July 12, 2009 Des Moines
Mark 6:14-29
“It’s Complicated”
An old friend from teenage church camp days recently contacted me through Facebook, the popular social networking internet site. For the uninitiated, Facebook is a technological marvel that enables users to instantly and constantly share their every waking thought and movement, no matter how innocuous, inane, or irrelevant with friends and family around the world. And, as I said, to catch up with people you may not have seen in years – in this particular instance, in probably 30 years. Every member’s personal page provides a template of standard information that can report, at a glance, a few basic facts about yourself – where you live, what you do, your political and religious persuasion, and your relational status. Of course, before you can see anybody’s information you have to officially and reciprocally accept each other as a “friend.”
After certifying that I did, in fact, wish to be “friends” with this old friend, I clicked over to her page to see what she is up to these days. Looking over her profile, I glanced over a few pictures she had posted, read a few of the notes that been posted on her “wall,” noticed where she is now living, her birthday, her daughter’s name, and then paused. Under the category titled “Relationship Status,” – you know, where you would expect to find something like “married” or “single” or “divorced,” – here she succinctly and forthrightly noted, “It’s complicated.” Hmmm.
That description could apply, of course, to virtually every kind of relationship – and more. It’s complicated. Take, for example, Herod’s rather puzzling relationship with John the Baptist. Here is a love/hate relationship if there ever was one. John, according to Mark, rather annoyingly and persistently nagged at Herod for stealing his own brother’s wife. Herod apparently – and not surprisingly – wearied of John’s constant condemnation and had him arrested and thrown in jail. Nothing particularly complicated about that rather linear sequence of events.
But that’s not all Mark has to say about these two. According to Mark, despite Herod’s moral scab that John kept picking at, Herod nonetheless had a soft spot for John. He liked to listen to him. Indeed, he protected him.
Until, that is, caught up in the celebration festivities of a party, and questionably pleased with his daughter's dancing in the midst of it, Herod made the rather stupid promise that, as a reward for her performance, she could have whatever she wanted. And, after a little thinking, a little dreaming, and a little consultation with her smoldering mother, what she returns to Herod to ask for was no horse or bicycle or bright red convertible, but rather John's severed head on a platter.
Well, even Herod knew the request was preposterous. I mean, to say nothing of the gruesome cruelty of it and the inevitable damper such a presentation would have on the party underway, what possible use could a dancing daughter have for a head? “But,” Herod thinks to himself, “what is an honorable King going to do? I can't go back on my word! After all, I promised!”
Never mind that some promises are too ridiculous to keep, and some requests too outrageous to honor, Herod, fulfilling some convoluted and specious sense of integrity, feels obligated to grant her wish – concluding somehow that butchery was more noble than reneging. It is...well...complicated.
It is interesting to me that, while other gospels report the death of John, Mark is the only one who tells the story in such detail – Mark, the otherwise terse and economical writer who tells practically nothing in detail. Usually in scripture such anomalies are signals by the writer that something especially important is going on – like a flair burning on the highway that signals passersby to slow down and be careful and pay close attention. What might it be that Mark, by means of this terrible story, wants us to see and take to heart?
One of Mark's favorite strategies is creating “story sandwiches” – he takes two slices of one story and inserts between them yet another story so that we readers have to attend, in a different sort of way, to both of them at the same time. This story of the beheading of John turns out to be one of those slices of meat. We get a hint simply by the way this story begins: “King Herod heard of it because Jesus' name had become known.” He heard of “it”? What is it and what does it have to do with John losing his head?
Well, “it” turns out to be the first of those two slices of bread. The story on either side of John's unfortunate end is about Jesus teaching his disciples about the life of discipleship – how to do it; what to expect; what to attempt; that they should travel light, taking nothing except a walking stick; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; that they should dress simply, both extend and receive hospitality, move in pairs, and heal, and cast out unclean spirits and invite all they met to turn and enter a different way of living; and that such a way of living and bearing witness carried with it a certain kind of power and authority. And, according to Mark, they went out and enjoyed some success at it.
But it is here – here at the very report of such success – that Mark interrupts with the story of John and Herod and the party dance and the present, and we get this sort of sick intuitive understanding. Discipleship, it turns out, isn't all preaching and casting out demons. It isn't all power and authority and calling people to repent. It's more complicated than that. John, too, had traveled simply and called people to repentance. John, too, had given witness to a different claim on our lives, and Mark didn't want to leave this call to the joys and importance of discipleship without inserting this sobering, cautionary clarification. It is important, he wanted to affirm, and it is infused with an elevating joy at the realization that you are about something high and significant. But it is also dangerous in any number of ways.
Parker Palmer tells the story of a man he met while facilitating a retreat for some elected and appointed government officials from Washington, D.C. This particular participant had worked for the Department of Agriculture for a decade after farming for twenty-five years in northeastern Iowa. In the course of the retreat he shared with Palmer that on the man’s desk just then was “a proposal related to the preservation of Midwestern topsoil, which is being depleted at a rapid rate by agribusiness practices that value short-term profits over the well-being of the earth. His ‘farmer’s heart,’ he kept saying, knew how the proposal should be handled. But his political instincts warned him that following his heart would result in serious trouble, not least with his immediate superior.”
On the last morning of the retreat, the man came to the group looking bleary-eyed after what he reported had been a sleepless night, and announced that he intended to return to his office and follow that “farmer’s heart” that had been nagging him.
When asked how this decision was likely to be received, this farmer-turned bureaucrat replied that, “It won’t be easy. But during this retreat, I’ve remembered something important: I don’t report to my boss. I report to the land.”
Palmer concludes by acknowledging that because the story is true, he couldn’t give it a fairy-tale ending. He doesn’t know whether or not the man followed through with his resolve, and if he did, whether or not he was politically and professionally punished. He only knows that the confrontation of expedience by integrity always results in a net moral gain for all concerned. [1]
But it can be expensive. Not everyone wants to hear what your conviction and sense of discipleship is compelling you to say. Not everyone wants to leave the life in which they are currently – and perhaps profitably – invested. Some will quite possibly hear you and be captivated into following a similar path; but others will just as surely hear you and conclude that you are the demon rather than the exorcist. And quite likely there will be a price to pay – hardly your head, but very possibly in your friendships or your employment or your family comfort or your economic ease.
You have already noticed, no doubt, that there are plenty around who pretend and preach that following Jesus solves all your problems and makes all your wishes come true. But Mark isn’t among them. Or John the Baptist. Real discipleship, they know, is more complicated than simply “doing the right thing” or “choosing the right path” or saying “yes” at the end of the aisle and living happily ever after. It can be expensive.
But who’s to say how much discipleship is worth? John will tell you it is worth every hair on your head – and then some; indeed, it’s worth everything you have.
Preach, then, help and heal. Exercise your spiritual authority. But know that it isn’t all jackpots, parting waters, and glee. It’s more complicated than that.