† Theirs wasn’t a match made in heaven, Herod’s and Herodias’s. Like many marriages of the rich and powerful throughout history, theirs was a political alliance, as was Herod’s prior marriage to a Nabatean princess.
The dissolution of the first marriage and the occasion of the second put Herod in a bind between his former father-in-law, the King of Nabatea, and a potential uprising of Herod’s own Jewish subjects, in alliance with Nabatea, to throw off this puppet King of the Jews.
John the Baptist was a popular preacher and Herod feared that John would be the voice of Jewish rebellion, so Herod struck before John’s movement could mobilize against him.
The first century Jewish historian Josephus gave us this account of the conflict between King Herod and John the Baptist. It differs from the gospel account by Saint Mark in Herod’s motivation, but not in the outcome.
In making King Herod a sympathetic character, fearing and protecting this perplexing, baptizing preacher, Mark succeeds in making King Herod look weak. It’s his second wife Herodias who bears the grudge; and it’s the drunken Herod, in a face-saving measure in front of his political cronies, who keeps his head at the cost of John’s.
John the Baptist wasn’t the first prophet to incur the wrath of the king and his court. Many of his biblical forerunners ran afoul of their rulers – the kings who strayed far from the covenant God made with God’s chosen people.
Herod himself was an opportunistic Jew, keeping the laws and customs when it suited him politically, and ignoring or flouting them when it didn’t matter so much. John called him on it. John got in the way. John had to go.
Amos was a prophetic ancestor of John, on the scene eight centuries before the Baptist. The Kingdom of David and of his son Solomon had been cut in two – north and south, Israel and Judah – and God sent the southern sheep-herder and sycamore-dresser Amos north, to Israel, to castigate the king and the wealthiest of his supporters over their economic oppression of the common subjects, in clear violation of the law and of common decency.
The priest Amaziah was the king’s man, and in defense of King Jeroboam, he told Amos to go home and to mind his own business.
It seems nobody likes it when an enemy or a rival pokes a nose in their own affairs – it’s rather like when Governor Newsom of California travelled to Florida and took out political ads against Governor DeSantis. Whether one likes his politics or not, one can understand why DeSantis took exception to Newsom’s incursion, just as one can understand Amaziah’s fit over Amos’s unwelcome visit.
To those who question whether politics belongs in church, today’s readings from the prophet Amos and the evangelist Mark are political through and through.
It was the world Amos lived in. It was the world John and Mark lived in. It is the world we live in.
We live in a time of deep political rivalry and division, much like rivalry and division between the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in Amos’s day; much like the rivalry and division in John’s day between the quasi-Jewish puppet fiefdom of Herod and the faithful Jewish people struggling for survival under his Roman-backed rule.
Today’s neighbors Israel and Palestine are at each other’s throats, as are the neighbors Russia and Ukraine. Might the neighboring Koreas, North and South, be next?
In our own country the political rivalries and divisions between neighbors seem intractable. Who knows how any if it will end, and people on all sides, all around the world, are anxious and frightened and vengeful.
Today’s gospel passage is a lectionary rarity in that Jesus shows up only by reputation. He doesn’t teach or heal or feed or challenge. About all we get from John’s story is the foreshadow of Jesus’ own political troubles, and his arrest and execution at the hand of his rivals. And afterward, Jesus’ body, like John’s, would be laid in a tomb. This gospel passage doesn’t give us much hope.
The politics of the kingdoms of this world are hard – they always have been; and the people who challenge the king get put in their place – usually in a prison or in a tomb.
Today’s gospel passage doesn’t give us much hope … but the gospel and the whole arc of scripture absolutely do.
Scripture and tradition teach us that Christ, dead and entombed, kept busy.
The Apostles’ Creed states, Christ “descended to the dead” before rising again on the third day.
In his first letter, Saint Peter teaches us that Christ “was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison” (3:18-19), that prison being the place where the dead who preceded him went, awaiting their redemption.
Our first parents, Adam and Eve, were the first to be rescued, a famous icon of Easter illustrates. Then the patriarchs and prophets, Abraham and Amos and the like; and finally the last prophet to precede Christ, John the Baptist.
Our own redemption, Saint Paul teaches us, comes through the blood of that same crucified, buried, and risen Christ. It is that same body and blood of Christ that we receive in Holy Communion.
Our adoption as God’s children comes through Holy Baptism, which is our participation in Christ’s death and resurrection.
Our inheritance as God’s children is the promise of God’s great ingathering of things heavenly and earthly through Christ, and the hope that we set on him, even as we await the fulfillment of this blessed assurance.
We, the Church on earth – Universal and Militant – remain in the long season of hard politics and anxious awaiting.
In this season we witness the suffering of others and we endure suffering of our own. We work where we can to alleviate suffering and to administer justice. This prophetic work of the Church may send some to prison and others to the tomb. It always has and there’s no reason to believe otherwise.
And to carry us through we have hope. We have hope because God blesses us, God chooses us, God destines us, God adopts us, God forgives us, God redeems us, God marks us, God saves us.
Why? Because God loves us.
Saint Paul believed this with everything he had (Romans 8:31-39). I urge you to be convinced of this this, too.
“If God is for us,” Paul wrote to the Church in Rome, “who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not give us everything else?” […]
“Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” Paul continued. “Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” […]
“I am convinced,” Paul concluded, “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” †
Fr. Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP
8th after Pentecost, Proper 10 – July 14, 2024
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco
“Nothing is Everything”
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