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| Salome and the Beheading of John the Baptist -- Caravaggio |
- 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19 and Psalm 24 •
- Amos 7:7-15 and Psalm 85:8-13 •
- Ephesians 1:3-14 •
- Mark 6:14-29
The Gospel passage for this Sunday records a grotesque and remarkably
gruesome episode – the decapitation of John the Baptist, and the appearance of
his severed head on a platter in the middle of a party! Mark manages to convey some
compelling images in just a few verses – the brutality of absolute power, the
terrible consequences of adolescent vanity, the viciousness of revenge, and the
necessary acceptance of these realities by simple followers.
The episode is recounted in a context that characterizes the whole
of Mark’s Gospel – the question of Jesus’ identity. What are we to make of him?
Is he the Messiah? Is he another prophet like John? The fate of the Baptist is
a ghastly catastrophe, yet even those who first read this passage, and wrestled
with this question, could not have failed to know that Jesus himself had died a
death scarcely less brutal. The difference, of course, is to be found in the
Resurrection.
The disciples of Jesus, just like the disciples of John, ‘came
and took his body, and laid it in a tomb’. What happened thereafter, however,
changed everything. It did not undo the fact of his execution on a cross,
of course, but nevertheless transformed its significance. It is precisely this transformation that the
reading from Ephesians means to explicate. In the death of Jesus, God ‘has made
known to us the mystery of his will . . . a plan for the fullness of time’. ‘In
Christ we have also obtained an inheritance’ we have ‘heard the word of truth,
the gospel of salvation’.
The death of John is a display of human will at its worst.
On the surface, the death of Jesus looks pretty much the same. But the Resurrection
shows it to be the mysterious, and saving, will of God.
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