Dangerous Discipleship - July 16, 2006
Mark 6: 14-29I was looking at a picture this week of my friend Jane Ellen’s ordination. Jane Ellen is an Episcopal priest, you see. The ordinations are very similar for Episcopal clergy and Presbyterian clergy, with one notable difference. There is a moment in the ordination to the priesthood that requires the ordinand to lie flat on the floor, face down, feet facing the congregation, head pointed towards the altar. This posture, called the prostration, is a sign of total surrender, complete vulnerability, and the emptying of oneself to the Holy Spirit.
This posture screams out “I will give up everything I have to serve, even the privilege of standing upright if it will serve the body of Christ. I cannot stand alone; only with Christ can I do the work I am called to do.” When I look at this picture, I can’t help but feel like a wimp. All I had to do was kneel, which is ungraceful enough, but to have to get into a lying position in front of a full church, head resting on my hands, whole body pressed to the floor, worried about what view the congregation was having to endure during a long litany, all the while keeping a dignified, prayerful attitude on one of the most important days of my life—well, clearly I’m not cut out for the priesthood. The hardest thing that was asked of me on my ordination day was that I vow to serve all of you with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love. But not lying down for my God. No, no that.
Something I noticed about prostration is that the one lying down is for all purposes, blind. Anything could happen to a prostrate ordinand and they wouldn’t even see it coming. I wonder if John saw it coming. Maybe Herod was kind to John in the last moment of his life, and allowed John to lie face down in prison, so he couldn’t see it coming. You know…the axe.
Herod is a guy who is certainly caught in the middle. He jailed John for calling Herod out on marrying his own sister-in-law illegally. The sister-in-law, Herodius, was angry at John, and wanted him dead. I’m sure the implications on her behavior from what John was accusing Herod of probably weren’t all that flattering. She did marry two brothers, after all. But Herod wanted John safe; Herod was secretly intrigued with the message that John was preaching. Herod was at once afraid of John and liked listening to him, too. With John in prison, Herod could be the hero, preserving the honor of his wife/sister-in-law, keeping John from harm, and having access to all that John could teach him. It was ingenious, really. An almost foolproof plan.
But the plan failed on the night of the party. On the big night, Herod’s birthday—and we know it was a very big deal, because the Bible doesn’t include many birthday party stories— Herod must have been feeling pretty powerful, pretty generous, pretty full of himself, pretty…drunk. By the time the entertainment began, which was Herodius’ dancing daughter (either Herod’s step-daughter or his niece, which ever way you want to look at it), he must’ve been feeling no pain, indeed. He was so pleased with her that he offered her anything she wanted. It must’ve been some dance. For even a drunk to offer half his kingdom, it must have been something.
Well, Herodius had her chance. When the daughter asked her mother what to ask for, there was only one thing that mattered—the head of John the Baptist. That the daughter went back to her step-father/uncle and added the little something extra “on a platter” to the request, shows that her mother raised her not only to be a good dancer, but to be artistic as well. It fit together so perfectly.
Herod was officially up the creek. He had promised her anything, and she was making him make good on the promise in front of everyone who had heard. And an oath, even a drunken oath, is an oath, after all.
So John became a martyr, a lasting example of what not to do if you want to keep your head. In short, the lesson we learn from John is this: Don’t tell the truth, don’t proclaim good news, don’t hang around with Jesus or his followers, don’t stand up for what is right, don’t mess with authority figures—especially the queen. Conform. Capitulate. Compromise. That is, if you want to live forever.
The task, for the preacher and for the hearer of a sermon, is to locate oneself in the text. But honestly, there’s not a character in this story I want to touch with a ten-foot pole. Herod? That boozy, bloated, power-drunk king can be persuaded to kill somebody by a commanding dance performance—by his step-daughter/niece, no less, which just adds another layer of creepiness to the whole story doesn’t it? Herod kind of comes out like the bumbling idiot in this story—taken in by a woman and her daughter, king of a gigantic empire, and yet powerless against feminine wiles. It’s tempting to think of that much power, but no thank you.
Herodius has been painted in this story as a jealous harpy, a vengeful scorned woman, an embittered queen who married her way to the top, and would like to stay there, no matter what it takes. She’s not above using her own child to get what she wants—she’s the ultimate opportunist, and diabolically clever. Even though she holds the ultimate power in this story, nobody wants to be Herodius. Well, not for longer than a few minutes— maybe just long enough to try on the crown for size. But nobody wants to cop to being Herodius.
And then there’s the nameless, ageless, faceless dancer. All we know about her is that she is caught up in something bigger than herself, and that the web of deceitful relationships is very tangled, indeed. I almost feel sorry for her. Almost.
And then there is the crowd of party-goers. Chances are that an invitation to the king’s birthday party is a hot ticket indeed. Perhaps if you are invited, it is understood that you don’t turn down the invitation—kind of like the annual company party, where one has to make nice to the CEO for ten seconds, wish a happy birthday, then go find some co-workers to sit with and snark about the CEO’s spouse’s most recent plastic surgery until the entrée is served, all the while enjoying the company-supplied drinks, and praying that the entrée is not rubber chicken again. (Maybe you’ve been to one of those parties, too.)
So, they sit there and watch while the boss’s kid dances, and clap politely. And just as they think the evening is about to end, the party takes a gruesome and ugly turn. Herod’s promise to the girl must have sounded like the king just showing off again—promising away half of his kingdom, as if he was so wealthy that he would hardly miss it. You can almost see the party guests rolling their eyes-at least the skeptical ones.
But when the step-daughter/niece returns moments later with her terrible bargain, and Herod follows through with it, well…the horror must have been palpable. I’ll bet some of them lost their supper, at least.
So, that leaves us with John. Camelhair-wearing, locust and honey-eating, gospel-preaching, baptizing, Jesus-befriending, headless, martyred John. Who in the world wants to be John? Any takers?
Discipleship is dangerous business. Most of us won’t be asked to literally give up our lives for the gospel. All of us will be asked to give up something. Most typically, what we will be asked to give up is our complicity with the world.
Most of us—God willing—will never be Herod, or Herodius, or the dancing step-daughter. Many of us will be called to be party-goers. Some of us might be called to be John-like.
Party-goers are those who witness the bargaining for power, the backroom negotiations for influence, the displays of wealth and hubris that our culture rewards. If just one of those present had stood up and called Herod on what he was about to do, had reasoned with him, had persuaded him to sleep it off and think about his choice in the morning, who knows—the story might have turned out differently. But nobody did.
What was it really that cost John his life in the end? It was telling an inconvenient truth. Sure, truth–telling and gospel proclamation were not just something John did, they were part of who he was. They are who we are, as well. Remember last week when I set you up with the promise that I would tell you this week what really happens to disciples? This is what really happens. We might not get our heads chopped off, but we might be asked to stand up for those who are about to, and we may be asked to tell an inconvenient truth now and again. But most importantly, we are asked to live our lives truthfully, honestly, authentically. Do we think that John, knowing what was about to happen to him, would have taken back one moment of the way he lived his life? Would we?
Maybe that’s the best we can hope for, maybe that is the more excellent way to live our lives: not perfectly, but in the sure-enough knowledge and with enough faith to know that when our moment comes, and we are called upon to enter the Church Triumphant as John was, as the whole cloud of witnesses has been, we can say we did what we did and lived the way we lived without fear and without regret, that every day we assumed a posture of surrender, openness and vulnerability, even when we couldn’t see it coming. Maybe, just maybe, we can transform the danger of discipleship into glory. Just maybe…
Thanks be to God.
