postID: 6906; title: The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
groupKey: secondary
groupKey: other
The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
O Lord, we beseech thee mercifully to receive the prayers of thy people who call upon thee, and grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfill the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Proper 10)
Array
(
[date] => 2015-07-12 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1165
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => formatted
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2015-07-12 11:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2015-07-12postID: 6906 (The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 6906; date_type: variable; year: 2015
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 6906
displayDates for postID: 6906/year: 2015
Array
(
[0] => 2015-07-12
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2015-07-12 with ID: 6906 (The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost)
The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
Array
(
[date] => 2015-07-12 11:00:00
[scope] =>
[year] =>
[month] =>
[post_id] => 1165
[series_id] =>
[day_titles_only] =>
[exclusive] => 1
[return] => simple
[formatted] =>
[show_date] =>
[show_meta] =>
[show_content] => 1
[admin] =>
[debug] => 1
[filter_types] => Array
(
[0] => primary
[1] => secondary
)
[type_labels] => Array
(
[primary] => Primary
[secondary] => Secondary
[other] => Other
)
[the_date] => 2015-07-12 11:00:00
)
1 post(s) found for dateStr : 2015-07-12postID: 6906 (The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost)
--- getDisplayDates ---
litdate post_id: 6906; date_type: variable; year: 2015
Variable date => check date_calculations.
=> check date_assignments.
=> NO date_assignments found for postID: 6906
displayDates for postID: 6906/year: 2015
Array
(
[0] => 2015-07-12
)
postPriority: 3primaryPost found for date: 2015-07-12 with ID: 6906 (The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost)
The reading_id [153546] is already in the array.
No update needed.
Scripture citation(s): Mark 6:14-29
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Mark 6:14-29
✛
Herod, John the Baptist, and Jesus
Array
(
[0] => 60756
)
book: [Array
(
[0] => 60756
)
] (reading_id: 153546)bbook_id: 60756
The bbook_id [60756] is already in the array.
No update needed for sermon_bbooks.
Today’s Gospel story has many points, a number of which we will miss if we take it out of its context. That context, the sixth chapter of Mark, is a good ways into the Gospel (Saint Mark has all told only 16 chapters). Chapter 6 began with Jesus’ return to his home town. Jesus had done many miracles and drawn quite a lot of attention elsewhere, but when he returned home, his power was oddly limited. The people there, who had known Jesus as a boy, asked, Where does he get all this? They said, this fellow’s a lowly carpenter. We know his mother, we know his brothers and his sisters—or so they said. Mark has some irony here, for of course Jesus’ so called brothers and sisters might have been children of a previous marriage of Joseph, and the townspeople do not know that God, not Joseph, is Jesus’ real father.
All this goes unsaid by Mark, who thus sets before us the sad case of people who think they know things, who in particular have a preconception of Jesus that cuts him down to size—thinking they know who Jesus is they are unable to appreciate the amazing things that Jesus, right there in their midst, could do. In the event, Mark says, Jesus was able to heal only “a few sick folk” in his home town.
But Mark’s overall point is the overwhelmingly amazing power of Jesus. The next thing he writes is that Jesus sent out his disciples in pairs. This was Jesus sharing his authority with his disciples, who then immediately went out to preach, to cast out demons, and to heal the sick. As those disciples did great work, Jesus’ own power was multiplied through them.
And to emphasize the extent of the news of this amazing power of Jesus being multiplied throughout the land, Mark inserts the story of John the Baptist’s death. Follow along how he masterfully unfolds this story.
First, he tells us that even the king, Herod, heard about what was going on, and upon hearing of these “mighty works” that Jesus was doing, Herod leapt to a fantastic conclusion: that Jesus is John the Baptist come back from the dead. Now when he tells us that Herod drew that conclusion, Mark then has to explain that John the Baptist was dead, and has to tell about Herod’s role in that occurring. John had been dead for awhile; we last heard of John back in the first chapter, where we were told that he had been arrested. Nothing has been said in the meantime. Mark, a masterful writer, saves the news for now in order to make a point.
The dispute had to do with Herod taking as his wife a woman named Herodias, who was the wife of his brother. John had rebuked Herod and told him he was acting unlawfully, and Herodias didn’t like that and wanted John killed. For his wife’s sake Herod had arrested John, but before he could kill him, something happened to Herod. Mark says he came to fear John and that this fear came from “knowing” that John was “just” and “holy.” Herod seems to have been attracted to a power that he recognized in John. He “observed” John, and listened to him, and was glad to listen to him.
Please note how unusual this is. John got the attention of the king, and then he got the ear of the king, and then he got his mind and his heart, to such an extent that the king would not allow John to be executed. Because of his wifehe wouldn’t release him, but neither would he push forward the execution.
As it happened, on his birthday Herod had a dinner with the high and mighty from all around. Lords and captains, “courtiers and officers and the leading men of Galilee” [RSV]—they were all there. Herodias’s daughter pleases the company with a dance, and Herod makes an oath to give her whatever she wants. Herodias seizes her chance, and the request is for John the Baptist’s head to be delivered. Cornered, unwilling to lose face in the presence of the leading men of the region, the king orders the execution. The head is delivered. The disciples of John go to retrieve his body and bury it.
And then Mark tells us—it’s the next verse—the disciples of Jesus returned to tell him with joy and amazement all the great works and all the teaching they had been able to do in his name. This whole thing about John the Baptist and Herod is sandwiched between the sending and the return of Jesus’ disciples on their highly successful mission of multiplying and magnifying the amazing power of Jesus.
+ + +
The point of today’s Gospel, then, is that it is an interlude in a greater story, and it is put into that greater story in order to lead us to an appreciation of the surpassing magnitude of what Jesus can do. John managed to impress a king with his holiness and his uprightness, his justice. And that king put John to death and saw in his own dining room John’s severed head. But John never did the amazing works that Jesus was doing in his own person and through his disciples, throughout the land. The king thinks: John must have come back from the dead, and somehow, having come back from the dead, he is able to do greater works than he did when he was alive.
But the king was wrong: it wasn’t John, it was Jesus. Mark wants us to see that the best thing ever to happen to the world is that Jesus came with power, with demonstrated authority “over human behavior, over the demonic world, and over disease” [so Gundry, 302]. But Mark also wants us to see that it is possible for humans to go to fantastic, almost absurd lengths to resist this Jesus who has come. For when Herod identified Jesus with John—to the point of his (I’ll say it again) fantastical belief that John had come back from the grave—by that very identification Herod was failing to see Jesus as . . . Jesus, as who he really is. Mark chapter 6 began with the hometown people refusing to see Jesus because (they thought) they knew where he came from. Herod’s refusal is more subtle, and methinks more pernicious. Herod is urbane. He likes conversation, he likes being near to someone who is holy and just, he would like it very much if Jesus were brought to him, in jail but alive, so he could listen to him. And in the end (according to Saint Luke) Herod gets that wish also. But when it is over, the Herods of the world turn the Jesuses and the Johns over for execution.
Which is to say, not only does Mark want us to see how amazingly powerful Jesus is, he also wants us to see how easily he might be betrayed.
May God increase in us a love and awe for Jesus in all of his vast and amazing power. And may God preserve us from ever betraying him.
