Sunday 11th July, Trinity 6

Lectionary Readings for the Sixth Sunday of Trinity

Ephesians 1:3–14

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance towards redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory.

Mark 6:14–29

King Herod heard of it, for Jesus’s 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.’ But others said, ‘It is Elijah.’ And others said, ‘It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.’ But when Herod heard of it, he said, ‘John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.’ 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. For John had been telling Herod, ‘It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.’ And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not, 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. But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers and officers and for the leaders of Galilee.  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.’ And he solemnly swore to her, ‘Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.’ She went out and said to her mother, ‘What should I ask for?’ She replied,

‘The head of John the baptizer.’ 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.’ The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her. Immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison, brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl. Then the girl gave it to her mother. When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Trinity

According to the Gospels of both Mark and Matthew, Herod Antipas imprisoned John the Baptist for denouncing his marriage to Herodias, the divorced wife of his half-brother Herod Philip, because this marriage violated Mosaic Law. Herodias was furious with John, and began to hate him and plot to kill him. But Herod was afraid to have John killed—-he was fascinated by this gaunt, prophetic, stern, terrifying figure, and knew that what John said was true, and that somehow he was indeed connected to God. So Herod’s birthday comes up, and his beautiful daughter dances for the guests at the birthday banquet. And in his complete failure to think about the consequences of his action, Herod, enamored of his own daughter’s physical display of her body in the dance, promises her anything she desires. Like every good daughter, she consults her mother as to what this should be. Herodias wastes no time in eliminating the source of outrage to her Queenship. John the Baptist is beheaded. His head is presented as a birthday gift to the gratified queen and the horrified king, on a platter.

So that’s the story.

Jesus, who brought God’s love and peace, met a violent end. This is a shocking story. This is also a truth about us human beings and what we do. John, Jesus’s cousin, who, like Jesus, did not hold back in saying what he thought about the powers that ruled his people in those times, also met a violent end, in the way we have just heard. One foreshadowed the other.

Why have these stories, which are also facts of history, continued to have so much power to move our own imaginations and our own emotions?

The story of John the Baptist’s beheading has fascinated artists and musicians and writers for many centuries since: it has been dramatized in painting and theatre and opera over and over and over.

In the Renaissance, one of my favourite painters, Benozzo Gozzoli, in 1462, gave to the world an oddly beautiful multi-coloured depiction of John’s beheading. Titian, in 1515, depicted a woman tenderly cradling the head of John in her arms, her young daughter looking on. This might be Judith holding the head of Holofernes, but both possibilities are fascinating…and shocking.

Caravaggio, in 1609, in one painting, has a muscular soldier savagely twisting the body of John down into the ground as women eagerly look on. The story of Salome became an obsession for Caravaggio in the final years of his career: he painted it three times.

But this story is, above all, associated with turn-of-the-century decadence—that is, the turn of the 19th into the 20th century. I was amazed to read that some scholar somewhere had compiled the fact that 2,789 French poets have written about Salome!

A medieval addition to the Salome legend held that, as well as her mother's hatred of John for his preaching against her, Salome in her lascivious dance was also motivated by a frustrated love for John. The illustration I chose for the cover of this morning’s service sheet embodies this possibility—-it is called The Apparition, and it is by the French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau.

It took Moreau seven years to paint. It created a sensation when it was exhibited for the first time in Paris at the Salon of 1876—-it is considered to be Moreau's most important work.

Caravaggio painted this subject at least three times; Moreau, more than 150 times. I quote one description of The Apparition: in this particular hallucinatory watercolour set against a lavish background inspired by the Alhambra, a bejewelled, bare-breasted Salome points in anticipation at the head of John the Baptist levitating in an eerie glow and dripping blood into a large stain on the floor. ***

The Apparition was one of the inspirations for Oscar Wilde’s one-act play, published in 1893. His play then became the libretto for the opera by Richard Strauss in 1905. In Strauss’s opera, Herod is portrayed as lusting after Salome, while Salome, in her turn, desires John the Baptist; she finally satisfies her corrupt wishes by kissing the lips of the severed head of John, who had spurned her. Its famous Dance of the Seven Veils then led to the figure of Salome as synonymous with the image of a strip-tease dancer, topless in a hula skirt flaunting herself to all men everywhere. (Not a helpful image in the history of feminism!)

These are just some of the highlights of the ways in which this story has appealed to the dramatic imagination of human beings in the course of the centuries. I think that one of the reasons for the popularity of the story of Salome and John the Baptist, gruesome and terrible as it is, is that is somehow holds up for us the abiding question: are these two aspects of ourselves, body and spirit, completely disconnected? Do we choose one or the other to inhabit, and that’s it?

Christians, throughout history, have struggled as we think about our bodies—how do they relate to our souls? If it is our minds, our thoughts, our deepest yearnings inside ourselves that connect us to God, what role do our bodies play in our relationship to God?

John the Baptist, who didn’t care what he wore or what he ate, appearing from long stays in the wilderness to witness to the truth—-his ascetic body and his ascetic life stand in sharp contrast to the courtiers of Herod in that banqueting hall where, drunk with the orgy of delicacies of food and drink and the excess of power, a ruler commands a young girl to dance for their further entertainment, who then seduces her own father into the assassination of this same Man of God.

The spirit and the body—-do they always have to be opposed like this? The word, love, might help us to reconcile the fleshly and the spiritual elements of ourselves. The passage from Ephesians gives us these beautiful words of truth:

God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.

What a declaration! What an assurance!

What prompted the beheading of John? Not love, but a lust for revenge and for the display of power. And Herod’s weakness of bodily desire, that won out over his proper fear of this Man of God.

But a reflection on the nature of love—-genuine love, God’s love—-can point us toward a reconciliation of body and spirit, I think.

Paul says in Corinthians (6: 19-20)

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

The good God who created us as His good creatures intends for us only what is good. He has embodied us to act in love toward one another. If we love our own bodies and use our bodies as vessels of love for others, we will honour the God who made us. We will experience the great joy of relationship. Christ has already redeemed us by his great act of love. So are we to live out our redemption in embodied acts of love for others. So that we, as Ephesians says, might live for the praise of his glory.

If we are obsessed with our own bodies as monuments to ourselves, to our own praise and glory, we betray God’s purpose for us, and compete with others, or attempt to exercise power over them, as in Herod’s command of Salome.

But if we regard the gift of our bodies as living emblems of God’s love for the whole world, carrying out acts of love that only bodies can do, we honour God’s image in us.

God has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth: things of the body, and things of the spirit.

For the moment, in our present time, we live in the spirit to which our bodies are joined, and we are given the power of choice as to how to inhabit this mystery. But in the fullness of time God will gather us up, body and spirit. Faith, hope, and love abide, body and spirit, but the greatest of these, of all of these, in all of these, is love.

The Revd Dana English

St. George’s Campden Hill Church, London

July 11th, 2021

***The most astonishing element of this work is its fusion of different cultural elements. These have been identified with Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the Alhambra in Granada, the Mosque/Cathedral of Córdoba and various medieval cathedrals. Themes have been identified from Etruscan, Roman, Egyptian, Indian, and Chinese art and culture.