Sometime
during the last year I saw for the first time Richard Strauss’s one-act opera, Salome.
The story is based on the passage that you just heard proclaimed as the
Good News of Jesus Christ a minute ago, namely the beheading of John the
Baptist. Strauss, upon seeing Oscar
Wilde’s play by that name which Wilde wrote in French, composed his German
opera, giving to audiences in 1905 something so stunning and shocking that the
work was banned for several years in London and then performed only with
alteration. The Vienna State Opera did
not perform it until 1918. And when it
premiered in New York in 1907, wealthy patrons insisted that further
performances be canceled and kicked up a fuss trying to get the British
composer Sir Edward Elgar to join them, an invitation he flatly refused,
calling Strauss “the greatest genius of the age.” Such drama!
Salome, a
name not given in the Bible in connection with this story, is in the opera the
daughter of Herodias. Her lecherous
step-father Herod persistently flirts with her.
The Strauss opera builds to a climax when Salome dances the “Dance of
the Seven Veils,” for King Herod until, having removed one veil at a time, she
finally lies naked at his feet. She then
demands the severed head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. No one, to my knowledge, retched at The
Kennedy Center when in a final act of decadence Salome passionately kissed the
lips of the beheaded prophet; but it does not take much to appreciate how
audiences of an earlier day, unused to the stage and cinematic violence that we
see all the time, were totally repulsed by the scene. Wilde, of course, and Strauss, boldly
embraced just such shocking eroticism partly, perhaps, because doing so jolted
a prissy and repressed public with images calculated to dent, if not smash,
their hypocrisy.
So far, no
one seems terribly sickened by all this on a warm July Sunday in 2012. Not only do we have little trouble
appropriating the grotesque, inured as we are to blood and gore in everything
from cartoons to computer games; but also we have at best only the vaguest
sense of unease about the biblical story to begin with, caring not very much
about John the Baptist’s ill fate, and understanding even less what it all has
to do with anything remotely touching our lives at the moment. I am making a heap of assumptions here, to be
sure. I allow that it is possible that
you may be indeed feeling a little queasy with the thought of a severed head,
even if it is found in the pages of the Evangel of Jesus Christ according to
Mark. And I allow that you might be
disturbed that on this, of all Sundays, I should preach on the gospel as
opposed to another passage about a dance, namely the exuberant, handsome young
David, dancing with all his might before the Ark of the Covenant. There is plenty of eroticism in that story,
too, which would make a good opera if someone were inclined to compose it. But let’s stick with this gruesome gospel
tale today. It might have something to
say to us worth our hearing. And, who
knows? There might even be some good
news here before we are finished.
What is the
story even doing in Mark’s gospel? It is
the only story in that short book that is not directly about Jesus. Why would he have included it? Its style, so different from Mark’s rather
crude Greek, reflects the fact that he borrowed an already existing story,
perhaps even one circulating in print.
Why? For one thing, he inserts it
exactly at the point at which Jesus sends out his disciples in pairs, giving
them authority to cast out demons and to anoint and cure the afflicted and
diseased. Mark says that Herod got wind
of all this because Jesus’ name was beginning to be in the news. Folks, ever quick to jump to conclusions,
were saying that John the Baptizer had been raised from the dead (the idea of
resurrection in those days was not the stumbling block that it later
became). Others were saying no, that
Elijah or one of the other old prophets had reappeared. Herod no more heard the name “John the Baptizer”
than he flipped into a terror imagining that one whom he had arrested,
imprisoned, and later executed had indeed risen and come back to life, perhaps
to haunt, or at least to embarrass him, Herod.
The
digression into the ghoulish story of John the Baptizer’s death functions for
Mark as a time-filler while the pairs of disciples are out doing their
work. When the story ends, the disciples
return and report to Jesus all that they have done and taught. But surely there is more to the story than
that. In fact it does have something to do with Jesus. Harking back to the Old Testament, the scene
of Herod and Herodias recalls another king and queen, namely Ahab and
Jezebel. Jezebel had a serious problem
with another prophet, Elijah. She tried
every way she could to have him put to death.
So, Mark seems to be saying, this is the kind of thing that happens to
prophets who speak truth to power. What
happened to Elijah back then and to John the Baptist more recently is exactly
what is in store for Jesus. He too will
suffer death at the hands of the politico- religious establishment. One does not take on the big boys without
paying dearly for it.
If you
follow Mark’s story really closely, you cannot help but see that it is laden
with messages to disciples, followers of Jesus.
Of course it is, for that is what gospels are for. Mark, however, is quite obviously conscious
of disciples specifically as targets of persecution. There is more than a good chance that the
very thing that motivated him to write a gospel was the first, or at least a
very early, wave of persecution that tested the faith and mettle of
disciples. Why should one confess the
faith of Jesus Christ if to do so means to die, perhaps a painfully violent
death? What is to keep one, feeling the
breath of lions and seeing one’s buddies torn apart for sport just because they
happen to be Christian, from quickly rethinking the value of following Jesus
and tossing in the towel before it is too late?
Mark’s basic answer is that faith in Jesus is worth the risk because
Jesus is truly the Son of God, and hence the Truth.
It is not
incidental that the story of John the Baptist’s fate takes the spotlight just
as the disciples are being sent by Jesus on a mission with authority over
unclean spirits. Those who are sent are
apostles, for that is what the verb “αποστελλω=to send” means. And apostles are sent not into a friendly,
hospitable world, but into a world that is riddled with evil, bewitched by
power, and largely in the grip of forces that sooner or later will turn with a
vengeance on anything that attacks their entrenched interests. Apostles had better watch out. John the Baptist opened his mouth one too
many times about immorality in the royal household. Jesus paid the price by taking on the powers
and principalities. Disciples, apostles,
will pay dearly too.
There are,
of course, many people in many places in the 21st century who know
this all too well. One thinks of Jawani
Luwum, Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., and even some like Nelson Mandela
who have survived. The narrative that Americans
cherish is that we in this country are spared those awful outcomes of Christian
witness. Don’t be too sure. Although we can be thankful that many lives
are protected from outright persecution and death, we need to understand some
basic things. One is that the essential
meaning of the gospel is precisely that one cannot in fact be a follower of
Jesus unless one’s loyalty to what he called the Kingdom of God or the Realm of
God is paramount to national and political ties. Telling the truth, whether in protesting the
massive imprisonment of black men, or supporting those whose status puts them
outside the law, or opposing political parties and politicians that lie, cheat,
and steal on many different levels, will land today’s disciples in deep trouble
with power structures. In that sense,
this society, while restrained by a constitution and laws, is little different
from any other political culture.
Prophets, apostles, evangelists, and ordinary faithful Christians are
not in the business of being popular, but rather of being loyal to the God of
Justice, Peace, and Love. We have to
make up our minds whether we are going to go on the mission of Jesus or sit it
out. But one thing is for certain: discipleship costs.
It is
frankly much harder to jolt an easy-going, peace-loving population like the
great array of the American middle class (if there is still such a thing) with
a message like Mark’s or Jesus’ than it was to crash into Victorian morality
with a character like Salome. Notice
what gets peoples’ dander up and their blood boiling these days. Generally it is stuff about as relevant to
our lives as a Salome making love to the severed head of a man of God whom she
has repeatedly tried to seduce. It is a
bevy of things like nudity, pornography, and sexual orientation and behavior
different from the norm. None of that is
especially threatening to power, political or otherwise, though many in power
would have us think so. Then, too,
people argue on and on, talking about things that no one can disagree with,
antiseptic things like “creating safe environments” and “relieving
stress.” None of it gets at the root of
the evils truly infecting humanity and the planet. Hyperbolic phrases like “the undoing of
civilization,” “the moral decay of the nation,” “the undermining of the sacred
foundations of society,” and other such claptrap is sounding brass to cover the
real noise of economic injustice, the damage done by unbridled greed at all
levels, racism, militarism, gender inequality, and financial vulnerability, not
to mention more global crises like inhumane prison conditions, genocide, the
persistent rape and poisoning of the environment by economic engines, and the
wholesale rip-off of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable by powerful
corporate interests that own whole political systems and protect them with
armies and navies. I am not talking just
about the United States. I am talking
about Egypt, Sudan, Syria, China, Russia, and a host of other places that
participate in versions of the same macabre games that silence Truth by
chopping its head off and then in tawdry scenes, kissing the relics and
memories of dead radicals as if they had blessed them all along.
Is there
any good news, or do you hear this as just one more rant that can be classified
loosely as liberal Christianity echoing in an empty room? Well, there is good news, but you have to
listen very closely and very quietly to hear it sometimes. Believe it or not, there is some good news in
that little ending of Mark’s beheading story when the disciples of John the
Baptist come and take his body and bury it in a tomb. In the midst of violence and wholesale
degradation, there are pockets of Presence that pick up the pieces. There are disciples that nurse the sick, who
care for the wounded, who look out for children, who feed the monks and nuns
that pray and the prophets that protest.
Burying the dead might not be a glamorous job, but it is one that makes
the grief of the world a little easier to bear.
And it is good news that some disciples do that.
That is
only one piece of the Good News. If the
bad news was that John was not in fact raised from the dead, the Good News is
that Jesus was. And Jesus is still being
raised from the dead, just as creation itself is still in the process of
happening. Communities of disciples
gather together to share the kind of love that Jesus modeled and taught. One by one, people are bringing into his
fellowship those who come to him in faith, baptizing them in the name of the
Living God and of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Two by two and sometimes in larger numbers, disciples are going out into
the world with a real sense of authority over unclean spirits, taking on the
powers of disease and insanity, speaking up for Truth, defending the orphan and
the widow, taking time to listen to the powerless and dispossessed, feeding the
hungry, educating the ignorant, and welcoming the stranger. Herod is still on the throne in many places,
and Salome is still doing the bidding of her irate mother. But,
Though the
cause of evil prosper,
Yet ‘tis
truth alone is strong,
Though her
portion be the scaffold,
And upon
the throne be wrong,
Yet that
scaffold sways the future
And behind
the dim unknown
Standeth
God within the shadows
Keeping
watch above God’s own. [1]
[1] James Russell Lowell, "Once to Every Man and Nation," 1845
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012
