Third Sunday after Trinity – evening
Sunday 7th July 2019
Trinity 3 – Proper 9 – evening
Gen. 29. 1-20
Mark 6. 7-29
Revd Preb Maureen Hobbs
This evening we have two wonderful biblical stories, worthy of the best Holywood screenwriters – or of the most dramatic Soap operas. Real page-turners both of them!
First Jacob finds the girl of his dreams – who happens to be one of his own clan – so her father seems happy at the match. Keen to impress his future father-in-law, he even promises to work without wages for seven years, if Rachel can be his wife. Laban agrees with alacrity – what businessman would not! – although such a promise is perhaps rather rash. And all through the seven years Jacob finds his anticipation and excitement growing at the prize that will be his … and time seems to fly by.
Although as we will discover, Laban has another scheme in mind, that will keep Jacob working for him, will see both his daughters married to this rich young kinsman, and will keep them all within his household where he can keep his eye on them and enjoy the benefit of any grandchildren who may come along… The plot – as they say, thickens!
The in our second reading we learn first how Jesus was setting about training and deploying his disciples – in order that as many people as possible should hear the message of God’s love for them. He sends them in pairs, and travelling light.
This is followed by that wonderfully salacious tale of Salome dancing for her step-father, Herod. The tale that has given birth to the stories of the dance of the seven veils – each veil heightening the excitement, the anticipation that Herod feels, until (silly old fool that he is) he rashly promises her whatever she might ask for. And, working to her mother’s instructions, she demands the head of the Baptist.
Now the backstory to this scene – so beloved of the epic film-makers – is that Herod had seduced and married his brother’s wife, Herodias. When John began his public ministry in the desert of Judea, he was a pretty uncompromising, hell and damnation sort of preacher. Not a comfortable or comforting message at all. He rather laboured the point about all the wicked and un-holy things that were rife in the society of his day. He pulled no punches – and yet the people flocked to hear him and seemed to be won over by his arguments – at any rate, plenty of them underwent baptism by John in the chilly waters of the Jordan in the hope of gaining salvation for their souls. Even Jesus came to the desert to listen to John and be baptised….
But John had preached repentance not just for the ordinary people. He had a real go at the establishment too. Soldiers, tax-collectors – even the King himself. Herod was given a dressing down in public for his private life and told he was “living in sin”. Kings tend not to like being treated that way – their wives even less so. And so Herodias determined that she would have her revenge, but Herod was enough of a politician to know that he could not kill a man just for pointing out what was undoubtedly the truth – especially when that man had a certain public following. So John was arrested and imprisoned, but might have stayed there many more years…
Until the night of that fateful party and That dance. And a promise made in public, in front of all Herod’s influential guests. He could not back down without losing face – and so a man dies at the behest, so it would seem, of a young girl with apparently blood-thirsty tastes.
I rather wonder what the girls in these stories thought of the men and their rash promises? Did Rachel feel as keen on Jacob as he was on her? Did she secretly want to keep her sister Leah with her for company, rather than face setting off alone to a strange place and family with her husband Jacob? Did Salome really know what she was asking for and was she as manipulative as her mother? Using the lust of an ageing king to satisfy the revenge of her beloved mother … Presumably Salome was Herod’s neice – the daughter of the husband her mother had rejected in favour of Herod .. it all gets very complicated!
Well whatever the human feelings and reactions of our characters in these stories, I think we are meant to focus on how God uses these human stories within his plans for the whole of humanity.
Jacob is to become the great patriarch of the Jewish people. His twelve sons will eventually found the twelve great tribes of Israel – indeed his own name will be changed in the process. But in order for that to be achieved at a time when childbirth was a risky and hazardous business – at least for women (!) he needs several wives to accomplish it. And so he will acquire Leah (and her maid Zilpah); and the beloved Rachel (and her maid Bilhah).
And in the New Testament, John is a necessary character. He begins by leaping in the womb, before his birth, in recognition of the child that his mother Elizabeth’s cousin Mary is carrying. His role is to be the herald – the one who goes before the king, preparing the crowd for the one yet to come.
He gets people into a receptive frame of mind – he preaches a message of salvation through baptism and repentance, so that when Jesus begins his public ministry, people are excited and looking for the Messiah. But had John remained at large, there could have been a problem. He too had plenty of followers, disciples, flocking to him in the wilderness.
But the message Jesus wanted to bring was not his. Jesus did not advocate separating oneself away from the world – for the world was God’s too. Jesus wanted his followers to engage with the world and purify it from the inside – not the outside. So John’s teaching had to subside as Jesus’ ministry grew.
Indirectly Herod’s murderous action – first in promising Salome her heart’s desire, and then in delivering the head of the Baptist, ensured that John’s followers would melt away.
John has an honoured place in the New Testament – somewhere between the great prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the Saints of the NT. The story of his death comes sandwiched between the description of Jesus sending his disciples out to preach and heal on their own and then coming back together to witness the feeding of the 5000 – when Jesus lays down his claim to be a new Moses for his people – just as John was hailed as a new Elijah.
God uses our human character and our human nature to fulfil his purposes. From the most unlikely material, he creates a chosen people to show to his world a better way of life, of living. From poor peasant stock he creates his chosen One to show to his world the very best of human life and human living.
So maybe, even when we cannot see how the plot will work its way out, we may yet be surprised at how God can be at work in all of our lives. Taking the most unpromising, unlikely characters and nature, and yet weaving of them something wonderful and unexpected. And that is what keeps us fascinated to find out, in our life and the part we play in God’s story – what happens next!?