Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (10B), July 15, 2018

O God of Love, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

This is one of those Sundays when acclamations of thanksgiving and praise seem inappropriate after the readings. We have a particularly terrible set of readings when it comes to the denigration of women.

In 2^nd Samuel, it’s David’s wife Michal, the spoiler of the story, who saw him leaping and dancing and she despised him in her heart. Michal had been used and abused by her father King Saul and his successor King David, but according to tradition, she loved David and did not think he should be recklessly prancing around, scantily clad, before the throne of the Holy One. What David was doing while leading a triumphant procession of the ark is here translated dancing, but it’s not the usual word to describe happy, playful movement. It’s a word that means “make mockery.” It’s a vulgar, in-your-face kind of victory dance in which David was lewdly exposing himself “in the sight of the slavegirls of his subjects like one of the riffraff” (which is how the Tanakh, or the Jewish Bible, translates the Hebrew) There’s a difference between being fully alive in the Glory of God and the self-congratulatory disregard for the dignity of every other human being when one believes God to be exclusively on one’s own side in a contest or war. Michal knew the difference; David did not.

There’s much to commend the letter to the Ephesians, but it reminds me of being in Ephesus five years ago, and learning about how sophisticated and progressive that city was in the first century of the common era, with regard to the leadership of women, how egalitarian it was when it came to women in authority, in learned professions – teachers, architects, artists, medical practitioners, and I get mad thinking about how the Church has discounted and suppressed that information through the centuries, making it seem like women’s leadership is a modern innovation.

Then we have this gruesome story of the execution of John the Baptist, which gets blamed on a woman and her young daughter. I mean come on. What is this story doing in the Gospel of Mark? It’s an unusually detailed account in the shortest Gospel. (Matthew’s telling is much briefer when he writes his longer Gospel, and Luke and John don’t include it at all.) What is Mark doing with this long aside in the middle of a mission narrative about empowering the twelve to liberate and heal others? (I’m not sure.) It’s a literary flourish of Mark’s – both flashback and foreshadowing. Having heard about the successes of Jesus and his disciples, Herod is flashing back to his decision to have John the Baptist killed and foreshadowing Pilate’s decision to have Jesus of Nazareth killed. Mark’s community would likely immediately think of brave Queen Esther who chose to save her people when asked by King Ahasuerus what he could give her up to and including half of his kingdom. The parallels between Babylon and Rome couldn’t be clearer. Tragically, Herodias was no Esther. They also would have known the story of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel’s clash with the prophet Elijah, or maybe even Judith, the pious widow of Israel who beheaded a tyrant. [1] Mark is highlighting the difference between the way of right-relation and the way of wrong-relation, even in the face of death. Mark is using the archetype story to emphasize the unstoppable presence and power and promise of God, even in the midst of catastrophe.

The scene of Herod’s birthday party has many elements found in the scene at the end of Gospel with Pilate and the crowd. Herod and Pilate both want to please their people, against their own “better judgments,” according to Mark (except they didn’t have better judgements). In Herod’s case, it’s the angry wife’s fault; it’s the little girl’s fault for dancing so well. In Pilate’s case, it’s the religious leaders’ fault; it’s the crowd’s fault for choosing to let another prisoner go free. In both cases, these two powerful men make deadly decisions to save their own faces, to appease their base and to purchase the appearance of strength, however temporary, [2] rather than make a just peace. John the Baptist and Jesus were perceived as threats. They were challenging the authority of the state by stirring up healing and freedom so they were arrested. They were undermining the governing authorities’ ability to make the people instruments of their own oppression. Pheme Perkins, Biblical scholar at Boston College, writes that justice is always the ultimate victim in situations where sexual and power politics rule, and that the “willingness to sacrifice others to maintain honor, prestige, and power remains one of the great temptations of persons in positions of authority.” [3] It’s interesting to me that Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate were both exiled within a few years after John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth’s executions – neither of these tyrants lasted long, and Mark and his audience knew that.

The more difficult the story, the more I like to wonder about not just what the story might be doing in scripture, but what such a story might be doing in us. How is this story teaching us, challenging us, and exposing us? How does this story play out in us? Because I do think that this story is in us, individually and collectively. I see it more easily whenever I look at this story of Herod and Herodias, and Herodias’ daughter and John the Baptist, the way one might look at a dream. How might we interpret this dream-like archetype story using the Jungian method of identifying a part of yourself or myself in every character or situation?

Most of us have never sentenced anyone to death, or asked for anyone’s head on a platter, at least not with the expectation of literally getting it. However, if you dig below that, haven’t many of us, when faced with an uncomfortable truth, wanted to kill it, to fire it, to dismiss it or make it go away? Haven’t we, in moments of bravado (born of insecurity), made rash promises that came back to haunt us? Haven’t we all, when asked what we want, turned to someone else to make that determination for us? Haven’t we ever desired something spiteful? Haven’t we ever kept quiet in circumstances that went against our own moral compass? Haven’t we ever gotten caught up in a crowd and ended up going along with something that didn’t feel right?

And what do we know of the insistent, even prophetic voice within calling us to the healing and liberating power of God that perplexes us, that we like to listen to, but that we lock up – you know — put in a protective custody dungeon so that it doesn’t stir up too much trouble? In what ways are we willing to sacrifice that insistent voice of right-relationship with God and with others to preserve our public image? How have we been ambitious, callous, or opportunistic and ruthless? Or what do we know of our own desire to impress others at any cost? [4]

But before we pummel our dreamy selves into the ground, let’s remember that one component of our gospel dream is John the Baptist, who calls things as he sees them. Loudly. John speaks truth to Herod, even when Herod has the power to kill John, which Herod ultimately exercises. John says what he believes and Herod hears John’s voice long after John has been executed. We all have moments when we know we must speak up and when we do speak truth, even at personal risk. We all have moments when we tell truth come when it may and cost what it will. We all have a voice of a little girl within, inquiring, “For what should I ask?” The right answer is always “freedom and healing for God’s people.”

The purpose of this exercise is not to encourage us to engage in some sort of navel-gazing, or to beat ourselves up. Rather, it is to help us reclaim and incorporate the parts of ourselves that live in the shadows, the parts we would rather didn’t exist, with the parts of ourselves that astonish and delight us. I want to urge us into greater fullness in our relationship with the Divine, especially in the face of internal and external tyrants. To do that, I think we may need to be reminded every now and then of the vast realm of potential for both extravagant good and terrible evil that exists both inside our little personal universes and in the larger worlds we inhabit.

That means that we need to apply this vast realm of potential to our notions of the Holy One as well. I have no patience for the idea of god which (or Who) desires to create and preside over some sort of greeting card happiness factory – that is not the God of our past or our future. The scriptural testimony is about a creator capable of all the vagaries of creation and more: a spirit of holiness for whom our own range of capabilities is but a small subset: envy and compassion, ecstasy and moroseness, arrogance and humility, passion and indifference, destructiveness and creativity, brilliance and darkness. The account that scripture gives is of a covenant relationship with the divine and with one another that invites each to be fully present, fully alive, fully awake to and with the other. The story that scripture tells is of a God Who needs us to bring it all, all of the time. And in the end, we are always called to demonstrate that the power of Love is always greater than the power of evil. The power of Love is always greater.

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