In this week’s service, Rev. Dylan Parson explores the story of King Herod and John the Baptist from Mark 6:14-29. He draws parallels between the role of a court jester in medieval Europe and ancient China, who was allowed to speak truth to power, and the prophet John the Baptist, who spoke out against Herod’s marriage and warned of his impending judgment.
Herod, like many rulers throughout history, is tempted by his own desires and the voices of those around him. He elevates these voices above the voice of God, spoken through John the Baptist. Despite knowing better, he ultimately decides to have John killed, demonstrating that sin can sneak up on us even when we know it’s wrong.
Rev. Parson emphasizes that Herod had a conscience and was aware of his wrongdoing, but chose to ignore it. He notes that this is a common experience for all of us, as we are all drawn to goodness and holiness by the prevenient grace of God. However, we often prioritize our own desires and the opinions of others over doing what is right.
The story of Herod serves as a warning about the dangers of ignoring the truth and the importance of being willing to hear it spoken by God or other people. By silencing John’s voice, Herod cut off any hope of redemption and set himself up for disaster. Rev. Parson encourages his congregation to be open to hearing the truth and to prioritize doing what is right, even when it is difficult.
Transcript
In medieval Europe, as well as ancient China, the Aztecs had this too. A king or other aristocrat in a royal court would have a jester, oftentimes, which is also known as a fool. You’re familiar with the concept of a jester, I’m sure. It was an early type of clown or comedian, and they almost always wore a special costume.
Whatever culture they were in, they had a special costume. In Europe, that consisted of the pointed cap with the bells on the side of it, and they had this stick that was known as a marote. It was something like a staff or a scepter with a clown’s face on it, like a weird, creepy little puppet. Their whole appearance, in some ways, was meant to be kind of a shadow of the king’s.
They had the cap and bells as their crown, they had the marote as their royal scepter, and jesters would sing, they would dance, they would tell rude jokes, and so on. They were one-man shows to entertain the royal court, like a dinner theater sort of thing. But they were more than just pure entertainment. Many historians argue that the court jester played an important political role too, not unlike the king’s advisors and that kind of thing.
They didn’t have any power, but they had an important role. So jesters, unlike peasants, unlike any other servant of the king, had a special kind of freedom that was known as jester’s privilege. And what that means, basically, is that they were allowed to ridicule the king, they were allowed to make jokes about his family or his appearance or his decisions without getting beheaded. That’s what they wanted to say.
They were allowed to tell the truth when no one else was, to say the things that the king’s advisors couldn’t even say for fear of the consequences of what would happen if they said it. One historian says that it went even further than that. She says the jester’s political role was crucial for the king’s own good. Having a designated mocker, someone whose job it is to make fun of the king, helped keep the king grounded in a way that was easy to not be grounded.
It helped the king remember that he was human and that he was fallible, that he made mistakes despite almost always being surrounded by yes men who would flatter him, who would affirm him all the time no matter what he did. So when you believe that you’re a king who’s been put on the throne by God himself, you can get a little overconfident. But the jester, by mocking him, by joking, was able to draw the king’s attention to potential stupid decisions before he could make them. And that would prevent him from doing harm to the kingdom through pride, through arrogance, just by getting too big for his head here.
In all of this, only the jester was allowed to do, which obviously meant that kings thought it was an important role. All these kings kept the jester. They preserved it. They protected that role.
And the jester’s comedy became something like a safety net for all the people. They prevented a king from getting too big a head, causing his kingdom to get wiped out in some foolish war that they couldn’t actually win. The jester would help prevent the king from oppressing his people until there was a bloody uprising. Now the jester just kept things in check by saying, Look, this is dumb.
Don’t do it. I’ll make fun of you. It helped. The ruler of Galilee in Jesus’ time, King Herod Antipas, does not have a court jester as far as I know.
I don’t think we see those in the Old Testament. But what he does have is a prophet, which is a similar kind of role in more ways than you would think. Herod has a very unexpected relationship with John the Baptist. John prophesied the coming judgment of God over the people.
He called everyone to repent of their sins. He attracted huge numbers of people to hear him in the wilderness of the Jordan Valley on the fringes of Herod’s kingdom. And as you might guess, kings usually like things pretty well the way that they are right now. So hearing someone proclaim the arrival of a new kingdom, God’s kingdom, the Messiah coming, that isn’t often well received by kings.
But Herod, interestingly, Herod really likes John. He can’t help himself. He might not love the content of John’s message due to his own self-interest, but what he recognizes, I think, is that John is telling the truth for his own good, for everyone else’s own good, just like a court jester. What he’s saying might be annoying, but Herod knows he should listen to it.
But Herod gets caught in kind of a sticky conflict here. I’ll try to make this as clear as possible because the way that Mark tells this story is a little bit confusing, especially the characters. But the Herod in our story is properly known as Herod Antipas. He has a brother, Philip, who is confusingly also known as Herod II, and both of them are sons of Herod the Great.
So at least Mark called him Philip. And Philip, King Herod’s brother, divorces his wife Herodias, whom Herod then marries. Does that make sense? So biblically speaking, and in Jewish law, marrying a divorced person is considered adultery so long as the former spouse is alive. And Herod makes this even worse.
He adds this double layer of scandal to it by marrying his brother’s ex-wife. So two layers of scandal here. And Herodias has a daughter from her marriage to Philip, and this is now Herod’s stepdaughter. Mark also calls her Herodias, the same as her mother, but we know her elsewhere as Salome.
The daughter is known as Salome, which makes things a little clearer. So here’s the situation, right? First, Herod’s wife hates John the Baptist. John is, after all, a notorious truth-teller. He doesn’t soften his words for anyone to hear, and he has condemned Herod and Herodias’s marriage as adulterous and wrong.
As the Common English Bible translation puts it, she had it in for John. She wants John gone. Which is also really interesting, I think. Hearing the truth about themselves, a condemnation of their sin, which they’re fully aware of.
This is not a surprise to them. They know they’re not supposed to do this. This affects Herod and Herodias in very different ways. I’m sure Herod doesn’t like it.
No one likes to hear about what they’re doing wrong. But Herodias wants John silenced immediately. Herod’s listening. Herodias wants it to stop.
And so Herod, the husband that he is, and the diplomat that he is, decides to compromise. He’s not going to kill John, but he’ll at least lock him up in prison to make his wife feel a little bit better, to stop him from talking bad about them in public. Mark says that Herod protects John from his wife, puts him in prison as kind of a protective measure. And Herod figures that she should be grateful that at least he’s done something about it.
He’s not bothering you anymore. It’s fine, right? But Herodias is still not happy about the situation. So one night, an opportunity arises for Herodias to get what she wants finally. So Herod, this great king, this powerful king, has done what royalty does, and he throws himself this grand party for his birthday.
And all of his generals are there, all of his officials, all the businessmen, the big names and important guys, all of them are men here, of the Galilean court. And of course he wants to impress them, which is the entire point of big royal gatherings like this. In the middle of the banquet, the entertainment here, not a prophet, not a jester, Herodias’ daughter, Herod’s own stepdaughter, comes and dances for the crowd, thrilling them, the CEB tells us. She danced and it thrilled them.
Biblical scholars debate on this, what the kind of implication is here, but there seems to be an obvious sexual undertone, right? All these men are fawning over the dancing of this young woman. And Herod basically is exploiting his own stepdaughter for the entertainment of his creepy old friends. That’s what’s happening in this scene. They love looking at her.
And so carried away, Herod swears to his stepdaughter that he’ll give her whatever she wants, even half his kingdom because of her dancing, because she did such a good job. And so Herodias, Salome, goes to Herodias, her mother, to think about what she should ask for. And naturally we know what Herodias thinks she should ask for. She wants John the Baptist killed and she wants his head.
None of this putting him away in prison where I can’t see him. Give me his head so I know he’s gone. And so her daughter goes back and tells Herod. And Herod is extremely distressed when he receives this request.
The CEB says that he was upset whenever he heard from his stepdaughter, but the word that’s used here is much more intense than that. It’s perilupos in Greek. The only other place that this word for upset shows up is in Mark’s gospel, is whenever Jesus is in the garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood about his crucifixion coming up. He’s upset, awaiting arrest and execution.
Herod is as upset as Jesus preparing for the crucifixion. It’s very intense. Herod is miserable. He knows that this is wrong.
He knows that he shouldn’t do it, but he promised her, right? In front of all these big, important people. He doesn’t want to embarrass himself. He promised that he’d give her whatever she asked for and this is what she asked for. Nothing big, really.
And so his conscience takes a backseat to his other commitments. It’s very clear in here that Herod knows better and he has John killed anyway. He knows, but he still doesn’t. And we see here in Mark’s gospel that there is no excuse for what Herod does.
He sucked up into this whirlpool of temptation around power and popularity and prestige and sex until he finds that his foot has been caught in a trap. But he does it eyes wide open. He knows what he’s doing. He heard the voice of God through John and at least to some degree, he kind of understood that.
But he elevated the voices of his own desires and others’ desires above that voice of God. Herod loved to listen to John. Mark tells us that it confused him what John was saying, but he got it. And so the fallout of his sin comes calling really fast.
When it comes, it surprises, it terrorizes him. He’s so upset. It’s as if he’s being threatened with death. This is how sin works.
No one, not even King Herod, wakes up in the morning, maniacally laughing, eager for the opportunity to do something wrong. Nobody who’s sinning thinks they’re a bad person, eager to go do bad stuff. That’s a really immature understanding of sin. It’s a lot sneakier than that.
It sneaks up in the guise of pleasant things, power, wealth, security, pleasure, all this stuff that Herod is trying to build up around himself. Herod’s situation is so fascinating and so tragic because he actually has a conscience. He’s not a caricature. He’s not this cartoon evil person.
He has a conscience. And the reality is that we all do. The prevenient grace of God calls us to goodness and to holiness. It tugs on our hearts.
John Wesley said that every person is born with an understanding of basic moral law written on our hearts. He says that’s the unchangeable law of love, the holy love of God and our neighbor. We know how to do right by people. We know that’s what we’re supposed to do whether we’re Christians or not.
Even before knowing Jesus, we have the basic sense of right and wrong that ends up drawing us to Jesus, whom we can then draw towards further or walk away from. And this is exactly what we see with Herod, this historically evil person in the Bible. We see Herod was sympathetic to John, who was a prophet, proceeding and proclaiming the coming of Jesus. Herod heard that and was compelled by it.
He was listening. Something powerful is churning in Herod’s heart. I think that he really has the opportunity in this moment to turn, to make a very different choice than he does. He could have chosen to listen to John.
But instead, he sells out John because of this careless promise for a couple minutes of entertainment that impresses his friends and exploits his stepdaughter. When we see how upset Herod is at being asked to kill John, which he follows through with immediately, I think the reason for that is that he has this sense of being cornered or trapped that he has no other way to go. That might be familiar. I think it is familiar to all of us.
This notion that sometimes we’re just not able to do the right thing, to make the Christ-like choice because the situation, our situation is special. It’s too hard. It’s too complicated. It’s too sticky, too difficult.
There’s no real good choice here. But the truth is that we are never really trapped. Herod could have said no. He would have faced the consequences.
They would have been bad. He would have faced the consequences. But he could have said no. He knew the right thing.
He could have done it. God was speaking to him. He heard it. He could have done it.
But instead, he ends up capitulating to his darkest impulses. His darkest impulses, his wife’s, the crowds. The crowds can often be just as strong as whatever’s coming from within. He hears the truth.
He even recognizes the truth and he silences it anyway. He cuts off the prophet’s head and with that, any hope of redemption that was offered to him through John. Wise kings have always known that shutting up the jester doesn’t make the truth go away. Just makes it harder to hear.
It’s extremely important that we are willing and able to hear the truth spoken by God, spoken by other people, or we are setting ourselves up for disaster. The word of God for us, the people of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.