Mark 6:14 King Herod heard of it, for Jesus’ name had become known. Some were saying, ‘John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in him.’ 15 But others said, ‘It is Elijah.’ And others said, ‘It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.’ 16 But when Herod heard of it, he said, ‘John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.’
17 For Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because Herod had married her. 18 For John had been telling Herod, ‘It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.’ 19 And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not, 20 for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him. 21 But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers and officers and for the leaders of Galilee. 22 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.’ 23 And he solemnly swore to her, ‘Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.’ 24 She went out and said to her mother, ‘What should I ask for?’ She replied, ‘The head of John the baptizer.’ 25 Immediately she rushed back to the king and requested, ‘I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.’ 26 The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her. 27 Immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison, 28 brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl. Then the girl gave it to her mother. 29 When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.
I've never really given much thought to Herod as a person. As a political figure, sure. But I’ve never really worried much about what it must be like to be Herod. In the Christmas story, he’s just kind of a monster, and that’s how historians of the day outside of the Bible remember him, too. But our passage this morning gives us a picture of what it’s like in Herod’s head.
And I think that’s interesting because it offers us a pretty realistic, textured look at the psychology of an evil person. Don’t get me wrong, he is an evil person. Sometimes we use psychological or therapeutic language as a way of getting people off the hook, like no one can really be “evil,” they’re just repressed or compensating for something or whatever. Have you noticed this, there’s always some extenuating circumstance where the person hurting others is actually a victim themself? And I think there’s an element of truth there: hurt people hurt people and all that. But there’s still the question of how that happens and the even more tantalizing question of ‘Could it be otherwise?’
So while this is a story about an evil king, I think it’s also a story about human nature: the drives we wrestle with and the people we become as we deal with our desires and our fears. So our story begins this morning with Herod hearing rumors about Jesus’ ministry. Jesus is feeding people, healing people, casting out the forces of darkness…which is “king” behavior. And Herod’s advisors come to him and they’re like, “We’re not sure who this guy is, it might be a prophet, it might be the second coming of Elijah, or maybe it’s the return of John the Baptist.”
Herod immediately fixates on that one. “Yes, it’s John the Baptist.” Which it turns out is a bit of Herod’s guilty conscience—or his calculating political nature knowing where his enemies come from. The storyteller goes right into a flashback of how Herod himself came to have John executed. John was teaching and gathering followers, and he was critical of Herod. In particular, he was speaking out against Herod marrying his brother’s wife. Which is a twofold problem for Herod. At home, John’s saying, “You’re not properly following the Law,” which has a way of undercutting someone who says they’re the king of the Jews. But also, some historians think that this woman, Herodias, was the daughter of a very powerful neighboring king, whom Herod marries to forge a political alliance. John running around prophesying against that marriage is also weakening Herod’s position from a “foreign policy” perspective.
So Herod arrests John. And Herodias wants John dead. But, Herod’s too calculating for that. The story says that he knows John is a righteous and powerful man, and Herod’s actually afraid of him. He’s probably also afraid that killing John will lead to a popular uprising against him. But even with all that, the storyteller says that Herod liked listening to John, he was perplexed or intrigued by what he had to say.
Notice all of these elements, these drives, these obligations that Herod has given himself. He wants to keep his throne, he wants to keep his wife and his wife’s family happy, he wants John to stop criticizing him, but he also wants to keep listening to John, and he’s afraid that John’s disciples will start an uprising. And so Herod, from his throne, looks out at all of these swirling obligations, and he decides, “I can have it all. I’m the king. I can have my cake and eat it too. I can transcend all of these conflicting drives within me and around me. I can keep John alive and shut him up and keep my wife’s family off my back and shut them up. I can do what I need to do and not make any powerful enemies in the process.”
It’s a brilliant storytelling technique, because this guy is supposed to be the king, but he’s ruled by everything going on around him. Herod imagines himself in a high place, like a Game of Thrones character calculating and scheming and gaming everyone, when actually he’s beholden to everyone around him. Herod’s need for power makes him so small. For someone who presents himself as this great king, this massively wealthy power broker, he’s really the smallest man who ever lived.
And we see this in the execution scene with John, when his smallness, his weakness really comes out. He’s balancing all of these various obligations, playing the political game, but then he gets drunk with his buddies and his daughter dances for them all. And Herod’s sooooo charmed(?), that he promises her anything she wants. She goes and asks her mom what to ask for and Herod’s wife says, “The head of John the Baptist.” After all that calculating, all that careful maneuvering, Herod puts himself in the power of the least powerful, the most objectified person in the room, and that leads to this monstrous decision to execute John, not because he really has to go through with it but because he doesn’t want to lose face around his buddies and his wife.
So this great king is actually just a guy. He makes a series of commitments trying not to make anyone around him too mad, and the result is this monstrous violence overflows as the things he was trying to keep under control burst free.
It’s a very very ancient maxim that for the most part people don’t do evil things because they think they’re evil. People try to do what’s good and they do harmful things because they are mistaken about what’s good (like that it’s just pleasure or power) or because they think it’s the necessary, realistic, practical thing to bring about what’s good. We become who we are through a series of seemingly unimportant commitments that become decisions that become habits that become our character. And so your sweet little college best friend who loved flowers and gardening and everything natural, had a bad experience with a doctor, and saw a Facebook meme about natural medicine, and got into some message boards and groups where she felt like people understood her, and now five years later she’s an anti-vaxxer who’s very worried about border policy. Or I’ve known people who are so kind, so nice, they want to avoid conflict and they want everyone to be happy, and so when something annoys them or hurts them, they let it go, they let it go, they let it go, and then after so many years they can’t take it and something breaks, and all of the sudden something comes out of them and the sweetest gentlest people will start acting like Scarface, and it’s like “Whoa, where did that come from?!” Or I think many of us have known people who were so energetic for justice, so active in calling for a better world, but defeat after defeat inflicted wound after wound, until compromise after compromise congealed into a bitter defense of the way things are (because the thought of anything else is too painful)—there’s not a stauncher defender of the status quo than yesterday’s jaded radical. We carve ourselves into these shapes to hold all our drives and commitments and wounds together. That’s how unimaginable cruelty becomes very much imaginable—it’s easy to see how that happens to people in power, but it happens just as easily to the rest of us.
I think that’s why it’s so interesting that this story gives us Herod’s psychology, reminds us that Herod was a person. Anyone can go down that path, maybe not to that same extent or in that same way, we can’t all be kings, but anyone can become hardened and cruel and small. Sometimes we have experiences in our lives where that kind of evil comes near, someone we’ve been close to has been cruel or abusive, and it’s natural to ask in those moments, “How did I not see that coming? How could I be in such close proximity to someone like that?” But that kind of monstrosity, that kind of evil, isn’t alien to what it means to be human. It’s very human. It’s not that there are some people who are inherently that bad and some people who are inherently exempt from that badness. There are people who justify and justify and enable and enable until they can’t tell the difference between good and evil. And there are people who seek accountability and apologize and reject that path. And then I think probably many of us begin to harden and justify and then by some grace change our minds and turn around and walk away from that smallness, usually because some loved one or true friend helped us see the path we were taking.
Herod’s smallness becomes the kind of person he is. He repeats the same fears, the same habits he showed toward John, with Jesus. In fact, maybe they even compound, maybe he thinks Jesus is the return of John because he thinks Jesus is starting the uprising he always feared from John’s followers. And so Herod jumps right back into the same cycle, which will eventually lead to him joining with the Romans to crucify Jesus. That’s what it takes for Herod to have it all, to hold all the different drives and commitments of his life together so that he can stay on top.
And Herod is right to be threatened by Jesus. If Herod is deeply human in kind of a pathetic way, Jesus is also fully human and he isn’t pathetic precisely because he doesn’t try to avoid the pathos of our limitations. Where Herod tries to gather all the threads of his life together to make his own coherent picture, Jesus pours himself out, let’s go, descends in humility. In the first part of chapter 6, right before this story, Jesus goes into his home synagogue and teaches from the scriptures in a way that makes everyone so mad at him they start making fun of him, like “Isn’t that the carpenter’s kid?” And all Jesus says is, “Yeah, a prophet is without honor in his hometown.” Jesus doesn’t play any games, he doesn’t scheme, he doesn’t spin, he doesn’t worry about optics. And he also doesn’t play the victim, getting mad at people who get mad at him when he knows very well he’s being oppositional. That’s what he came to do! He refuses to justify himself, he just feeds people and let’s them draw their own conclusions. Jesus is free to be good because he’s not worried about everyone perceiving him as good.
And if anyone can become hardened and bitter and distorted, anyone can also become supple and humble and willing to do what’s right even when it costs a lot. And part of what we’re here to do is help each other grow into the kind of humanity Jesus demonstrates. Obviously, churches can become places where people act in very small ways toward each other, because we’re made up of people. But we’re also one of the few places where we can slow down and ask ourselves, “Where am I becoming hard and bitter and fearful? Do I have any pet wounds that I’d rather keep poking instead of letting them heal?” When we confess what’s going on in our lives and our hearts to each other, when we come to the table and say “We all have needs we cannot meet on our own” we are practicing little habits of humility and love. We’re practicing letting go of the fantasy that we can have it all and have it all together. And those little practices become habits that become character, which isn’t to say no one here will ever get lost down another path, but hopefully we can discern together in humility how to respond so that we don’t repeat the same old boring awful patterns. Jesus gives us a new patterns.
Herod is just a guy, we are human, which means our choices, our paths aren’t predetermined. There are many people and many communities we could become as the months and years pass by. But that also means things can be otherwise, we can grow and become more flexible and loving and capacious in how we work with our desires together. We can become more human like Jesus instead of Herod and when we see the way of Herod cropping up in our hearts or our friends or the powers of this world, we don’t have to take them as seriously as they want us to. We can remember how small they are, and how great the love of Jesus is. Amen.
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