Thinking allowed

Trinity 7: 14 July 2024

on Wednesday, 17 July 2024 at 8.46 am by Simon Kershaw
categorised as sermon

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.

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.