It seems John the Baptist was like Jesus’ #1 disciple and also highly respected. As it happened his head was cut off as a favor to one of King Herod’s dancers. What if she had asked for Jesus’ head instead or what if she had asked for some boring gift like a gold necklace? How would this have changed Christianity?
John the Baptist John the Baptist is a story of courage and conviction seen through the life of one of God’s greatest prophets who gave everything to prepare the way for the Lord. It begins with the blessing John’s birth was to his aged parents. John grows in strength and integrity as he stands against political and spiritual adversity to preach the coming of the Lord. Finally, John beholds and baptizes Jesus, the Lamb of God. A terrific way to teach a child this story of God’s faithfulness …
ENJOY THE FESTIVAL OF SAN JUAN BAUTISTA (JOHN THE BAPTIST)
One of the most storied cultural celebrations in South America will take place this June in Barlovento. Barlovento, in the state of Miranda, is the region of Venezuela that is most thickly populated by descendants of African slaves. The majority of the cultural expressions of Barlovento are based on religious and recreational activities that found their origins in colonial times.
According to Jesus Chucho Garcia, the preeminent authority on AfroVenezuelan culture, the traditional AfroVenezuelan fiesta is a state of collective spiritualism motivated by a celebration that revolves around a saint, a death, a harvest, the start of a fishing expedition or some other recurring activity that the community plays an important role in. The celebration of San Juan Bautista evolved as a result of the religious imposition placed on AfroVenezuelans by the Spanish crown during colonial times. As a way of reenforcing the system of slavery, the white slave owners forced African slaves and their descendants to honor San Juan Bautista as the patron saint by praying and paying homage to him. The Blacks interpreted the celebration as an attempt by the salve holders to convince them that, even in heaven, they would encounter a spiritual equivalent to the master who ruled them on earth.
However, as Chucho Garcia makes perfectly clear, the Africans had their own religious beliefs, mythologies and symbols. They therefore used their drums, songs, rhythms and dances to reenforce their own religious beliefs, and transformed the celebration that was meant to strengthen the hold of slavery into a festival of liberation. The result is that the celebration of San Juan Bautista simultaneously sought contrary objectives; as a tool of the church and masters of the plantation to resign the slaves to their status, and as a celebration by the slaves and their descendants that reaffirmed the call for liberty that burned in their hearts as strong as ever. In fact, on June 24, 1749, the Blacks in this region had planned a huge rebellion to coincide with the celebration of San Juan Bautista. The whites got wind of the rebellion and nipped it in the bud.
Each year the Society of San Juan Bautista organizes the celebration of the saint whose namesake it carries. The celebration, which begins on the 23rd of June, consists of acknowledgments of grace, carrying the saint to the river in order to bathe him, and making pious offerings. On June 24, a church mass is conducted, the saint is removed from the church, and a procession is made to a home or cultural center. There San Juan will be placed on an altar adorned with flowers, cacao, and a variety of fruit. During all of this time, the drums will be beating out relevant African rhythms. Finally, on June 25, the saint is returned to the church to be confined until the following year. Throughout the day, as always during the festival, the drums beat amidst a continuing give and take between a soloist and a chorus. The message of the soloist is that if San Juan Bautista knew when he would be honored, he would gladly come down from heaven with a crown on his head and dressed in black. The response of the chorus is to repeatedly invoke the name of Malembe, the traditional protector of the community who came with them from Africa (Congo).
Luis Perdomo, Assistant Director of the Andres Bello Multicultural Center in San Jose de Barlovento, explained that the celebration of San Juan Bautista takes place throughout Barlovento, but is centered around the small town of Curiepe. Curiepe is where the first town of freed Afrovenezuelans was founded.
This year’s festival promises to be as spiritually uplifting and energetic as ever. The syncopated rhythms of the drums, the wind filled with songs of joy, deliverance and energy, and spirits engulfed with hope as each person remembers that the world can be a better place. One can not fully appreciate its magic unless it is witnessed first hand. Join me there. You will not regret it.
John the Baptist was cast into prison! Now how such a great man of God could be put into prison is beyond me? For doing what, preaching the gospel of course. Hey, wait a minute here….I thought people who wore the crisp white shirts and finely pressed suits who preached the gospel received great riches for doing such good work for God. But now if you will remember, John the Baptist was not one of those. He had to wear garments made of camel’s hair. His meals were locusts and wild honey. You can never know the true men and women of women solely by the clothes they wear, the houses they live in or the cars they drive.
When Jesus heard the news he went to Galilee. He left Nazareth and lived in Ca-per’na-um, which was on the sea coast in the borders of Zabulon and Neph’tha-lim. This came to pass as it was spoken by the prophet E-sai’as: “The land of Zab’u-lon, and the land of Neph’tha-lim, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles.
Now…one thing I want to note here with prophesies is when the original foretelling of the future came to E-sai-as, the prophet, and the words alone gave no real clue as to what is actually going to come to pass. Go back up and see what actually happened, then compare it to prophesy again. This is because foretelling of the future through the powers of God of Heaven is always done in parts that often resemble some kind of a puzzle or riddle. Most of the time when the words come to pass it vaguely resembles what was actually spoken.
Jesus now begins to preach the same gospel John the Baptist was spreading, which is to repent for the sake of earning an eternal life in the kingdom of heaven.
As Jesus walked by the Sea of Galilee he saw two brethren, Simon who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother who were fishermen of the sea. Jesus asked them to follow him and he would show them how to become fishers of men. Jesus knew this was a much more worthwhile way to spend time than sitting by the sea fishing for fish. Peter and Andrew dropped their fishing gear and followed after Jesus.
As Jesus, Peter and Andrew continued on their journey they came upon two other brethren which were James, the son of Zeb’e-dee, and John his brother. These two men were mending their nets on their father’s ship. They also followed after Jesus.
Then Jesus went about all Galilee teaching in their churches and synagogues. He preached the gospel of the kingdom. He told the people he had power to heal all the sicknesses and diseases among them. The fame of Jesus spread through Syria. Sick people with divers diseases, torments and people possessed with devils, lunatick people, and those who had palsy were brought to Jesus. Jesus healed them all.
Everywhere Jesus went; great multitudes of people followed him from Galilee, and from De-cap’o-lis, and from Jerusalem, from Judea, and from beyond Jordan.
Then came the great sermon of Jesus on the mountain, so simple are the words of Jesus, so easily understood that even a small child could understand the meaning to his words.
John the Baptist preached in the wilderness of Judea. His message was to repent because the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The prophet E-sai’as foretold about John the Baptist saying: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
John the Baptist wore a leathern girdle about his loins and wore other clothes made of camel’s hair. His meat was locusts and wild honey. John the Baptist did not dwell in fine luxury and wear the snow white shirts and perfectly pressed outer garments as many of our evangelists do today. After his sermons he sat down to a meal of locusts and wild honey. He was not served lavishly on banquet tables full of varieties of meats, vegetables, pies, cakes and any and everything else the congregation cooked up. He had serious work to do and serious messages to bring. His goal was only to preach to others “repentance.” He did not look for gold or silver or any kind of payment from anyone that he preached to. Many of our evangelists today will not even go to a group of people to deliver any kind of message unless they know there is a certain salary and the finest of accommodations waiting for them.
In those days many repented at the preaching of John the Baptist from Jersualem, Judaea and the regions around Jordan. John the Baptist baptized them. If these people brought forth good works until their own deaths, they are not sleeping, awaiting the great trumpet sound for all the dead in Christ to arise first.
John the Baptist saw the Pharisees and Sadducees who came to the baptism. He called them a generation of vipers and asked who had warned them to flee from the wrath to come? He asked them to bring forth fruits now if they had repented. He told them not to say within themselves (for John the Baptist read the hearts of the Pharisees and Sadducees) that you have Abraham as your father. John the Baptist told them God is able to make the stones rise up children to Abraham. In other words, God had much greater power than Abraham, and was the father even of Abraham.
He further told the Pharisees and Sadducees that every tree which brings not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire. And in other words this means if you the Pharisees and Sadducees do not actually repent and turn from your wicked ways to prove to the others and to God of your true repentance in actual “works or behaviors,” then you will in time be brought down and cast into the fire. So who did the Pharisees and Sadducees think they were fooling? They might be able to fool Abraham, and John the Baptist, but God is greater than Abraham, and God they could not fool. John the Baptist told them he could go ahead and baptize them with water, but he that comes after him, which is God, is mightier than John the Baptist.
John the Baptist told the Pharisees and Sadducees God would baptize them with the Holy Ghost and with fire (if they so deserve). God will use the fan in his hand and thoroughly purge the floor to gather up his wheat, but the chaff shall be cast into unquenchable fire. In other words, you will never be able to hide from God anything you do that is unrighteous.
After all this, came Jesus from Galilee to Jordan and asked John the Baptist to baptize him. John the Baptist forbade this to happen. He told Jesus, I am in need of you baptizing me and you ask me to baptize you. Jesus had a purpose for why he asked John the Baptist to baptize him. Jesus told him, I need you to baptize me now so it becomes us to fulfill all righteousness.
After John the Baptist baptized Jesus and he came back up out of the water, the heavens were opened up to Jesus, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him. Then Jesus heard a voice from heaven which said: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
Through these scriptures we are taught we must first repent, which actually means to turn away from all unrighteousness and sin to receive a “born again spirit of God” and then be baptized in the name of the Father, the son and the Holy Ghost. After which time, we are to bring forth fruits of good works in the hopes that some day we like Jesus will hear God say to us: “this is my beloved son or daughter, in whom I am well pleased. We also taught that simply baptizing with water does save a man or woman from their sins. Water baptism is in answer to a good conscious toward God. Repentance and then good works until death brings man or woman the actual rewards of eternal life.
When his daughter Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it.” And he solemnly swore to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.” She went out and said to her mother, “What should I ask for?” She replied, “The head of John the baptizer.” (Mark 6:23-24)
We had a baptism this morning, and I think if you’d searched through the Bible for the most inappropriate Gospel story to feature today, you couldn’t have done better (or rather worse) that the one we had this morning – the story of the death of John the Baptist!
When you’re working with the lectionary, of course, it’s all the luck of he draw. We might have got Jesus saying, “let the little children come to me”, but we didn’t. We got this story of lust and murder, humiliation and death.
And perhaps it’s only right, if we are going to urge our newly baptised to “Fight bravely under His banner against sin, the world and the devil” that we warn them first where the fight might take them! Or perhaps I should have just over-ridden the lectionary today and chosen a more family-friendly reading?
For it’s not just the fact that this Gospel reading focuses on the tragic death of John. It’s all the grizzly detail that you get in the story. It’s as if we got the Hollywood, X-rated version of the story, for, I think you’ll agree that with most tragic stories you read about in the Bible, you get the ABC version.
Compare, for example, the Biblical account of Herod’s later murder of James (the brother of John) that we’re given in the book of Acts: “About that time, Herod arrested some people who belonged to the church and mistreated them. He even had James the brother of John killed with a sword.” (Acts 12:1-2) The end! That’s it – short, succinct, tragic, but we get over it and we move on!
But not in this account of the death of the Baptist! We get first the surly details of Herod’s personal life that give rise to the criticism he gets from John. We get the imprisonment, the party, the dance of the young girl, and ultimately the grizzly details of how John’s head was served to the girl’s mother on a dinner-plate!
It would have been quite a scene, and it must have been quite a dance, and I did consider trying to recreate the atmosphere this morning by attempting a dance myself , but I decided that, even though I obviously do look good in a dress, my rendition of the dance of the seven army surplice blankets would never do it justice.
At any rate, the real question is ‘What is this story doing here?’ And I don’t just mean ‘what is it doing here, being read at a baptism?’, but ‘what is this passage doing in the Bible at all?’
It’s almost as if at some very early meeting of the Bible Society someone said, “we’re just not moving enough copies of this book! We need more sex and violence in here”, and so Mark piped up and said, “how about I include the death of John the Baptist?”
OK. I’m sure that wasn’t really it. Indeed, I assume that the reason this story is so drawn out is most probably for the sake of the followers of the Baptist, as John was a very popular guy, and his disciples no doubt wanted to know the details.
Even so, there’s not much that’s encouraging in this story for the followers of the Baptist. It’s not as if any of his last remaining words were recorded in this story. Indeed, we hear nothing from John in this story, as by the time he makes his personal appearance he is no longer able to speak! And that is disappointing, as I think it would have been very helpful to know what were the last words and last thoughts of the Baptist.
We like to assume, of course, that when it comes to the death of a great man of the faith like the Baptist, that they go out full of courage and grace like Maximillian Kolbe.
Kolbe, you might remember, was the Catholic priest murdered by the Nazis who departed this earthly stage singing hymns from his starvation bunker until the guards got so sick of it that they finally finished him off with a lethal injection.
But not all martyrs die quite so gloriously. If you read the last recorded words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for instance, who was also murdered by the Nazis, you’ll find someone with far more self-doubt and questioning, and I suspect that John the Baptist was something more like this.
For the only words we hear from the Baptist while he was in prison are words of doubt. He messages Jesus from prison, you may remember, asking Him, “Are you the one we were waiting for or should we wait for another?” (Matthew 11:3)
John had been so confident early on – both about Jesus and about his own work, proclaiming Jesus as the ‘lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world’ (John 1:29) while railing as openly about Herod’s personal indiscretions as he did about everything else that ticked him off.
Perhaps John had thought himself untouchable, or perhaps he didn’t care what happened to him at that stage? But things began to look different from the inside of his prison cell, and John had doubts.
Did John die still full of doubts, or did the response he received from Jesus satisfy him, such that he died in peace? We do not know. We know nothing of the inner life of John at the end but only of the grizzly details of his martyrdom – of the way John ticked off Herodian, Herod’s wife, of Herod’s wild party, of the seductive dance that lured the drunken king to promise up to half his kingdom to the young seductress, and of the girl’s grizzly request.
And so we come back to our original question – what is this story doing here, this story of drunken debauchery and murder? What is it doing in the Bible?
If it’s here for the benefit of the disciples of John the Baptist, it doesn’t really have anything encouraging to offer them, and I’m sure it’s not the final chapter of the life of their master that they were expecting.
Of course we don’t know exactly what John’s followers were expecting but we do know that John was regularly compared to Elijah, and I expect the disciples of the Baptist expected his career to follow a similar course
Elijah had been the mouthpiece of God to the political leaders of his day. He challenged king Ahab and queen Jezebel and had multiple death threats made against him. Nonetheless, God kept Elijah safe, and eventually he saw the tables turned on those who tried to imprison him and kill him.
I expect the disciples of the Baptist expected his career to follow a similar course. And then they got the news that John’s head had been served on a dinner plate to the queen. It must have been hard to make sense of it all. And in truth, it really is a difficult story to make sense of, even at this distance.
You know how in our conventional Christian wisdom we say, “well, this tragedy might not make a lot of sense right now, but once we see the bigger picture, we’ll see how everything fits together.” Well … it’s 2000 years on from the death of John the Baptist and I still can’t see the point!
I find it hard to believe that, if John had died of old age something else wonderful that did happen somehow could not have happened (if you know what I mean). It is not obvious that the death of John actually accomplished anything – not then and not since – and maybe sometimes we just have to accept that tragedies happen and that they are not always miracles in disguise but just plain tragedies.
Even so, I think the Gospel writer does intend for us to see this story as part of a greater, grander, story of hope, and the key to that, I think, is actually the way in which the story is introduced.
For you may remember that our Gospel reading didn’t actually start off as being a story about John the Baptist or Herod, let alone about Herodian or Salome It starts rather with people asking questions about Jesus – ‘who is this guy?’. Some said Jesus was Elijah or one of the other prophets, but it’s Herod who identifies Jesus as John the Baptist having come back to haunt him, saying, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised!” (Mark 6:16)
And Herod is completely wrong of course, but in another sense he’s entirely right. Jesus is Jesus and not John – we need have no doubt about that – but what Herod does realise is that killing off John did not put an end to John’s work, as John’s work was just part of a larger project that Jesus was continuing!
And of course it’s not really so much the ministry of John goes on, but rather the work of the Kingdom of God that goes on!
John is dead, but the battle for the Kingdom continues. Others before John and others after him have fallen in the battle, but still the work of God continues! Jesus Himself will fall in this battle, but the work of God continues. Indeed, not just despite His death, but through His death, the work of God continues.
For in the end, the work of God isn’t so much a boxing match where, when one fighter goes down, the show is over, the good guys have lost, and everybody goes home. No. It’s a relay race where, as one runner falls, he passes the baton on to the next guy in line and the race continues!
This is the battle for the Kingdom of God – a battle that is still raging and in which we are all involved! And this is what baptism is about too – the welcoming of new soldiers into the fight – new runners into the relay.
For we recognise that as we welcome new competitors on to the field, others of us are falling from the track, and some of us are very weary and are failing. And so we give thanks for these new athletes on to the field, as we watch them begin to take up the baton and join the good fight.
It’s what my father taught me – that the work of God is like a flowing stream, and that when someone puts a rock in the stream, the water flows around the rock. This is what the disciples of John had to discover. This is what the first century disciples of Jesus had to discover, and this is the discovery that we continue to make today – that despite the setbacks, the hardships, and despite those we lose along the way, the work of God continues, joy comes in the morning, or, in the words of Martin Luther, “The City of God remaineth”.
Many have gone before us in this battle and others will follow, and none of us is invulnerable. All of us, sooner or later, will fall, but the work of God continues. I will fall, but the work of God will continue. You will fall at some point but the work of God will continue!
And sometimes all we can do is pick up the remains of those who have fallen and give them a decent burial. But we do so in the confidence that whatever happens, God will be God, God’s work will continue, love ultimately will triumph, His Kingdom will come. Amen