(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Explaining Jesus”, originally shared on July 5, 2021. It was the 128th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Did you watch any of the HBO series, “Game
of Thrones”? We don’t have cable, but the first season had received a lot of
buzz and it looked interesting, and I got it as a gift for Christmas on DVD. So,
I watched it and it was pretty violent and graphic and abusive toward pretty
much everybody. At some point, a character says, “In the game of thrones, you win,
or you die.”
In this stage of the pandemic, you can take
the recommended precautions or your chance of getting very sick and even dying
goes way up.
But, in both cases, people are willing to
take their chances and put theirs and other’s lives at risk, because they don’t
think bad things will happen to them. Both are built on selfishness and personal
power at any price.
Mark gives us the story in Mark 6:14-18 of what happened in the
time between Jesus’ sending out his disciples for their first ministry
experience and their return. It’s the story of the death of John the Baptist.
The story he tells is very, “Game of Thrones”.
It also goes a long way in explaining who Jesus isn’t and who Jesus is.
Today’s reading from Mark 6 comes from the time when Jesus’ disciples are
sent to call for repentance with the power and authority of Jesus over illness
and evil and word is getting around about Jesus.
It starts with a “King” who was not a
king. “King” Herod was in fact Tetrarch of the Roman province of Galilee.
His father, Herod the Great, was a monster. He actually was a King. He
was the King Herod that tried to kill Jesus by killing all the children in
Bethlehem when he heard from the wise men that a king had been born there.
He was the King Herod who didn’t like competition.
King Herod directed in his will that when he died, 100 of the leading
citizens of the country were to be executed so that there would mourning at the
time of his death. It was not carried out, but it gives you an idea of his
mindset. Very “Game of Thrones”.
He was not called Herod the Great because he was great, but because of
his large-scale building projects, including the rebuilding of the Temple in
Jerusalem, the Temple that Jesus knew.
Did you know that George Forman, the former boxer, and the inventor of
the Forman Grill, had five sons, all of whom he named “George”? Herod the Great
had sons by 10 wives, who he named Herod Antipas, Herod Philip, Herod King of
Calchis, Herod Agrippa 1, Herod Agrippa II, and another Herod Philip. Every
Herod was a ruthless, ambitious, power-hungry, killer like their father.
He killed at least one of his wives and two sons and other family members
who he believed to be plotting against him.
This was all the worse because the Herodians had a Jewish origin but had
taken on the worst characteristics of the Roman empire.
When Herod the Great died, his kingdom was divided among three sons,
none of whom was given the title “King”. Herod Antipas became a tetrarch,
governing a fourth of his father’s kingdom.
Herod Antipas served from 4 B.C. to 39 A.D., a long stretch. Though he
did everything he could, including murder, like his father, to gain the title
of “king”, he never did. Some scholars think that Mark’s use of “King Herod” was
very likely meant to mock him.
Just before the text that
we’re about to read from Mark 6, the disciples have been sent out with Jesus’
authority over evil and illness, having been instructed in how to handle
success and failure, and now Mark takes us into a little interlude. John the
Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus, a man with his own disciples, and Jesus’
cousin, had been arrested by the King and thrown in prison and executed.
Jesus had been relatively unknown compared to John the Baptist at the
time of John’s death, though they were related and were born at about the same
time. Herod Antipas had heard of Jesus growing “name” among his people and was
trying to figure out how to explain to himself who he was. People were talking.
In Mark 6, starting at the 14th verse, we read:
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.”
Herod Antipas seems to be a little more
certain than he should be.
He is trying to explain
Jesus to his own satisfaction. He’s listening to what people are saying. But how
can anyone explain Jesus when they don’t know that Jesus is God?
This reminds me of a
birthday card I saw once. There was a picture on the cover of an old guy, with
his pants pulled up over his waist, pointing at a land mass in a bay and
speaking to some children. “That thing over there? That’s a sticking out-er
thing”. On the inside of the card it read, “Another year older, and another
year closer to just making stuff up.”
It’s a rough form of
“mansplaining”, when some men speak, usually but not always to women, in a way
that is condescending or patronizing. It’s a way that people, not always men,
think they need to pretend to know everything in order to justify their power.
But psychologically, it
might make some sense here.
This passage in Mark 6 continues with the 17th verse:
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.”
The death of John the Baptist links him with the death of the prophet
Elijah in the Old Testament; John is like Elijah, Herod Antipas is like King
Ahab, and Herodias is like Jezebel. Some Jews expected Elijah to return in the
last days. John comes not as a reincarnation but in the spirit and power of
Elijah (*Luke 1:17-18), as is declared by the angel Gabriel at the
announcement of John’s coming birth.
“He will turn many of the people
of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go
before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the
disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for
the Lord.”
Herod killed John against his better judgement. Maybe it was the guilt from
that decision that made him pick the most personally satisfying but least
likely explanation of who Jesus is: John has been raised from the dead. People
sometimes explain Jesus in a way that is most useful to them.
Guilt does funny things to people.
Herod Antipas served from
4 B.C. to 39 A.D., when he was banished by the Emperor Caligula based on
charges by his brother. He never became a king. Here was the problem.
He was married to a
daughter of a king, the King of Nabatea, a nearby nation. When visiting in
Rome, he proposed marriage to Herodias, who was also his niece, when she was
married to his half-brother Herod Philip. Herod Antipas had to first divorce
his wife, which he did. This made his wife’s father furious and he went to war
against Herod Antipas, resulting in military losses in 39, A.D., the same year
that he was banished. It also infuriated the Jewish population on the basis of
Leviticus 18:16 and 20:21, forbidding marriage to one’s brother’s wife.
John called him out on
this publicly, “telling Herod, ‘It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s
wife.” John’s call for repentance was not limited to those who were unlikely to
hurt him.
This story of Herod trying to explain Jesus in the light of John the
Baptist’s death by Herod Antipas’ order also parallels the death of Jesus that
is to come: Jesus is executed by the civil
authorities, like John. Pilate is reluctant to have Jesus killed but is afraid
of what could happen if he does not, like Herod Antipas being pressured to kill
John. The Chief Priests, like Herodias, manipulate a volatile situation to their
desire. Jesus was crucified, a death intended to add humiliation to the end of
life, like beheading and display was for John. Jesus’ disciples come and collect
Jesus’ body and give it a decent burial, like John’s disciples do for John
later in this chapter.
The gospels aren’t written as live breaking news. The events of Jesus
life, death, and resurrection have already happened before they were written
and the Christian community, including the disciples and the original
eyewitness, have had time to be moved by the Holy Spirit to consider what it
all means.
The execution of John the Baptist is sandwiched in the middle of the
sending of the disciples for their first missionary journey to explain who
Jesus is and their return from that journey.
It points to what is going to happen on the cross and what it means.
John is the forerunner of Jesus. Jesus is the Messiah, the Savior of the
world! The cross is at the center of this story because the cross is at the
center of who Jesus is. Mark has shaped this chapter to explain who Jesus is.
What is important about Jesus is that he died for the sins of humanity,
because Jesus is fully God as well as fully human being. The cross is the love
of God on display in sacrifice, unearned but freely given, through faith. There
is no following the way of Jesus. Jesus IS the way.
C.S. Lewis wrote, in his book “Mere Christianity”, “I am trying here to
prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him:
I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his
claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a
man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.
He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a
poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice.
Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something
worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a
demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not
come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He
has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
The way of Jesus is the way of the cross. It is lived as an outcome of a
living relationship with the one true living God.
“In the game of thrones, you win or you die.” That was the world of
Herod Antipas, and we’ll hear the rest of his story next time.
In the good news of Jesus Christ, Jesus dies so that you may have life,
and may have it abundantly in Him.
That explanation of Jesus eludes the Herods of this world but is life
itself to all who open their hearts to receive the love and grace of God in
Jesus.
Open your heart today.
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