The Power of Words      a Sermon based on Mark 6. 14-29  preached at First Presbyterian Church, Clarks, Summit, PA on July 11, 2021

       The voice that cried in the wilderness: “prepare the way of the Lord,” was silenced.  According to the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus heard about John’s death, he got into “a boat and went to a deserted place by himself.”[i] It is a snapshot of the universal need to grieve when someone important to us has died.  Lately, we’ve watched as family members and friends in Florida await the chance to begin that process.  Sadly, we’ve witnessed the stunned reactions of the people of Haiti, as they wonder “what is next” after the sudden, brutal murder of their president has overshadowed their lives.

            Quietly, the disciples of John the Baptist collected what was left of his body “and laid it in a tomb.”  Where are the crowds who flocked to the wilderness to wade in the water and seek a new start?  Is there no one to step up and tell a story of the turn around their life took as a result of his call to re-pentance?  Like so many families and circles of friends had to do when Covid 19 came along, a few stand in for the many to do what needs to be done, in the hope that someday soon, when conditions are better, the necessary rituals can be observed. Today, we do for John what could not be done for him at the time. We remember him, we seek to under-stand what led to his murder, and we give thanks for his legacy.

            The life of John the Baptist is a tribute to the power of words from beginning to end.  When his birth was announced to his senior citizen father taking his turn as the priest in the temple, old Zechariah was struck dumb for doubting the word of the Lord.  When he was born, his mother said his name was to be John. The neighbors insisted the miracle child of Elizabeth should be named Zechariah after his father. The old man asked for something to write on, and scrawled:  “His name is John.” And with that he was given back the gift of words.

            Years later, when John started preaching, his words echoed across the wilderness and drew people from near and far.  They listened to his call to repentance. They waded into the Jordan to be baptized.  They asked what they could do to bear witness to their changed lives. “Share what you have with those who have not,” he told the people.  “Do your work honestly,” he told the tax collectors. “Don’t throw your weight around and act like bullies,” he told the soldiers.

            It was the power of his words which brings us this day to stand with his disciples in tribute to a life ended by a brutal act which, like so many others, demonstrates that bad things happen to good people.  He spoke truth to power and power’s wife didn’t like what she heard.  Herod believed the truth shared by a guy in an old bathtub replacement commercial who spoke of a happy wife as the secret to a happy life.

            The late William Placher attempted to untangle the twisted limbs of the family tree of Herod the Great. He writes:  “Herod Antipas, the Herod of this story, first married the daughter of the king of Nabatea, a land east of his own territory.  Then he fell in love with Herodias, his niece, who was already married to another of her uncles (he was also named Herod, but, to minimize confusion, Mark calls him Philip).  Antipas’s wife, understandably annoyed, left him and went back to her father, so that a poten-tially useful alliance turned into a threat from an angry father-in-law.  In fact, the king of Nabatea did later attack Herod Antipas, and the Romans had to come and bail him out.”[ii]

            Placher’s survey of the family that put the fun in dysfunctional continues: “Herod Antipas, then married Herodias, who under Jewish law could not divorce her husband (only men could initiate di-vorce), so she was now technically married to two brothers, both of whom were also her uncles.  Herod Antipas was clearly in violation of Leviticus 18.16, which prohibits marrying your brother’s wife if the brother is still alive.  Salome, Herodias’s daughter by her first marriage, (the young girl who danced at the party,) was thus Antipas’s niece on her father’s side, grandniece on her mother’s side, and now step-daughter.”[iii]   

            It was the power of words that led Herod to arrest the preacher whose words  intrigued him.  John’s offence was to call the king out for his unlawful marital status, which made Herodias mad enough to kill. She wanted her husband to have John permanently silenced.  Herod would not do it, so she nursed a grudge, waited for an opportunity, and pounced when it presented itself.

            It was also the power of words which prevented Herod from carrying out his wife’s wishes.  Mark, is usually spare with his gospel words.  Back in the first chapter, he used only five of them to tell about John’s arrest. They came as part of the introduction to the preaching of Jesus.  He wrote: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.’” (1.14-15). At the time, Mark offered no explanation of why John was arrested, and not a word about where he was held or how long he was to be imprisoned.

            Now, five chapters later Mark spells it all out.  His truth telling was the cause for his arrest war-rant.  Herod’s wife wanted him dead.  The reason she didn’t get her way immediately, is described in a most intriguing pair of sentences that explain why Herodias could not convince Herod to have John killed.  Mark explains: “Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he pro-tected him.  When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed and yet liked to listen to him.”  In a book called Through Mark’s Eyes, Puck Purnell, an Episcopal priest from Connecticut wrote of Herod’s reason for keeping John alive this way:  “When Herod heard John speak, he was puzzled and impressed at the same time.”[iv]

            Buried deep within this story of misused power, lust, political ambition, face-saving and murder is a complex relationship between the holy man and the king. Herod’s interest in what John had to say prevents us from dismissing him as the purely evil, black-hatted villain. 

            Theologian Douglas John Hall says:  “There is that within him (Herod)—that ‘Augustinian’ residue of remembrance and hope—that recognizes in the witness of John the kind of human authen-ticity to which he too is called. The forces of self-aggrandizement and lust that are powerfully at work in his life—are nonetheless countered by an ancient memory of good.[v]

            There is a danger whenever we gather for a Memorial Service to make of the deceased more than they were. On the way to the cemetery one day long ago, a funeral director told me the story of the service where the preacher was going on eloquently about the goodness of the man who had died.  As the accolades kept coming, it caused some discomfort among the family.  Finally, the widow elbowed her eldest son and whispered: “Go up there and look in the box and see if that’s your father he’s talking about.”

            So, we ought to be careful about making John the Baptist the unflawed hero wearing a white hat. As a prophet, he could be unbending.  Those who call others to account can  be inflexible.  On top of that there is another story involving John, who begins to doubt he was right about Jesus being the mightier one who was to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.

            All this to say that we do well to guard against pigeon-holing people as being all good or all bad. At a time when the airwaves are filled with people demonizing or bestowing sainthood on athletes, celebrities, politicians, or the latest star of a YouTube clip, we should be cautious about jumping on the bandwagon. We are, all of us, a mix of laudable motives and unrealized best intentions.

            When the scandal hits and the treasurer of the little league a few towns down the line is caught using concession stand money to fill the slots at the casino, that doesn’t mean her work as a Sunday School teacher or Cub Scout Den Mother was a sham.  When some notorious sinner is photographed going to church, that doesn’t mean it is just for show. If the hero is lauded for running into the burning building it is not guarantee that he won’t make an insensitive comment to his wife at dinner.  The power of words to hurt, hinder, label and libel is something for us all to keep in mind.  The decline in our public discourse has amply demonstrated the proverbial wisdom of the saying: “Mud thrown is ground lost.”

            Let’s take another look at Herod and John’s interaction through the eyes of Douglas John Hall. He writes: “What makes the encounter of the prophet and the king so poignant is that they understand each other well enough. The puppet king knows enough about truth to recognize his own falseness; and the prophet is sufficiently acquainted with temptation to desire the monarch’s liberation from it. Their meeting could have been redemptive, but one great flaw prevented it:  Herod’s insatiable quest for pre-eminence —having it, keeping it, flaunting it.  Not sexual lust but the lust for power is the problem this text illuminates.”[vi]

            It was the power of words that painted Herod into the corner.  Keeping an open ended promise made while his powers of reason were diminished by too much elbow bending at his party was his downfall.  As Matthew Skinner points out, Herod’s “pledge to his daughter—offering up to half of a kingdom that is not even his to grant—is an arrogant boast, meant to impress the other elites in atten-dance.”[vii] 

Herod made his promise in the presence of others. The room goes quiet, as every ear is keen to hear what the young lady will claim as her prize. Picture her saying: “Give me a minute to think about it and I’ll get back to you.”  The noise of the party resumes, cups clinking, someone telling a bawdy joke, people laughing. The dancer slips over to the table where her mother is seated, leans down, whispers in her mother’s ear: “What should I ask for?”

            Herodias seizes the moment knowing Herod is caught in a trap from which there is no escape. “Ask for the head of John the Baptizer.”  The room goes silent again as people see the dancer gliding across the floor toward Herod with a conspiratorial grin on her face. “This is gonna be good!” someone says across one of the tables.

            She speaks:  “I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.”  Herod’s heart sinks. The man his wife hated. The man he has tried to protect. The man whose words perplexed him and somehow touched him deep down, was doomed.

            Of course, he still had a choice.  He was the most powerful person in that corner of the land…or at least he was supposed to be. Still it was within his power to say “No.”  Or “I’ve changed my mind.” Or “two wrongs don’t make a right.” 

            But he didn’t. Mark says the request grieved him deeply, “yet out of regard for his oaths and for his guests, he did not want to refuse her.” One New Testament professor dissects the scene this way:  “Herod is caught between his respect for John, and his need to save face. Mark insists on showing Herod, despite his feelings for John, remained ultimately trapped by his own political ambitions.”  He goes on to point out that “Later in the Gospel Mark will portray Pilate as similarly caught between finding no guilt in Jesus and yet ‘wishing to satisfy the crowd.’  (15.14-15) In this way Mark undercuts the power of Herod, and later Pilate.  Such figures appear powerful…but they do not even have the character to do what they know to be right.”[viii] 

            How often have we seen that play out?  Two plans of action are presented, and after the pollsters or the big donors have been consulted, the nod goes to the one that will garner the most votes in the next election.  Two ways to spend a Saturday are outlined, and someone makes the choice to do what the current spouse proposes rather than what the kids from the first marriage were looking forward to doing.  The competing need of opening a shelter for the homeless and maintaining a residential neigh-borhood is presented to the Zoning Board.  Not-in-my-backyard wins that one most of the time.

            When Herod bows to the twin pressures of keeping his word to the dancing step-daughter and saving face among his invited guests who might consider him wishy-washy if he waffled on his pledge…one of the most gruesome sights in the Bible is recalled.  It brings us face to face with one of the hardest to understand truths of life: bad things do happen to good people…and often it is other peo-ple who are responsible for those bad things. Options have been weighed, choices have been made, and someone gets hurt in the process.

            Rabbi Harold Kushner’s best-selling book of yesteryear was entitled: “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.”  Bob Setzer, Jr. writes that people often got the first word in the title wrong, replacing the word, “when” with the word, “why.”  John Claypool, a pastor and seminary professor once asked the Rabbi why he didn't call his book “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.” 

            Rabbi Kushner’s replied: “Becausethat book would have been three words long:  “I don’t know.”[ix] 

            So many times in our lives we are confronted with that question and that answer.  When a workman is crushed as a construction project goes wrong; when the popular high school student wraps her car around a tree just before graduation; in the days, weeks and months after the plane disappears over the ocean or the condominium collapses in the wee hours of the morning, we are left with  “I don’t know” as the unsatisfying answer to our quest to know “why?”

            Mark’s inclusion of the ghastly end to John the Baptist, foreshadows the equally barbaric end to the life of Jesus. It is another reminder that life is hard and being and doing good is no guarantee of safety or security.  Mark tells the story of John the Baptist losing his life to show us something about the power of words.  They can hurt or they help.  We have a choice every moment of every day as to what our words will do.

            Mark includes the story to encourage us to make the good choice.  Characteristically, Mark has sandwiched this horrible story between two others, and as always, that is no accident.  Before it is the account of the disciples being sent out two by two to teach and heal and carry out in many places what Jesus alone could do in only a few. 

            After Mark reports that John’s disciples had courageously claimed his body to give him a decent burial, Mark tells the story of the disciple's return which is interrupted by the feeding of the 5000.  In it, a long day of people listening to Jesus is followed by an impromptu picnic where five loaves and two fish fed the multitude.

            When we put Herod’s birthday bash and the feeding on the hillside back to back, Mark is reminding us that our words have the power to touch others in a good way or a bad one.  We can use our words to heal and to help or we can hurl them around in promises we ought not keep.  We can live by fearful self-interest or give ourselves in service to others.

            Herod ended up on the trash heap of history when the Romans exiled him, tired of his begging for a title they wouldn’t grant.  John the Baptist is remembered for paving the way for Jesus.  The power of his words live on as the followers of Jesus repeat and respond to his call to repentance, and become truth tellers and gospel proclaimers. May we honor John’s memory always. 

“Blessed are the dead who die in the spirit.

They rest from their labors, and their works follow them.”[x]

(c) 2021, James E. Thyren

[i] Matthew 14. 13
[ii] William C. Placher, Mark, Belief – A Theological Commentary on the Bible, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), p. 93
[iii] ibid.
[iv] Puck Purnell, Through Mark’s Eyes, A Portrait of Jesus Based on the Gospel of Mark, (Nashville, KY; Abingdon Press, 2006, p. 41
[v] Douglas John Hall, Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 3) (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), p. 238
[vi] ibid., p. 240
[vii] Matthew L. Skinner, Connections, A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, (Louisville, KY, Westminster John Knox Press, 2021) Kindle location 4995
[viii] Joseph A. Bessler, Feasting on the Gospels, Mark, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), p. 176-8
[ix] Bob Setzer, Jr. Feasting on the Gospels, Mark, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), p. 176
[x] Revelation 14.13