It’s All in the Presentation

On December 16, 2019, a panicked mother called the Bullitt County, Kentucky, 911 Center. She was reporting that a man had stolen her car with her baby in the back seat. “Please find this bastard!” she told the police dispatcher. “Want his head on a platter!” Soon police apprehended and arrested the man they charged with kidnapping and auto theft (for starters) for carjacking the woman’s SUV with her 13-month-old child inside, but not before the man led them on a 100-mph chase, ending in a crashed vehicle.

“I want his head on a platter!” This is a demand for punishment that is certainly swift, certain, and severe. It is also a wish, intended or not, to subject the offender to a punishment that is humiliating, degrading, and commensurate with the worst possible crime. The phrase appears to originate in our gospel text for this week.

The unnamed girl consults with Herodias, her mother, regarding the nature of her request to Antipas. “What shall I ask?” she inquires. “The head of John the Baptizer,” her mother replies. The girl immediately re-enters the banquet hall “with haste,” returns to the “king” and says, “I want you to give me at once upon a platter the head of John the Baptizer.” The girl apparently adds the urgency of the request and the manner of presentation on her own.

Perhaps it’s a small detail, but it is intriguing. It’s worth spending some time with Richard Swanson’s comments on this matter in order to absorb the grisly symbolism of the scene. Up to the moment when the girl issues her request, Swanson writes, “it was possible to read the scene as a contest between Herod and Herodias, a contest that was conducted on the unwitting body of a little girl. She is sent in to dance,” Swanson continues, “she is sent back to Herod, and John is executed” (page 192).

Then she adds her own flourish to the demand. “Why the innovation on her part?” Swanson asks. Perhaps she’s “getting into the spirit” of the event, enjoying the contest, “and may be adding humiliating details to the ritual of execution” (page 193). This is the disturbing description of the additional instructions. “John’s head is brought out as if it were the next course in the banquet,” Swanson notes.

“If this is the implication,” he continues, “then she has just rung all the rituals that go with ceremonial cannibalism. John, the enemy,” Swanson notes, “is to be treated as food” (page 193). Hurtado concurs with this description. “The gruesome request presents the daughter as adding a touch of evil humor to her mother’s suggestion. On a platter,” he argues, “makes the head of John a kind of meal course at this wicked banquet” (page 98).

The other alternative, Swanson suggests, is that the girl does not wish to deal with “the mess that would be made if a bleeding severed head were to be brought into the room. A plate would contain the gore,” he notes, “she might hope in her innocence” (page 193). Which is the right perspective, Swanson wonders, and answers, “Yes.”

Swanson notes that we might find some eucharistic foreshadowing in this story. Jesus will say to his disciples, “This is my body for you.” The fact that the account is placed shortly before the Feeding of the Five Thousand in Mark’s gospel gives some additional support to this suggestion. It is also a grim reminder that when we hear the glowing reports from The Twelve as they return from their missionary journeys that the price of success might well be homicidal homage from the rulers of this world.

Why does Mark emphasize this detail – the head on the platter – in the account? Kraemer suggests that early Christians wanted “to refute not simply the suggestion that John the Baptist has been resurrected but more precisely the possibility that Jesus is John raised from the dead by telling a narrative in which the body of John is desecrated in a manner that makes it impossible to resurrect it, at least physically, by severing the head from the body, and by leaving the head with Herodias while burying the corpse” (page 341).

We need to take a moment to remember ancient views of the nature of resurrection. Suffice it to say, Jews of the time expected that whole bodies were required for the resurrection at the end of the age. That’s why it was so important for bodies to be buried intact and for the bones of those bodies to remain in one collection even after the flesh had decayed away. It’s also why it’s noteworthy that the writer of Mark uses the word for “corpse” in Mark 6:29 rather than the word for “body.” John was not entombed intact and therefore could not be resurrected, in the view of the ancients.

Kraemer’s view depends on reading Antipas’ statement that John whom he beheaded had been raised as more of a question – “Has John, whom I beheaded, been raised?” This is a possible interpretation of the text and the one that Luke takes for granted in Luke 9:7-9. Kraemer argues that the writer of Mark is not wondering why John was executed but rather why John was executed by decapitation (page 342).

Kraemer argues that the narrative need of the writer of Mark brings about this story in the gospel account, not any actual historical involvement in the execution by Herodias and her daughter. That may or may not be the case, but it doesn’t really impact the import of the story in the text itself.

Kraemer’s concluding point in the article is well-taken, however. This story has developed a life of its own in later Christian (and secular) literature as a convenient trope “to vilify these women far beyond anything in the gospels themselves.” This portrayal suggests, he argues, “that subsequent Christians have been particularly fond of the representation of voluptuous, seductive, evil Jewish women, who may serve, perhaps, as a counterpoint to the virtuous and generally chaste women who attend Jesus at the cross and at his burial, and witness to his resurrection” (page 349).

Part of the import of this story, according to Kraemer, is to set up an intentional contrast between Antipas and Jesus. “In Mark,” he writes, “Antipas’s execution of John is represented as the intentional choice not of a ruler whose decisions are grounded in the judgment and self-control appropriate to masculinity but of a man fall victim to his own appetites and desires, something many ancient writers understood as a feminine frailty” (346). Antipas surrenders to his base, animal nature and loses his male honor as actor, agent, and author of his own fate.

“My primary purpose here,” Kraemer notes, “is to suggest that concerns about gender may play some additional role in the formation of a narrative that implicates Herodias and her daughter in the death of John, through their exercise of indirect power and the manipulation of a weak, emasculate ruler whose lack of sufficient masculine self-control enables Herodias to accomplish her destructive (female) desires” (page 347). There’s no extra credit for long sentence in journal articles, but perhaps there should be.

Malina and Rohrbaugh suggest that the dancing itself is a sign that Antipas is a dishonorable and therefore weak ruler. “Dancing, most commonly done at weddings, is often quite erotic and usually done only for extended kin,” they argue. “Here officers and the leading men of Galilee are present. In non-elite eyes, honorable males would not allow a female family member to perform such a display; their failure to prevent her from doing so pegs them as shameless.”

“It is also shameful for any man to be bewitched by the proverbial sensuality of a woman in public,” they continue. “Since the maximum a woman could receive was only half of what a man was worth, Herod offered everything he could. The oath made by Herod was made in front of guests. He was therefore,” they conclude, “honor-bound to keep his word. Had he not done so, his officers would no longer have trusted him” (pages 216-217). Antipas was in control of no part of the situation.

At the time of the story, honorable women were expected to remain indoors and out of view in order to retain their purity and virtue. “In the royal households, for the most part, no one was greatly troubled over these customs,” Jeremias writes (page 361-362). Instead, in the royal households of the time, it was typical for the women to exercise influence, control, and power with and sometimes in spite of their husbands. Especially when it comes to the Herodians, this story has the ring of truth about it.

For the writer of Mark’s gospel, this story accomplishes several things. First, John is “Elijah,” not the Messiah. We, as readers, know that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. Second, John cannot have been resurrected since his body was not intact. Resurrection is for Jesus, not for anyone else in the story. Third, we can see what a weak pretender to the throne looks like in comparison with Jesus, the real King. This comparison foreshadows a similar contrast between Jesus and Pilate in the passion account in the Gospel of Mark.

Fourth, we can see the depths of human cruelty expressed in the careless privilege of the elites and the real risks involved when one is perceived as a threat to that privilege. I find several resonances between this account and accounts of lynchings in the United States, both historically and in the present moment. More on that, perhaps, downstream.

References and Resources

https://headtopics.com/us/i-want-his-head-on-a-platter-kentucky-mom-tells-911-dispatcher-of-suspect-who-took-her-baby-in-ca-10235366.

Jennifer A. Glancy , ” Unveiling Masculinity : The Construction of Gender in Mark 6:17-29,” Biblnt 2 (1994): 34-50.

Hurtado, Larry. Mark (Understanding the Bible Commentary Series). Grand Rapids, MI.: Baker Books, 1989.

Jeremias, Joachim. Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus. Philadelphia, PA.: Fortress Press, 1969.

Kraemer, R. (2006). Implicating Herodias and Her Daughter in the Death of John the Baptizer: A (Christian) Theological Strategy? Journal of Biblical Literature, 125(2), 321-349. doi:10.2307/27638363.

Malina, Bruce, and Rohrbaugh, Richard L. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. Kindle Edition.

Sandmel, S. “Herod (Family).” Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 2. Nashville, TN.: Abingdon Press, 1962. Pages 585-594.

Swanson, Richard. Provoking the Gospel of Mark: A Storyteller’s Commentary Year B. Cleveland, OH.: The Pilgrim Press, 2005.

So Much for Home Field Advantage (Mark 6:1-6)

Leaving home is hard enough. But it’s nothing compared to coming back. Thomas Wolfe may have claimed the phrase, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” as a book title. But he was naming an experience as old as human connections. Leaving home means rejecting to some degree, whether we wish it or not, the values, priorities, and practices that make “home” what it is. When and if we return, home has changed. And so have we.

This is a pressing issue for many as family conversations have become more political, more fraught, more prone to explosive outcomes. Do an internet search on how to survive difficult holiday conversations with family members. The returned results will number in the tens of millions. Producing advice on such survival has become a literary genre and a publishing bonanza – especially for those prone to the listicles, the “Ten Ways to Survive Thanksgiving with Your Crazy Relatives” sorts of things.

So, perhaps, we should not be surprised that leaving and returning are fraught moments for Jesus as well. The home folks expect the returning hero to support the values and people that raised and nurtured him. They expect to get a certain amount of credit (known in sociological terms as “honor”) for the success he has become. They don’t expect him to be an irritant, a disagreeable and critical outsider, or an ungrateful snot who has forgotten where he came from.

Why does this story appear in Mark’s account? I was quite taken by Leif Vaage’s 2009 article in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly, “An Other Home: Discipleship in Mark as Domestic Asceticism.” Perhaps that article will spark some thoughts for you as well. Vaage wants to make and then expand on four points: (1) following Jesus requires strenuous and intentional effort; (2) following Jesus is “anti – (conventional) family;” (3) the Twelve ultimately fail as disciples, both individually and together, and (4) the successful and exemplary Jesus followers in Mark are the little people, the minor characters in the narrative (page 741).

Vaage describes asceticism not as a superficial renunciation of sensual pleasures but rather as a rejection of the normal world as normative and satisfying and an embrace of a way of life that finds real satisfaction by living against the grain of the normal world – finding a better or larger life (page 743). He argues that following Jesus requires a “domestic asceticism” – a leaving home as norm in order to find the alternative and then a return to that home to critique and change it from within.

He proposes that it is “Mark’s conviction that the proper and most effective way to enter the kingdom of God is by redoing life at home. This,” he continues, “may be the evangelist’s most enduring challenge to us” (page 744). If that is, in fact, part of Mark’s agenda, then this gospel is the most timely and relevant tract for the times we Christians could have at this moment. And the reading from Mark 6, landing as it does on July 4, could be nuclear in its explosive potential in the pulpit.

“One of the more obvious ways in which discipleship, in Mark, entails serious effort at significant social cost,” Vaage writes, “is the break it requires with ordinary family life. Following Jesus,” he observes, “means, first, leaving home” (page 746). The first disciples abandon their families and their family businesses. Jesus identifies his own family, not as those who are biologically connected to him, but rather as those who do the will of God. In our reading this week, Jesus rejects the limiting identity imposed on him by the home folks and describes himself as a prophet dishonored by them.

The project of Jesus, in Mark, is not at home in the ancient Mediterranean world of normal social relations, including the patriarchal household,” Vaage writes. “Moreover, it does not seek a place within this world,” he continues. “The goal of discipleship is not enhanced participation in the way things are; neither does it seek reform of this world or any other possible improvement. Instead,” he argues, “the first order of business for Jesus and his disciples is deep withdrawal: deliberate dissociation from so-called ordinary social reality” (pages 748-749).

It is difficult to understand how the Jesus in Mark’s gospel could be regarded as “pro-family.” As Vaage notes, the rhetoric of Mark’s gospel sees the conventional family as part of the world’s “business as usual.” The business of the kingdom is to see the world in a new way and to trust in the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, more than in any conventional arrangements of life.

The real disciples in Mark’s gospel, then, are the edgy people – the minor characters who appear on the edges of the narrative and live on the edges of society. They make single appearances in the story and “get it” right away – in contrast to the Family and to the Twelve. The edgy people are healed, saved, and restored. They are commended for their faith. They get permission, at least in the case of the Gerasene demoniac, to tell the story publicly and fully. The edgy people include pushy women who are not punished but rather are praised for their initiative and courage.

All these edgy people act “shamelessly,” to use Vaage’s description. They are guilty of “breaking with indicated cultural roles of reticence and social reserve or distance…for the sake of finding, through Jesus, a better life” (page 750). The people who stick to the cultural script, such as the folks in Nazareth, aren’t able to find that better life through Jesus, because of their hardness of heart. The Twelve are in danger of such an outcome as well and seem to have failed at the end of the gospel account.

“In summary, discipleship in Mark is, finally, not a saga of effort in vain or tragic striving plus forgiveness,” Vaage writes. “In fact, discipleship, in Mark, requires, first, that one break all customary family ties. Following Jesus is initially an act of total renunciation,” he suggests, “unless, of course, one already is a social nobody.” But what happens after one has taken that initial step?

Discipleship, in Mark, Vaage proposes, “is not homeless.” Instead, Jesus and the Twelve spend large amounts of the first ten chapters of the gospel precisely in homes. But everything has changed. “After one has stepped away from the demands and privileges of conventional social life (including the structures and obligations of ordinary kinship,” he continues, “following Jesus, in Mark, next entails returning to the same social terrain to live there otherwise” (page 753). Notice how many times Jesus sends the edgy people home rather than allowing them to follow him on the road to Jerusalem.

Thus, discipleship, in Mark, according to Vaage, “is an alternate domesticity” (page 756). In Mark, disciples must go home again. Disciples leave in order to enter a new world of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Disciples then take on the discipline of returning home to disrupt the conventional structures of life with that Good News.

Jesus is not in the business of composing listicles for how to survive contentious family gatherings. Instead, he tells stories about how to leave and then come back to piss off the home folks.

At least, that’s how it appears in our reading for this week. Vaage imagines the “ideal disciple” addressed by Mark’s account. “In this scenario, the successful disciple first forsakes his or her family of origin as well as other customary affiliations and concerns in order to ‘go after’ Jesus,” Vaage argues. “A process of unlearning is thereby set in motion, during which many standard conceptions and usual expectations – regarding, for example, the nature of salvation, social authority, the Messiah, and so on – are challenged and abandoned, even as other unfamiliar, traditionally unauthorized, socially liminal persons and experiences serve to teach the alternate way of life identified by Mark with entrance into the kingdom of God” (page 760).

Perhaps we are called to disrupt the settled structures and assumptions of our biological, church, and social “families.” I can do that, but I don’t often do it for the sake of the gospel. I’m just difficult. Doing it for the sake of the gospel is an ascetical discipline, if Vaage is right, and not merely an exercise in self-justification.

I’m still working on that one.

References and Resources

Bruce Malina; Richard L. Rohrbaugh. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. Kindle Edition.

MOLONEY, F. (2001). Mark 6:6b-30: Mission, the Baptist, and Failure. The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 63(4), 647-663. Retrieved June 23, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43727251.

VAAGE, L. (2009). An Other Home: Discipleship in Mark as Domestic Asceticism. The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 71(4), 741-761. Retrieved June 25, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43726614.

Walker, B. (2016). Performing Miracles: Discipleship and the Miracle Tradition of Jesus. Transformation, 33(2), 85-98. Retrieved June 23, 2021, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/90008863

Wright, N. T.. Mark for Everyone (The New Testament for Everyone) . Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.

Context and Structure

The lectionary committee, alas, has taken texts from two different sections of Mark’s gospel and put them into one reading. Mark 6:1-6 is the conclusion of a section that begins in Mark 3 (either verses 1-6 or 7-13, depending on the commentator). Mark 6:7-13 begins a new section that may run through the end of chapter 8.

In addition, Mark 6:7-13 may be the first part of another Markan sandwich, including the sending of the disciples and the death of John the Baptist. Therefore, in our reading, we get an incomplete version of that sending and may have to fill in the results through our sermons in order to get a fuller picture.

Indeed, it is difficult to understand the discipleship mission in Mark in depth without a brief mention of the execution of John the Baptist. We will return to this text in more detail next week, but it’s helpful to read it now. Herod Antipas is convinced that Jesus is John the Baptist back from the dead to haunt and taunt him. This allows Mark to insert a flashback reporting what happened to John – an event that was hinted at briefly earlier in Mark’s account.

Just for clarity, let’s remember that one of the main issues for Mark’s account is Jesus’ identity. We get a preview of the conversation in Mark 8 as we listen in on the panicked conclusions of Herod Antipas. The same speculations that later come from the disciples now echo in Herod’s council chambers. But Herod’s conclusion is clear. This is the beheaded John, back to make his life a living hell.

“For the reader,” Moloney (2001) writes, “the issue has been raised of the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus, and with it the awareness that as the Baptist went to death, so also must Jesus.” Perhaps we can see that in the midst of the missionary success of the disciples, the shadow of the cross still looms. Discipleship has both rewards and costs, and the cost is everything.

I can’t help but think about Bonhoeffer’s oft-quoted line. When Jesus calls a person, Bonhoeffer asserts, Jesus bids that one to come and die. “John’s martyrdom not only prefigured Jesus’ death,” Moloney (2001) writes, it also prefigures the death of anyone who would come after him. The one who comes not to be served but to serve is the one who gives his life as a ransom for many. And we who are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection are called to die to self in order to live to Christ.

John’s execution foreshadows a number of elements in Jesus’ suffering and death, as Moloney notes. Both John and Jesus are put to death by rulers who regard them as good and holy men. Both rulers are stark contrasts to the goodness of their victims. Neither John nor Jesus gives in to the pressure either of the crowds or the rulers. The difference, of course, is that John’s tomb was not emptied.

Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the lectionary choice is the impression that the disciples were unqualified successes in their missionary efforts. Moloney (2001) gives a summary of the issue. “The disciples of Jesus, true to the call which comes to them from God, and like the Baptist, are to commit themselves unflinchingly to the mission for which they have been empowered by their association with Jesus,” Moloney writes.

“As with the Baptist, it will cost them no less than everything,” he continues. “Despite the good signs that accompanied the initial response of disciples to Jesus’ call,” he argues, “they show the signs of their inability to accept all the consequences of that call. They return to Jesus,” he concludes, “the source of all they do and say, with whose mission they are privileged to be associated…to tell him everything they have done.”

As Moloney notes, these are the same disciples who panicked in the boat in chapter 4. I would add that they are the ones who can’t figure out who touched Jesus’ garment. They are, perhaps, wondering along with the local folks where Jesus gets his power. Moloney argues that not only can the disciples not yet figure out who Jesus is. They can’t even figure who they are and how they fit into the “power picture.” As Moloney notes, no matter how much short-term success they experience, these are the ones who desert Jesus when things get tough.

“But that is not the end of the story,” Moloney (2001) reminds us. “That can only be found somewhere in Galilee, in a meeting between the risen Lord and the disciples There they will see him,” Moloney continues, “as he promised, despite the failure of everyone in the story…”

We have noted previously that one of Mark’s concerns is Jesus’ identity. Moloney helps us to see that Mark is also concerned with the identity of the disciples and, by extension, the members of the Markan faith community. It seems likely that Mark’s gospel is, in fact, a tool in forming the identity of that faith community in at least a couple of ways.

Walker (2016) argues that this community identity was shaped by participating in the gospel as oral performance of the gospel. That performance reported Jesus’ miracles as a central part of Jesus’ ministry and “that he expected The Twelve and other disciples to carry on the miracle tradition in their mission to Israel and beyond” (page 86). As we noted above, to be a disciple was (and is) to rely on Jesus’ for the authority and power to continue the mission.

All that being said, what are some elements which can tie together the two parts of our reading? One common factor is that both the home folks and the disciples center themselves in their relationship with Jesus. The Nazareth folks are sure that Jesus is “gettin’ above his raisin’,” as the phrase goes in some parts of this country. They are sure his identity and anchoring must come from the home territory. Anything beyond that is suspect.

We will talk further about this in the next section. But the salient point here is that the home folks are convinced that their reality defines Reality. The Nazareth perspective is the definition of normal, rational, and acceptable. They know the True, the Good, and the Beautiful when they see it, because their experience defines all of the above. This Nazareth-centric perspective means that they cannot see Jesus beyond his origins. Nor can they put their trust in him to do the works of the Kingdom among them.

The disciples are apparently sure that they are the ones doing the works of power on their mission. They are like me when we got our first remote control for a television. My dad told me to stomp my foot. The channel on the set “magically” changed. He told me to do it again, and the channel changed again. I was certain that I had developed a channel-changing superpower.

My dad let me figure out reality for myself (which took a bit). Parents and grandparents have engaged in variations of this game, I suspect, for as long as there have been parents and grandparents.

I’m not suggesting that Jesus was messing with the disciples here (although I imagine he did on occasion). Instead, I’m pointing out how easy it is for us to assume that we have the power to make something happen, when in fact that power comes to us from God through Jesus in the Spirit. When good things happen, I want to take the credit for making them happen. When bad things happen, I want God to take the blame.

We know that in Mark’s gospel account, this overreach on the part of the disciples will reach a climax in chapter 8. Jesus describes the necessity of his confrontation with the powers of sin, death, and the devil on the cross. Peter takes him aside to straighten out this troubling line of thought. Jesus names him Satan and identifies the power that seeks to convince us that we are the center, in charge of the universe.

It’s not much of a stretch for us to think about life in our congregations. How easy it is to believe that our local perspective is the definition of what is normal, acceptable, and right. How easy it is for us to treat anything from the outside as perverse. That is also the perspective we have adopted as white people in a cultural where whiteness is centered as normal and worshipped as supreme. The problem in Nazareth and in our white churches is the idolatrous worship of what we think we know for sure.

And we think that we are the ones who will make our lives, our churches, and our history turn out right. We invest so much in finding the right path, program, procedure, or plan to make our congregations grow. As we learned earlier in Mark, most of the time our best strategy is to get ourselves out of the way, out of the center, so the Kingdom can arrive and flourish as God intends. Of course, we really hate that.

The good news is that even though we all respond with such resistance, the Reign of God has come and is growing among us. Even in our childish self-centeredness as disciples, Jesus invites us to come along and to be changed by the journey.

REFERENCES AND RESOURCES:

Bruce Malina; Richard L. Rohrbaugh. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. Kindle Edition.

MOLONEY, F. (2001). Mark 6:6b-30: Mission, the Baptist, and Failure. The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 63(4), 647-663. Retrieved June 23, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43727251

Walker, B. (2016). Performing Miracles: Discipleship and the Miracle Tradition of Jesus. Transformation, 33(2), 85-98. Retrieved June 23, 2021, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/90008863

Wright, N. T.. Mark for Everyone (The New Testament for Everyone) . Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.