Mark
6:14-29
In the Episcopal
Church the gospel reading always ends with the declaration, “The Gospel of the
Lord.” To which the congregation
responds, “Praise to you, Lord Christ.”
That’s easy to do and it all makes sense when we’ve just read something
about Jesus say, feeding the 5,000 or calming a storm or healing the sick. But with today’s reading I found saying, “The
Gospel of the Lord” to be a bit of a challenge to get out of my mouth. Perhaps you felt that ambivalence in your
response as well. To be quite honest, I
was a bit tempted to switch up the punctuation here and change the period that
follows the sentence, “The Gospel of the Lord,” into a question mark. Because really, where is the gospel, the good
news in our reading today?
First off did you
notice the glaring absence of Jesus?
Barring one brief mention of his name Jesus is nowhere to be found. Rather the gospel lesson revolves around two
men, John the Baptist and King Herod (a Roman puppet king of Galilee) and two
women, Queen Herodias, originally the king’s sister-in-law but now his wife,
and Herod’s niece who turned into his stepdaughter. To sum things up, there’s bad blood between
John the Baptist and the powers that be.
Which often happens when you speak truth to power as John did publicly
condemning the king’s marriage to his brother’s wife and calling it
unlawful. So it really shouldn’t be any
surprise that the queen hates John for this and wants him dead. The feckless king, though, seems caught in
the middle fearing both his wife and the baptizer. Throwing John in prison seems to be a safe
middle ground until King Herod’s birthday rolls around. A banquet is thrown during which the king
foolishly swears to his dancing step-daughter that she may ask for practically
anything she wants. So after consulting
her mother she requests, “the head of John the Baptist on a platter.” And Herod, believing that he has no other
choice makes it so. And as you heard,
our reading concludes with John’s disciples claiming what is left of his body
and laying it in a tomb...The Gospel of the Lord?
I’m going to go
out on a limb here and say, “no,” that’s not the Gospel of the Lord - if that’s
all there is to it. If we only look at
this story alone, in complete isolation, there’s no hope, there’s no good news. But thankfully, that’s not the way that the
gospel writer of Mark intended it to be read or understood. As in other places in Mark, the story of John
the Baptist’s tragic death is deliberately sandwiched inside another story, in
this case a story about successful mission.
Jesus is sending his disciples out to spread the good news - you know,
the actual Gospel of the Lord - and through their efforts people have been
delivered and cured from both demons and sickness. But then this happy story of God’s power at
work in the world is abruptly interrupted by the telling of the gruesome
account of John’s death only then to go back to the original mission story
which finishes off on a high note of the apostles’ return from their travels
with a rather jolly report “of all that they had done and taught.”
It’s obvious that
this placement is no accident. By
putting John’s story inside of the disciples’ mission story it does become part
of the gospel, the message of the good news.
The message that yes, terrible even tragic things happen in life - and
happen even when you are living right and following God, but that’s not the
whole of the story.
Now it’s a
natural response that when something big happens to us or to the world around
us, whether they be good or bad, that we give it our full attention. But in doing so our view can become very
small and constricted - somewhat like our lectionary readings have a tendency
to do for us in church. I mean there are
definite advantages to having assigned Bible readings (one of them being that
the congregation isn’t limited to just hearing the passages that the priest
likes to preach on because if that was the case, I can guarantee you that you
would not have heard about John the Baptist’s death this morning!), but a drawback
to our lectionary is that by reading the gospel piece by piece, and not
necessarily in order, it tends to chop up the whole of the narrative to the
point where it’s easy to forget the larger story. I remember one woman a year ago who admitted
to me that although she had gone to church all of her life, it was only in her
middle age that it finally dawned on her that all the individual stories she
had heard Sunday after Sunday were part of a bigger story. Sometimes we can get so caught up in what’s
going on in our own story that we miss that point as well.
But here’s the
good news - that it’s not just John the Baptist’s story that is wrapped up in
God’s story of grace, hope, and love - our stories are, too. No matter what is going on in our lives or in
the world at large there is still a bigger picture, a fuller truth - the gospel
truth - which declares that even though pain, brokenness, violence, injustice
may have its way for a time it will not always be so. But until that time John’s story is a witness
that the task of following Jesus is never easy.
The road is rocky. And if we seek
to honestly and faithfully live into our baptismal vows to resist evil, to seek
and serve Christ in all persons, to strive for justice and peace among all
people we should not be surprised nor daunted when we are met with
resistance. That’s part of the story,
too.
God’s good news
never seeks to whitewash that truth that life can be hard. In no way are Christians supposed to look
reality in the face and deny it. Rather
we are called to see the fullness of all there is - that our stories do not
exist in isolation but are wrapped in a larger, greater story - God’s story
where, in the end, there is only grace and mercy and peace and love. That is our hope. That is God’s promise. That is John the Baptist’s story. And THAT is the Gospel of the Lord!
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