword in reserve is that you just can’t keep a “bad” man down. 

What kind of word can this story of the demand for having John’s “head on a platter” give to us, when someone, or life itself seems to want to have our “head on a platter”, at least figuratively speaking?   When life becomes cruel, unfair, unjust, and just plain mean, what can it mean, what should it mean to act and react like a Christian?   I believe this text gives some interesting insight into what it means try to be stay civil in today’s increasingly uncivilized atmosphere.

IT’S PROBABLY NOT ABOUT YOU

If there is any good news in this story at all, it begins with a surprise.   All that anger, hate, malice and rage directed toward you may not be about you at all.

Notice that this is how it was in John’s situation.  John the Baptist was a prophet.  He was even respected by Herod himself.   Our text begins by telling us that when Herod heard about Jesus he immediately thought about John, whom he had beheaded.   Herod believes Jesus is John, who has been “raised from the dead” (16).  The whole point is that Herod’s conscience is bothering him.  In verse 20 we read even that “Herod feared John and protected him, knowing him to be a righteous man.”  While Herodias, his wife, wanted John to be killed, the text says “when Herod heard John, he was greatly puzzled; yet he liked to listen to him.”  Evidently, when John preached, Herod heard the truth of his message, but the truth also came with some sharp edges which Herodias did not like.  She wanted John dead.

The truth can hurt sometimes, but the pain of the truth is a “hurt” that intends to help and to heal, if we are willing to take its medicine.  However, that it’s the medicine many do not want.   Also in Mark’s story about John, the problem was not in John’s telling of the truth, but in the inability to receive it.  The problem did not reside with John.   

All of us have run into something like this before.   We tell the truth or we try to do something that is right and someone can’t take it.  As a pastor you run into it often.  I recall several years ago, while pastor of a young congregation, the leadership team was reflecting about some creative ways to do evangelism during summer months.  At the invitation of a local baseball team, we decided to take a Sunday night in June, call off our evening service, and take everyone to the ballgame.  We bought tickets for members and asked members to participate by finding some unchurched friends and purchasing tickets for them.  At the Sunday morning service, while shaking hands, an older member took my hand, looked me in the eye and said, “How dare you call off Sunday evening service for a baseball game?”  Since that person did not care to call me aside, but decided to call me out in a public place, I knew there was an intentional attempt to hurt me.   I could have taken this personal, but the truth was, that it was not about me.   The leadership team and made this decision together.   The cause was evangelistic.  It was only one Sunday.   But this person just could not bear the thought of not having church.   There was a problem, but it wasn’t about what we were doing, it was about something else going on in them.   It was something about their limited view of what it means to be church in the world or something else.  Not long thereafter, that person developed chronic Leukemia.  Fortunately, they did not hold a grudge and said nothing about the baseball event ever again.

I would guess that most times when people lash out at you, like Herodias did at John, or when that lady lashed out at me, it’s not about what happening, but it’s about something else altogether.   Another great biblical example is in the story of the man born blind in John’s gospel (John 9. 1ff).   Do you remember how the disciples, when they saw the blind man “blind from birth”, that they asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  You can see here that what motivated the disciples question was not simply what was wrong with the blind man.  They had questions within themselves, probably about their own issues.   But amazingly, Jesus answers their question in a way that proved the problem was really not a problem at all.  According to Jesus, the blind man’s problem provided an opportunity for God to work, as Jesus answers, “…but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.”  How many of us could look at life’s challenges and problems this way, as challenges to overcome rather than ways or reasons to bring insult or to abuse another for what it happening around or to us.

So, the first truth in this story is that when people want your head on a platter (figuratively speaking), the problem is probably more than about what you are or are not doing.  You just happen to be the unfortunate one who has brought the issue to the surface.   As with John, and so with you, someone thinks getting rid of you will fix their problem, but the problem is more than about you.      

IT COULD BE A WAR IN THEIR OWN SOUL

The second message follows from this: When people lash out at you there is probably a war going on within their own mind and heart.   Can’t you see this with Herod and Herodias and the daughter of Herodias?   Anything you know about the Herods and their rule makes you think of anything but a happy family.   Their grandfather slaughter babies!   It doesn’t get more mean or dysfunctional than that.   Here, John’s preaches that Herod had stolen his “brother’s wife” (18) which was against both social and religious law.   We also have Herod’s birthday party where Herod himself has to throw his own party (does anybody like him) and brings in high officials.  

While at the party Herod is evidently attempting to impress his own guest by having in his own young, attractive stepdaughter to do a suggestive, provocative dance.  I just can’t imagine that his went over well with his wife, Herodias.   Anger, hurt, pain and disgust is between the lines everywhere.  When King Herod, perhaps feeling a bit guilty about everything, asked what she wanted of his kingdom as her gift for making such an impression, she does not immediately answer but went out to ask her mother.   That’s another bad sign as you can just imagine who was calling the shots.  When her daughter returns to ask for the head of John the Baptist, we are told the king is “greatly distressed”.   But to save face, he has to order the execution.  What a sad sight to see a King with no power at all being control by everyone else!

What is actually happening here is that we are seeing the pathetic inner struggle that went on among the Herods.  Again, the problem was not John, but it was the struggle within the Herod family for control, for power, for prestige and for their continued rule as puppet rulers under Rome.   It is their personal, family and political problem and struggles which caused them to lashed out and kill the true prophet of God.   

I recall another situation as pastor, when a wealthy couple in our church, who did not have children, began to help a family with children in the community.  They started bringing the children to church, reaching out to them, and even buying clothes and food, as their ‘drug addicted’ parents kept neglecting them.   The couple came to me and introduced the children so they could get me involved in the situation.  But when I did, as I went to Social Services to discuss the matter, they told me that my members where not really helping the children at all.  What money and showering of gifts was doing was keeping the children dressed and cared for, so that Social services could not find reason to intervene.  They advised me to get the couple to stop showering gifts, so they could see the situation as it really was and remove the children from the home and put them in a safe place.

When I attempted to tactfully advise the couple to back off for a while, they did not take it well.  They even lashed out at me for being an uncaring pastor.    As I continued to try to understand the situation and all their anger, I realized that most of the negativity was being fueled by the wife, who I found out later, had been herself neglected and found the church as her savior.  That was a good thing, but now she was projecting all that pain against me, when I suggested that they should restrain their gifts.   The truth is that it was not about just helping the children, but it was about this “wife” who needed help as a child, still trying to help the hurting child inside of her.  In helping the children, she was still fixated on her own struggles.  She lashed out at me because of what had happened to her, and in her mind, was still happening, she was unable to stand back and consider the bigger picture.

Often, this is what happens when people come after other person.  They are after someone because there is something still hurting in their own soul that has not yet been fully or completely healed.  We all see this in life.  Any of us can carry pain from one situation to the next, which can go in cycles and in new relationships until somewhere, sometime, somehow, we are able to get off car of shame, blame, and hurt and address the “struggle” that is going on within us. Until we address our own “struggles” we will keep dragging others into it, because, as they say, ‘misery loves company’.

THERE IS SOMETHING THEY AND WE NEED TO DO

This brings us to the third truth.  When someone lashes out at you, it is more than you they are lashing out at and it’s probably their own baggage they have not yet fully unloaded and are still struggling with.   But the most important truth from this story is that there is something they should do, must do, could do, but they are not doing for themselves, so now, what are they doing but are putting all the load on you.   Remember that Bible text in Galatians 6 which says, “Bear one another’s burdens and fulfill the law of Christ” but then concludes, “You must bear your own load.”  This is what many cannot do, because the hurt is so painful in their own soul.

Can’t we see this in Herod’s situation?    Herod will not unload his own baggage, but unloads it all on John.   Look at it:  Mark tells us that Herod is haunted by his memory of killing John.   When he hears about Jesus, he can’t think about what good Jesus is doing, but he can only think of what he did to poor John.   But it goes back further.  Herod “liked to listen to John”.  He “feared” or respected John.  He was ‘greatly puzzled’ about the whole matter.  Perhaps, when he heard John speak about his illegal and unlawful marriage, he knew there were things he needed to do, perhaps to confess and conclude that he needed to do life differently.   But instead of changing his own ways, taking an honest look at himself or instead of admitting his own foolish promise, he gave in to the rash call for John’s execution.

Do you know how simply this could have come out differently?  Herod could have said, “Oh, what I said was so stupid.  How wrong to promise something I should not fulfill?”  But Herod could not do what he really needed to do.  Again, that was Herod’s problem, not John’s.  When people don’t do what they should do, when any of us don’t do what we should do, all kinds of other people can get hurt.  It happens all the time.  There are often very simple ways out of complex situations, but too often, we choose not to do the things we should do and life turns tragic and people get hurt.

In the first letter of John, the first strong word to the community of faith is one we need to keep ever before us, if we want to keep community with each other.  John writes: “If we walk in the light, we have fellowship with each other” (1:7) and for this fellowship to happen we cannot “claim to be without sin” (1:8), but we must “confess our sins” to each other so that God can “forgive us”.  This is always the first thing we must always be ready to do, if we want to get along with each other.  We must be willing to admit and confess our shortcomings to each other.  But Herod didn’t.  We often don’t.  When Herod refused to do what he needed to do, John was killed.  And when we refuse to admit our own issues or face our own demons, we and others will get hurt. 

I would like to end this sermon by saying that it all depends on us, but that is not what this text implies.   John the Baptist could not do anything about his situation when he was arrested either.    The final word from this tragic story is not what humans can do, should do, or won’t do, but what God will do.   Herod is now history.   John was tragically killed.  But after John came Jesus.   Even in John’s tragic death, we can see a picture of what Jesus will do for all of us.   Jesus also suffered at the hands of other people who wanted his head.   Jesus was not the problem.  Israel was struggling in her own soul.   People would not do what they should do.   But even in all this, as tragedy happened to John and to Jesus, it is still God who had the final word.   Jesus once said of John, “there has been no greater person born among women” but even as great as John was, or even with who Jesus was,  as human beings doing God’s work in the world, neither could not save themselves.  None of us can.  As one person wisely put it, “none of us will get out of this world alive.”  In the final run of things, we all have to find a way to trust God for the final outcome of what is bad and what is good, which eludes our predictions or our control.

So, the conclusion of this tragic story has not been fully written because our stories are not yet fully written.  When people are out to get us, like they were out to get John, sometimes there is not much we can do about it except trust that somehow, someway God will either deliver or eventually vindicate us.   Since all of our lives will finally come to the same ultimate conclusion of death, the only positive and most logical response we can have is this: that no matter what happens we must keep our faith and trust that in the end, God will work and win through us.  Yes, John was killed.  Jesus died on the cross,  But we know their stories are not their own.  They both belonged to God.  And when your life belongs to God, even with endings, there is hope for new beginnings.   The world of Israel gained a new beginning through Jesus and through John.   We too can gain new beginnings out of tragic endings, but it will demand faith.  Those disciples of John had to keep on going, believing and hoping, when they “took his body and laid it in a tomb.” (Mark 6.29).   If they could only hold on long enough for what God was about to do next.    Did they?  Can we?   We must!  When our head is on the platter, God is our only true hope.   Amen.