(Based on Mark 6: 14-29)

The beheading of John the Baptist is a gruesome, ugly story. It is a story of low political intrigue, yet Mark laces his account with undisguised sarcasm. The guest list at King Herod's birthday banquet reflects the court and establishment of a petty Jewish prince under strong Roman influence.1 Present were Herod's court nobles, his army officers, and leading Galileans. Mark portrays an incestuous political relationship, as much as an incestuous matrimonial relationship.

The relationship is the collusion of military, governmental and commercial interests. Does that picture not have a contemporary resonance? Do we not still see that same collusions operating in world politics to achieve ends that are mutually beneficial to each of those parties?

Mark's sarcasm comes to the fore when he relates that none of those powerful men determined the fate of John the Baptist. Rather the Baptist's fate was determined by a salacious dancing girl who besotted the drunken King Herod.

At the centre of the sordid story is Herod's oath to Herodias' daughter, that Mark states twice for comic emphasis. The dilemma created by the oath is a parody of the shameless methods of decision-making made by the elite, a world in which human life is bartered to save royal face: Herod trades the 'head' (symbolizing his honour) of the prophet to rescue the integrity of his own drunken oath.2

I am reminded of the lines from the poetry of the First World War English Chaplain, Studdart Kennedy, about the crucifixion of Jesus,
When Jesus came to Golgotha they hanged Him on a tree,
They drave great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary;
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep,
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.³

It is, unfortunately, a fantasy to believe that the days when >human flesh was cheap' have gone. And it is naive to think that religious persecution that ends in death is a thing of the past, for in the last century there were more martyrs for the Christian Faith than in all the previous centuries!

It is discomforting to be thinking, as we are, of the gruesome beheading of John the Baptist on a Sunday morning when we might be looking forward to a cooked breakfast or to brunch with family or friends. The quiet of Sunday seems intruded upon by Mark's account of the Baptist's violent end.

Yet this account is sandwiched between the inaugural mission of the first disciples, by themselves. Prior to the story of the Baptist's end, we heard Jesus give detailed instructions to those disciples about travelling light as they went on mission. After the distressing detail of the slaughter of the Baptist, the disciples return to report into Jesus, about their experience of mission. Why the narrative sandwich?


You may have noticed that creating story-sandwiches is a technique that Mark clearly favours. Always there is a lingering emphasis that flavours the ingredients of the story-sandwiches. In this particular instance, it is a likeness in destiny between John the Baptist, Jesus and those who are sent on Jesus' mission. The political destiny of those who proclaim repentance and a new order is always the same. This inherited destiny, not just for those immediate disciples but for all disciples of Jesus of all times who proclaim the new order, is explicitly articulated first in chapter 8, verse 34, anyone who wants to be a follower of mine must renounce self; he must take up his cross and follow me and again in chapter 13, verses 9 -11. ...be on your guard. You will be handed over to the courts; you will be beaten in synagogues; you will be summoned to appear before governors and kings on my account to testify in their presence...so when you are arrested and put on trial...⁴

This is an aspect of Christian discipleship that seems to blight the joy of discipleship. It is an aspect that is not overly mentioned by many churches, as they compete against each other for a decreasing pool of adherents. It is no wonder that given the drive to survive, there are churches that ignore this prominent warning, given by Jesus Himself, and certainly experienced by those first disciples. Remember what Herod did to James, the Lord's brother.

This political collision that is mirrored later on in Mark's gospel with Jesus and then in the Acts of the Apostles with members of the early church is a direct consequence of commitment to an alternative ultimate authority, to the Reign or Rule of God. The very use of the title Lord signalled subversion, for such a usage indicated that Jesus rather than Caesar was Lord.

Indeed, a careful study of the birth narrative of Jesus in Luke will reveal that an alternative claim to power and authority is being crafted by Luke. For Caesar Augustus was known as 'Saviour', as the one who 'brought peace to all mankind'. The Christian gospel radically and unequivocally says, no Jesus is the Saviour of humankind, Jesus is the one who brings peace.

A problem for many of us as we read Holy Scripture is that we read the text without knowing the context. Not appreciating the context leads us to fail to understand the social, societal impact of the gospel. We read then a thin text, with its immediate meaning emaciated. The gospel has been reduced to news for individuals, rather than its original force of news for the whole of society and indeed the world.

There would have been no martyrs in the early church, if Christian Faith had been simply a matter of individual, private belief. The death penalty was invoked because Christians were seen as saboteurs of the then political system, in that they honoured an alternative Lord who had proclaimed an agenda that was diametrically opposed to the Caesar's agenda. The Roman administrative system became aware early of the refusal of Christians to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome, and who thereby made themselves political terrorists.

To speak of Christian belief having no political implications, is to evacuate the title 'Lord' of its original meaning, and to fall into a heresy of dualism, compartmentalising faith and life . Nowadays, we have seen Christians stand out for their faith courageously in Africa and India, more so than in western European countries where Christianity has lost much of its nerve.

This is so because we have been socialised into what Christopher Lash has termed a 'culture of narcissism' in which people live for self and for the moment. There can be religious versions of this culture, as we realise when we watch tele-evangelists from the Unites States.


The spirituality derived from the Rule of God, the essence of Jesus' proclamation, was a spirituality of transformation. As one Baptist Minister who worked in New York's 'Hell's Kitchen' district put it, ascetic Christianity called the world evil and left it. Humanity is waiting for a revolutionary Christianity which will call the world evil and change it. ⁵ He spent his life changing that particular hell-hole.

The ancestry of such thinking is John the Baptist and Jesus' own insistence that God desires 'mercy and not sacrifice', that is, social justice and not religious devotion, when the latter is devoid of the former.

A task before the church is that of biblical truth-telling in the tradition of the great Hebrew prophets of whom the last was John the Baptist. These prophets were not into future-gazing, trying to predict the future. These social prophets read the future on the basis of trajectories from the present. That is, they fearlessly enunciated that if you as a nation continue to do this then you as a nation will suffer this. These prophets discerned the signs of the times; they read political occasions and understood the consequences far more so than the leaders who were blinded by their own interpretations of events and by their own delusions of power.

Such prophets were forth-tellers, rather than fore-tellers. That was the nature of Hebrew prophecy. As such, it usually brought the prophets into collision with those in power who hated to hear an alternative version of possible events. John the Baptist with his radical social justice preaching was in the lineage of these great prophets, and like them, suffered the calumny of rejection by those political figures who felt threatened by him.

The extent of King Herod's fear of John is that even after Herod had John beheaded, Herod thinks of Jesus as John the Baptist brought back to life (6:16). I guess anyone who knows that their power is founded on falsehood and criminal action will be that paranoid, and act with paranoia. As then, so now.

It is difficult for us, who think of ourselves as ordinary, much the same as everybody else, not given to making claims about ourselves, wanting to enjoy life and do the right thing, to appreciate that because we are the church, we are an alternative to the mainstream of Australian life that is that culture of narcissism. But we are such a subversive people because we inherit the gospel, and because the prophetic strand is an integral part of the gospel. As one New Testament scholar said, the primary social structure through which the gospel works to change other structures is that of the Christian community. ⁶

If we flinch from this Christ-given task, then we invite a gruesome, ugly world, which will be a world of 'crude and cruel days in which human flesh will be cheap', as days have been in other, earlier times.

Mark made sure the early church knew the cost both of living prophetically for itself, and the cost of its not living prophetically, for others. The cost in both instances still remains the same.

          1 A.N. Sherwin-White. 1963. Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament. New York: Oxford University Press, p.137.
          2 Ched Myers. 1990. Binding the Strong Man. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, p.216.
          3 G.A. Studdart Kennedy.1961. The Unutterable Beauty. London: Hodder & Stoughton, p.34.
          4 Myers 1990. op. cit., p.217.
          5 Quoted in Kenneth Leech 1992 The Eye of the Storm. London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, p.19.
          6 John Howard Yodder. 1972. The Politics of Jesus. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, p.157.