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The Royals, what would life be without the British royal family? Hardly a week goes by without a new whiff of scandal out of that bunch. What’s the real relationship between Prince William and Prince Harry? Let’s not mention how Megan and Kate feel about each other. There’s Charles’ affair with Camilla. Would somebody please crack the conspiracy behind Diana’s death. While we’re discussing her, was life with Charles so bad that it lead to Harry being fathered by her one-time riding instructor, or was it her former body guard or was it an officer of the Welsh Guard? And then there’s Prince Andrew, what exactly was the nature of his relationship with Jeffery Epstein or should I say the nature of the relationships that Jeffery Epstein availed him to? If John the Baptist were alive today and a British subject, he would have no problem finding sermon material among the British Royals. Fortunately, the laws are such that he wouldn’t be beheaded for it. It would have been a different story if these were the days of King Henry the VIII.
Anyway, John the Baptist and Herod Antipas, that was an interesting relationship to say the least. Modern Royals face the rumour mill of the tabloids. But for Herod Antipas, he faced a prophet of God. We know John. Every Christmas he shows up. He was the hermit who lived in the wilderness along the Jordon River somewhere probably in a cave. He wore a camel hair tunic and ate locusts and wild honey. Crowds of people were flocking to him out there in the wilderness to be baptised in the Jordan River. As to why, the best I can explain it is that due to Roman oppression and the corruption in the Jewish government and the Big Business religious machine going on at the Jerusalem Temple there was this sort of mass pervading expectation/hysteria that God was going to bring about that long foretold Day of the Lord judgement upon his people. They were expecting that any day would send the foretold Holy Spirit anointed King, the Messiah, to deliver God’s people from their Roman oppressors and establish his reign here on earth where there would be justice, equity, righteousness and peace.
The people wanted to be ready for this Day. So, in order to be ready, the stain of the sin of the people, otherwise known as the iniquity of the people, needed to be dealt with, washed away. Normally, the annual observance of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was the means to do this. It involved sacrifices at the Jerusalem Temple and fasting. Unfortunately, these people coming to John in the wilderness believed that the Temple priests were so corrupted by greed and power that any sacrifices the offered where nothing but a hypocritical show of the rich and powerful in which the poor of the land (which was most everybody) could not afford to participate. The rich had gotten richer and the poor had gotten poorer. So how was a person of faith to be ready for the Messiah’s Coming if what was going on in Jerusalem was a sham?
Well, they bathed a lot. Archaeologists have found that during that period many people had ritual bath cisterns at the entrances of their houses for the purpose of washing off the “uncleanness” they may have incurred by contact with the Roman and Greek cultural influences that had pervaded their daily lives for close to 400 years. (We do this today with hand sanitizer stations everywhere we go.) John’s baptism took this ritual bathing instinct one step further by moving it to the Jordan River where the Israelites first entered into the Promised Land after the Exodus. So, John’ and his baptizing offered a mass cleansing and restoration for the people of God.
Archaeologists have also found that in the likely area where John was baptizing many of the wealthy and powerful people of Jerusalem, Herod Antipas included, had luxury mansions on the hilltops overlooking the Jordan Valley. To get to these mansions they had to pass by John and the masses of people he was baptizing. We can’t help but imagine that as they rode past in royal procession John the Prophet, the forerunner of the Messiah, did not pass up the opportunity to expose their corruption. This public prophetic lashing by a dirty desert hermit defacing the honour of the royals particularly of she who would be Queen, Herodias, was powder keg wired to explode.
So, how about a little royal gossip about Antipas and Herodias; but I guess it’s not gossip if it’s true according to the historical record. The marriage of Herod Antipas and Herodias was at the heart of John the Baptist’s confrontation of the two and it’s really complicated; as in there was only own family tree involved. Antipas was the son of Herod the Great who was King at the time of Jesus’ birth. Herod the Great was a great builder known for expanding the Jerusalem Temple. He was very much a pawn of the Roman Emperor Augustus. He was also very paranoid. He had three of his eight sons, his second wife, and a brother-in-law executed believing they were trying to usurp his throne. He had a total of ten wives, one was his cousin and another his niece. We also know Herod as the one who culled the children in the area of Bethlehem who would have been born around the same time as Jesus.
Antipas was the son of Herod the Great’s fourth marriage. Upon Herod’s death, Caesar Augustus divided the land between him and two other brothers, Philip and Archelaus. Like his father, Antipas became very much of a pawn of the Roman Emperor who was by then Tiberius. He built several cities and named that after Tiberius and others of the imperial family. In an effort to maintain peace with the Nabatean Kingdom I (Saudi Arabia), Antipas married the daughter of the Nabatean King, Aretas IV. Her name was Phasaelis. Well, he divorced her in order to marry Herodias. This unlawful divorce which disgraced Phasaelis resulted in an eventual war with the Nabateans about three years after Jesus’ resurrection. Antipas lost and since it was part of the Roman Empire Tiberius exiled him to Spain.
Herodias was actually the niece of Antipas, the daughter of one of his half-brothers whom Herod the Great executed. Herodias was also first married to another of Antipas’ half-brothers named Herod II whose mother was the daughter of the High Priest in Jerusalem whom Herod the Great had appointed as a political favour (oh, what tangled webs we we’ve). They had a daughter, the young girl in our reading from Mark whom some say was named Salome. Well, according to Levitical Law one cannot marry a niece. The blood lines are too close.
Antipas and Herodias became a thing when one year when Antipas took a trip to Rome to see Tiberius and stayed with Herod II and Herodias. Apparently, Antipas and Herodias got a little too close. She decided she would rather be the wife of a tetrarch in back home than just a low-ranking socialite in Rome. Now, it’s hard to determine whether or not she actually divorced Herod II, which women were typically not allowed to do. Regardless, she took Salome moved to live with Antipas in the backwater land of the Jews. Again, let me remind you, Herodias was also Antipas’ niece as well as the wife of his half-brother of whom she was also a niece. This blatant divorcing of spouses for lust and power-playing and the marrying within bloodlines really upset the faithful in Israel. It was just one more display of how corrupted with the Greek and Roman ways that the political and religious leadership had become in Israel.
As noted, John the Baptist would pass up no opportunity to point out to Antipas and Herodias how much of a stain their marriage was on the honour of God’s people. So, Herodias had Antipas arrest John. Fortunately, Antipas had a soft spot for John. As Mark says, Antipas was afraid of John for he could tell he was a righteous man, a prophet. Antipas also enjoyed the novelty of John’s preaching and teaching. So, he didn’t have John executed as Herodias desired (“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” I’ve often heard commentators say about Herodias.)
The opportune time for Herodias’ revenge arose. It was Antipas’ birthday. There’s a feast. The guests are Antipas’ cabinet officials, high ranking military officers, and the ‘first citizens’ of Galilee. For some really weird reason Antipas has his stepdaughter who is somewhere around twelve to fourteen years old come and dance provocatively for this gross group of older men who’ve been drinking. She nails it, at least for Antipas. He’s so struck with her moves that he offers her half of his kingdom.
Now before this gets any grosser, we have to ask why this dance? Could it be Antipas was trying to find out who among his courtiers would like to try to marry into the royal family. For good or for ill, he was trying to figure out who’s got “ambitions”. There’s a lot of power that comes with being the son-in-law of the President, so to speak. In consideration of the offer, the young girl goes to her mother for advice which opens up another angle on who has really orchestrated this young teen dancing for a bunch of drunken men at a birthday party for the wanna-be king. Her own mother! Could it be it was her own mother, Herodias, who was trying to see who in the kingdom had “ambition”? In the world of wealth and power “ambitious” people can be manipulated.
But then Antipas, does this stupid, stupid, ridiculous thing of offering half his kingdom to a young girl…on oath. Herodias seizes the opportunity and gets her to ask for the head of God’s prophet served to her on a platter. (I can’t imagine how traumatizing that must have been.) Herodias made it clear that this is what happens to those who would question her honour, even if it is God’s prophet speaking for God. Herodias has “ambition.” She has this mysterious power to get the people who have power to do what she wants done. She’s the behind-the-scenes manipulator you point to when the people in power start doing things that otherwise don’t make sense.
Well, welcome to the world of wealth and power at the top of the food chain. I hope you could keep track of all that. One of the puzzles of Mark’s Gospel is figuring out why he interjected this story of the death of John the Baptist. He could have just noted that Herod had beheaded John. It seems he wants to give a behind the scenes peak into the way things are in the world of wealth and political power and where it leads. He is attempting to say that life at the top of the food chain, so to speak, is a sick, twisted mess. He is trying to say with this senseless death of John the Baptist that this is what happens to those who speak God’s truth to wealth and power. The death of John the Baptist had a profound impact on Jesus for this reason. In all the Gospels, when Jesus hears of the death of his forerunner he becomes certain that something like that is going to happen to him. Those who speak God’s truth to wealth and power will die.
The world of wealth and power is just a mess of “ambition”, manipulation, debauchery, lewdness, child abuse, and people making irresponsible promises because something has pleased them – and this is the behind the scenes that makes the world go round. If you’ve ever wondered why governments can’t just get done the things that need to get done like creating a truly fair and just society, saving the planet, protecting children, well, the dynamics at play around the banquet table of Antipas’ birthday feast just might be your answer.
I don’t mean to sound hopeless in saying that those who speak God’s truth to wealth and power will die. And I am certainly not saying we, the disciples of Jesus should therefore say nothing. But one thing we do need to reckon with being the Church today is overcoming the historical reality that the majority of us Christians have been ambitious guests at the banquet table of Antipas, if I may use that as a metaphor. The Church’s wholesale participation in the Indian Residential School debacle is clear evidence of that. We gave a theological backing to slavery, to colonial expansion and the outright genocide and culture-cide of Indigenous peoples all over the world. Christian Anti-Semitism enabled Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. We even give a theological reason for the destruction of the environment, With this Pandemic, it is no secret that one can find Christians playing a key role in why people don’t get vaccinated and won’t wear masks or abide by other public health measures.
I’ll speak more about what we should be doing next week as I will be comparing the Feast of Antipas to Jesus’ Feast of the Loaves and Fishes. But to wet your appetite, we disciples of Jesus have a prophetic voice to speak with in our communities, the loudest manifestation of which is the way we love each other and our neighbour. Having a Prophetic voice does not have to mean running around condescendingly pointing out the sins of others. Being prophetic is to offer a vision of hope to the world, a vision that helps people to see that there is another table to sit at, another feast to attend that’s being hosted by Jesus – a feast where the dance is people bowing to serve one another in a spirit of unconditional, mutual, and sacrificial love, where everyone has enough, abundantly enough. Amen.
