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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
“Jersey Shore” and “Desperate Housewives”—we may call them “reality television” and “primetime drama”, but in many ways they are no different from the serial, dramatic programs that came decades before them on both television and even radio, shows such as “Days of our Lives” and “Guiding Light”. Those programs, with soap manufacturers for sponsors, give the name “soap opera” to the genre. The genre’s defining element may officially be “the open-ended nature of the narrative”, but to us the genre may mean long and involved storylines often featuring immoral activities. In some ways, much of today’s Gospel Reading resembles a “soap opera”—a “soap opera” that at first seems to have very little to do with Jesus. When we consider the Gospel Reading a little more, however, and have it applied to ourselves, we soon see a common theme of “Trying to Silence the Prophetic Voice”.
Today’s Gospel Reading again picks up right where last week’s Gospel Reading left off. Last week’s Gospel Reading told us of the Twelve, sent out by Jesus two by two, proclaiming that people should repent, casting out many demons, and anointing with oil many who were sick and healing them—no doubt doing all such miracles in the Name of Jesus. This week’s Gospel Reading tells us that Herod heard of it, for Jesus’s Name had become known. Herod also heard three different explanations for Jesus’s miraculous powers, and, sensing that his executing John the Baptizer had failed “to silence the prophetic voice” speaking out against him, Herod, with his guilty conscience and memory of John’s head on a platter, could only conclude John had been raised.
The rest of today’s Gospel Reading, with its soap-opera-like details, essentially tells how Herod came to execute John the Baptizer. This long and involved storyline features even more immoral activities than the divinely‑inspired St. Mark records. This Herod is different from Herod the Great, who is the “King Herod” of the Gospel accounts of both Jesus’s birth and of the visit of the magi. This Herod, Herod the Great’s son Herod Antipas, was not even officially a king but only a tetrarch, a petty ruler over one‑fourth of the Roman province. This Herod, Herod Antipas had been married, for some 20 years, to Phasaelis, the daughter of the Arábian Nabataean king Aretas the fourth—that was before he “eloped” with Herodias, the wife of his half‑brother Herod Philip and niece to both of them. (Not wanting to be divorced, Phasaelis had gone home to her father, and a war later ensued, which some interpreted as punishment from God for the murder of John the Baptizer. Herodias later induced Herod Antipas to make the trip to Rome that ruined him, and she had to follow him into exile in what is France today. And, Herodias’s daughter, whose name sources outside the Bible tell us was “Salōmē”, later married one of her granduncles—but all of that is getting ahead of our “story”.)
In our “story”, the “union” of Herod Antipas and Herodias disrupted two marriages and itself was not a marriage but was adultery plain and simple, all the more since Herod Antipas and Herodias were within the forbidden degrees of blood relation. John the Baptizer had been saying that what Herod Antipas was doing with Herodias was not lawful, and Herodias’s resulting grudge against John and pressure on Herod Antipas resulted in him seizing, binding, and eventually beheading John. The Jewish Pharisees and Jesus Himself eventually became aware of how Herod reacted in the case of John the Baptizer, and their awareness no doubt played a role in the Pharisees and Jesus’s conversation about divorce and remarriage, which conversation St. Mark records in the tenth chapter of his account. In early October we will hear that report of how the Pharisees tried unsuccessfully to use the matter of divorce to silence the prophetic voice in Jesus, as Herod Antipas had done with John.
Officially, the First Amendment of the U-S Constitution prohibits congress from making any law abridging the freedom of speech. However, the U-S Supreme Court has found some limits to freedom of speech, a limit such as shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, though apparently one’s lying about his or her military service is not one of them. Hate speech, on the other hand, may soon be a limit to our freedom of speech in this country. Democracies such as Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, and New Zealand reportedly all currently prohibit hate speech of various kinds. Already years ago in Canada, where I served previously, criminal charges of hate speech could be made against pastors preaching against homosexuality even in their own pulpit! More recently in this country, so‑called Christian denominations have almost been falling over themselves going in the other direction, endorsing gay unions and same‑sex marriages. Just this past week the U-S Episcopal Church became the largest American denomination to put its stamp of approval on homosexual unions, something the Presbyterian Church U-S-A had narrowly failed to do only days earlier.
So‑called Christian denominations have long been silent on the kind of heterosexual divorce and remarriage that prompted Herod Antipas to try to silence John the Baptizer’s prophetic voice, but they should not be. At the time of the Reformation, Scripture passages such as today’s Gospel Reading were used to condemn such divorce and remarriage. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther used the Reading to reject the divorce and marriage proposed by King Henry VIII of England, and Dr. Luther wrote in the Large Catechism that, among Christians, “married people are forbidden to be divorced.” Of course, even those of us who are not divorced and remarried are ultimately by nature no less sinners than those who are divorced and remarried. Who among us does not fail to love and honor our spouse or even otherwise to live our life chaste and decent in word and deed? We may all too quickly think ill of Herod Antipas and Heródias for their soap‑opera‑like storyline silencing John the Baptizer’s prophetic voice, but we may just as quickly try to silence any prophetic voice that says what we do is not lawful.
“No one living is righteous before You,” we this day confessed to God in our Introit from Psalm 143. In that Introit we also pleaded, “Enter not into judgment with your servant.” We have answered God’s call to repent, spoken by the very same prophetic voice we might try to silence. We have answered God’s call to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust that God forgives our sin, and to want to do better. When we so answer God’s call to repent, God forgives our sin—our sin of divorce and remarriage, of trying to silence the prophetic voice, or whatever our sin might be. He forgives all our sin for the sake of His Son, Jesus Christ.
Today’s Gospel Reading’s report of the death of John the Baptizer and all its talk of John being raised from the dead wonderfully foreshadow Jesus’s death and resurrection. Herod Antipas, who arrested, bound, and eventually beheaded John the Baptizer saw and questioned Jesus, the true king of the Jews, while Jesus was under arrest. Though Herod did not find Jesus guilty of any charges against Him, Herod and his soldiers nevertheless treated Jesus with contempt and mocked Him, before sending Him back to Pilate. Though Pilate also did not find Jesus guilty of any charges against Him, Pilate eventually ordered Jesus crucified. On the cross, Jesus died because of the charges against you and me. Our sin put Him there. Likewise, Jesus was resurrected from the grave to show that God the Father accepted His sacrifice on our behalf.
In Christ, John the Baptizer has been raised from the dead, and, in Christ, you and I have been raised from the dead, too. In Christ, God the Father has answered our Introit petition: “For your Name’s sake, O Lord, preserve my life! In your righteousness bring my soul out of trouble.”
In Christ, God the Father has answered our Introit petition, and He has answered it through His Word in all its forms. He puts His Name upon us in Holy Baptism. He individually absolves our sin in that same Name. And, as St. Paul puts it in today’s Epistle Reading, in Christ we have redemption through Christ’s blood—blood we receive in, with, and under wine in the Sacrament of the Altar, blood shed for you and for me for the forgiveness of our sins, for our life, and for our salvation. Such blessings the prophetic voice offers for us to receive by grace through faith.
In today’s Old Testament Reading, the prophet Amos told King Jeroboam of his unexpected call to be a prophet, and in today’s Gospel Reading we heard how “King” Herod treated perhaps the greatest of all prophets, John the Baptist. We know how “King” Herod and Pilate treated Jesus, the Prophet like Moses, and Jesus foretold of the apostles’ similar treatment by kings when they would appear before them. You and I should expect to be treated no differently whenever the prophetic voice is heard from us, either as a congregation or as individuals. In this world for the present time, God hides His greatness, majesty, and power. Those outside the church mock God and us, as if He does not know our plight, cannot do anything, or does not care. We tolerate such for now, since we know the time is coming when God will show them He has known our plight, can do something, and does care.
While we wait for that day, we struggle, often the same way the Gospel Reading tells us that Herod Antipas struggled. For all the soap‑opera‑like storyline and the eventual silencing of John the Baptizer’s prophetic voice, St. Mark’s divinely‑inspired account reports that Herod feared John, knowing that He was a righteous and holy man, and Herod kept him safe, if only for a time. For, when Herod heard John, he was greatly perplexed, and yet he heard him gladly. When Herodias’s daughter asked for John’s head on a platter, Herod was exceedingly sorry. Herod would have liked to have followed the godly course John laid out for him, but he could not break away from his former life. In such respects, how like Herod we are! As St. Paul writes of himself in Romans chapter 7, we do not do the very things we want to do, but we do the very things we hate. We have the desire to do what is good but not the ability to carry it out. Who will deliver us from this body of death? As we live each day with repentance and faith, we can joint St. Paul in answering that question: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +