Trinity 7: 14 July 2024
Readings: 2 Samuel 6.1–5, 12b-19; Psalm 24; Ephesians 1.3–14; Mark 6.14–29
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.
(The east windows at St John the Baptist Church, Leamington Spa; photo by Aidan McRae Thomson)
When I came to prepare this sermon, two themes stood out.
First, John the Baptist and my “relationship” with him.
I’ll come back to that in a moment.
The other theme from our readings is …
Well … it’s dancing!
David dancing before the Ark;
Salome dancing before Herod.
Now it’s a bit of a co-incidence
that they are paired here together:
we’ve been hearing the story of David
over the last few weeks,
and we just happen to arrive at this episode
as the gospel gets to this interlude in Jesus’s ministry.
But I expect lots of you watch tv programmes about dancing –
Strictly Come Dancing anyone?
So perhaps you’re imagining David and Salome
as celebrity contestants in Strictly.
There’s David, king of Israel,
stripped down to a “linen ephod”
whatever that is,
but it definitely sounds a bit scanty doesn’t it?
Dancing, ooh, the quickstep, perhaps.
And the princess from Galilee, Salome,
(though she is called Herodias
in our bible translation this morning) –
young and attractive,
dancing something a bit raunchy, a tango, maybe.
In popular modern culture
it’s the dance of the seven veils,
though that was only invented by the writer Oscar Wilde –
the biblical text lacks the eroticism
which we might imagine into the story.
As for David,
the ephod that he wore was a priestly garment –
knee-length, open at the sides, belted at the waist –
perhaps a bit like the vestment
that a deacon sometimes wears, a dalmatic.
But back to John the Baptist.
I have, as I mentioned, a bit of a history with John.
It’s getting on for 40 years since Karen and I moved here –
and when not serving, I’ve usually sat somewhere over there:
right by Comper’s statue of John the Baptist.
But long before that,
from when I was born,
I went to a church dedicated to John the Baptist:
I was a choirboy and then a server,
and I was formed as a young Christian.
Now that church was a great Victorian barn of a place,
bigger than here.
And one feature I remember vividly
was a set of three big windows at the east end,
behind and above the altar.
In the lower part of each window
there’s a scene from the story of John the Baptist,
and above each of them a parallel scene
from the story of Jesus.
So the left window depicts the Nativity of Jesus,
a manger with a shepherd and worshipping angels,
while below are scenes from Luke’s account of John’s birth.
And the bottom of the centre window
shows the story we have heard today.
There is Salome dancing –
fully and demurely robed I hasten to add.
There is John
kneeling before the executioner wielding his sword.
There is a man opening a door,
presumably bringing in the head of John,
though that horror isn’t shown.
So, why do the windows pair these scenes?
Well John was an important figure to the gospel writers,
and all four of them include him in their stories.
He’d been the major figure in what we might call
a religious revival,
and crowds had flocked to see him,
a bit like some Billy Graham rally perhaps.
Among them came Jesus.
Are the gospel writers a little embarrassed about this?
About Jesus being baptized by John?
About Jesus perhaps playing second fiddle to John?
They want us to understand
that from their point of view,
from our point of view,
John was preparing the way for Jesus.
The first readers and hearers of Mark’s account
must have included people
who had been followers of John,
who perhaps had come out to the Jordan and been baptized,
but maybe had had little involvement with Jesus.
The gospel writer wants these people to see
that Jesus is continuing John’s proclamation:
repentance and new life.
But Jesus brings a new twist to the proclamation.
John had preached repentance
as preparation for the arrival of God’s kingdom.
But Jesus proclaims that God’s kingdom has arrived already,
here, now:
Jesus’s followers – you and me –
can repent
and move from the ways of this world
and live instead in the kingdom of God,
where the hungry and poor,
the troubled and the dispossessed
are lifted up
and people are reconciled
with each other and with God.
And there’s a second message from today’s gospel.
Following Jesus isn’t always easy.
It can be hard to lift up the lowly
and be reconciled with others,
and sometimes others don’t want to be reconciled,
sometimes people don’t want the lowly lifted up,
perhaps because they like to have people to lord it over
or to exploit.
Sometimes there are hard consequences.
Certainly there are hard consequences for John –
that’s the story we have heard today:
John is condemned and executed by Herod.
And soon Jesus in his turn
will be condemned and executed
on the orders of Pontius Pilate
and with the connivance of this same Herod –
and of others who are challenged
by the idea of God’s rule, God’s kingdom.
In death, as in life,
John is the forerunner of Jesus.
And this is what can be seen
in the middle window at my old church:
above the panel with the beheading of John,
we see the Crucifixion.
Jesus pays the ultimate price of love and reconciliation,
put to death by the Roman governor
on charges brought by the Temple leadership,
a conspiracy between the rulers of this world
to attempt to defeat … love.
And there’s one more window to look at.
The third window at my childhood church
reminds us of one more thing.
It shows, in the bottom, the end of today’s story:
John’s disciples come and carry away his body
and place it in a tomb.
It is the end for John.
But the upper section of the window
shows a very different scene.
The follow-up to the death of Jesus
is the empty tomb,
the bursting from the grave,
the defeat of death.
The triumph of hope.
That is to go beyond the story we have heard today, with the message of Jesus:
Love conquers all.
You see,
John had proclaimed
that the end of the world was coming,
and people needed to repent.
And John had been killed and buried.
Jesus, though, proclaims something new:
not the end of the world,
but the end of the age,
and a new age
where God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
And Jesus too is killed and buried … and …
rises to new life.
And that’s what we see in the last of the windows,
that similarity-and-difference between John and Jesus.
John buried; Jesus resurrected –
resurrected to new life,
life in the new age where God’s will is done.
As we heard Paul remind us in his letter to the Ephesians –
Jesus’s death on the Cross
reconciles us to God and also to one another.
And Jesus’s resurrection brings us
to share in life in God’s kingdom.
Right here and now.
So,
unlike John, we are Jesus’s followers.
But, like John,
our role does include preparing the way for Jesus:
preparing the way for Jesus
in the hearts and lives of those around us.
John’s life – and John’s death –
remind us that this might not be easy
but the example he sets
is one of boldness in telling the truth
and in proclaiming the gospel,
the good news that, in Jesus,
the kingdom of God is among us.
Let us each consider this week
how we might begin
to prepare the way to Jesus
for just one person.
Amen.
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