The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
There’s an axiom that Lutheran scholars use when reading and studying the Scripture: even when a text doesn’t talk directly about Jesus, it is still and always about Jesus. In today’s Gospel reading, Mark invites us to contrast and to compare Jesus with two other biblical personalities: Herod the king, and John the Baptist. We know the story of Herod and John, and we know how that story ends. Wicked King Herod will have faithful John the Baptist’s head on a platter before the reading is out. But in the process of telling this story, this grisly story, Mark teaches us something else, a lesson that is often overlooked in this true story. We learn to distinguish between two kinds of kingdoms: the kingdom of this world, and the kingdom of God on this earth. In essence, this is a text teaching us something about the nature of the two kingdoms, through which both God and the devil work.
Antipas had the title of tetrarch. He was the ruler of a meager section, one-fourth, of the kingdom of his father, Herod the Great. Herod the Great had four sons. When he died, they divided up the kingdom of Herod the Great, which was rather substantial, into four smaller sections. Antipas got the one in which Galilee was positioned. Yet Mark calls him “king” throughout the entire passage today. Herod Antipas — King Herod, by the way, never conferred on Antipas the title of king. But here Mark does it five times in this pericope. Mark uses the title here as an artful presentation, inviting the contrast of a king of this world, compared and contrasted with the King, Jesus Christ. Jesus is the only other person in the entire Gospel of Mark that gets the title of “King.” In chapter 15, during the Passion narrative, Jesus is referred to or called the King six times. As for Herod, he was a worldly ruler who lived in opposition to the reign and to the kingdom of God. Jesus, on the other hand, is the King who brings with Him the kingdom of God and the reign of God. And as Christians, we are called to pick a path: a path in which we walk like the world, or a path in which we walk in the kingdom of our Lord. We’re called to follow Him, that is, to follow the path of the King of kings and the Lord of lords. We are to follow Jesus, even if living under the reign of Christ, in His Word, means that the rest of the old sinful world, the kingdoms of this world, persecute us, reject us. Colossians 1:13 tells us: He, namely Christ, “has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son.” There you go: two kingdoms. One of sin and darkness and death. The other of Christ, forgiveness of sins, and life eternal.
The New Testament makes it clear that there is a kingdom of this world, which has its own king, the devil, and the kingdom of God on earth, which has its own King, the Son of God, Jesus the Christ. The question for you and every Christian is: which kingdom do we conform to the most? Which one manifests itself in thought, words, and deeds, as we go through our week? What values, what thinking, what entanglements most shape and influence us to think and to do as we think and do? Herod Antipas — in fact, all the Herods: Herod the Great, and Antipas, Agrippa, Archelaus — displayed values of their own, and values of their own present age. And the present age, the world in which we live, is an evil age. That’s exactly what the biblical text teaches. That’s Galatians 1:3–4: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father.” As many of you know, I returned from Colorado, that class, with at least one pearl of wisdom from Dr. Hahn. He had a lot, but I limited in my notes. And he said, the very first line of the class, the opening, first day: the principal duty of a baptized Christian, from the moment that they’re baptized, is to survive this present evil age. Then he started citing statistics, which show very, very few of the baptized survive this present evil age. Rather than conform to the will and the way of God, to the words of God, to learn what Christians are supposed to say and do and think, and how we are to relate to the rest of this world and to the church, why, we fail miserably as a people. We’re bound for our own extinction, as a matter of fact, unless something changes.
In the Gospel lesson this morning, Herod knows but defies the clear Law of God and the commandments about taking his brother’s wife and marrying her and making her his wife. I’m very confident that Antipas thought that he was following his heart, that he deserved such attractive and pleasant company, because he was, after all, a kind of king, a patriarch. Herod did what people do all the time, and then called it virtuous. He served himself and his own desires, and was unconcerned about the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, or God’s will. He was all about himself, instead of those whom he had been called, by various vocations, to serve. “Me first. Everybody else is a tool to get what I want.” That was Herod, and all the Herods. Herod built a palace to live in for himself, and he built a city, the city of Tiberias, and he built them both in such a way that they were copies of the city of Rome and the palace of Caesar. He concerned himself with fitting in and conforming to Roman culture, the culture which he admired so much. He concerned himself with power and prestige. And that’s illustrated by the invitation list to his own birthday party. Verse 21: on his birthday, he gave a banquet for his nobles and his military commanders and the leading men of Galilee. He was all about hanging with the elite and serving the elite, because the elite would serve him. Herod, like so many of us, wanted to be liked by that elite, by those peers. And while pretending to be large and in charge, he caves in to the will of his stepdaughter, his wife, and some of the nobles. He’s deeply concerned about upholding his own honor, which is done by upholding his own words, which is done by upholding his promise. He makes a promise that he should not have made, and certainly should not have kept. For when he made it, and when he kept it, he broke the commandments: Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. He broke them fundamentally. And it all started with coveting, and thinking like the rest of the world. He prided himself on keeping his word over God’s Word. So he grants the request to his stepdaughter and his wife, as a way of saving face in front of the elite. He orders the beheading of John the Baptist. Herod Antipas, his guests, his stepdaughter, and his wife embody the thinking and the values and the behavior of the Roman Empire, and of all the pagan empires of the day. Which means he values the opinion of the devil himself, and the old sinful nature, that is the king of this present age.
Jesus, on the other hand, embodies the values of a contradictory kingdom: the kingdom of God, of His Heavenly Father. Jesus lives in perfect obedience to the commandments, to the whole will and the whole way of God, His Heavenly Father. Herod lives in earthly splendor. Jesus, on the other hand, lives in humility: born in a manger, grows up in a tiny little town that hardly anybody paid attention to, has no place to rest His head, as He says to His disciples at one point. He associates with sinners and outcasts, while Herod associates with nobles and military leaders and religious and political elites of the territory of Galilee. Herod acts in such a way as to avoid public embarrassment. Jesus is mocked by the public as He is crucified. And although the king was very sorry, verse 26, yet because of his oaths and because of his dinner guests, he was unwilling to refuse her, namely the stepdaughter. Jesus submits to the will of His Heavenly Father and endures scorning and humiliation. “Not My will, but Thy will be done” is Jesus’ disposition. Herod is an agent of death, beheading a man known to be from God. Jesus is God, and He came into the world to give eternal life, and create a new heaven and a new earth on the last day. Jesus doesn’t use His power to overthrow the plan to kill Him, but submits to death, so that all sinners, you and me included, would live on, and survive past our baptism, our confirmation, and our early adulthood, well into our old age, to live eternally, to survive eternal. Colossians 1:4 — Christ, who gave Himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, did so according to the will of our God and Father.
We are called to follow King Jesus, to conform to the values of the kingdom of heaven, which are in the biblical text, and to live eternally in the kingdom of God. St. Paul urged Christians in the city of Rome, saying thusly: “Do not be conformed to this world.” That is, don’t act like the rest of your neighbors, who don’t know anything about the Christian faith, even though they may call themselves Christians too. We ought not to think like them, to act like them, to vote like them, to spend money like them, to prioritize like them. We are called to be different. It’s been given to us to be different. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what the will of God is.” You’re supposed to be finding out what is good and acceptable and perfect. You’re supposed to be going after the finer things in the Christian life, the noble things, the honorable things — not honorable and noble in the way that the world calls honor and nobility, but in humility and in true faith, trusting Christ. To be a citizen of the kingdom of heaven is essentially to take up our cross and follow Jesus. And what does it mean to take up the cross? It means two fundamental things. First, it means repentance. That’s what taking up one’s cross means. It means acknowledging our need for the cross, for Christ. We never outgrow the cross. We never outgrow the crucifixion. We never leave it behind. It’s always there before us. Sorrow over sin, and trusting in Christ, is repentance. And that’s what John preached, and that’s what Jesus preached. John the Baptist came proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And Jesus said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel.” And He sent out His disciples, 70, 72, and 12, all at different times, telling them to go out and to preach repentance for salvation. And they went out and proclaimed that people should repent. Mark 6:12. John confronted the specific sin of adultery with Herod and Herodias, where John had been saying to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” And Herodias had a grudge against him and wanted to put him to death. And she got her wish.
Christians are people who live in two worlds, but we’re truly only a citizen of one of them. We’ve been taken from the other. Philippians 3:19–21: their, meaning citizens of this world, end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body, by the power that enables Him even to subject all things to Himself. It is true what we sing in that one hymn we all really like. I’m going to make it plural: we are but strangers here. Heaven is our home. We are strangers. Heaven is where our citizenship truly belongs. But as we await our home, and while we’re in this evil place, the Word of God is calling us to repent of our worldly thinking, speaking, and acting, as if we are still children of the devil. Our values and priorities are supposed to be the values and priorities of the kingdom, consistent with the reign and the values of the Lord God Himself, which He’s given to us in the biblical text, and which is embodied on our behalf and lived out in our stead in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. To reject the clear, revealed Word of God and the will of God is to stand with King Herod. To reject the clear and revealed Word and will of God is to stand against the reign of God the Heavenly Father in our lives, in the lives of the church: a light on a hill, extinguished by our behavior. The one who calls you to repent is the same one who gave you His life as a ransom, to redeem you out of your sin, death, and this present evil age.
But to be a citizen of heaven is to follow the way of the cross. And the way of the cross means rejection to the world. In the case of John the Baptist, that rejection took the form of arrest, execution by beheading, and the burial of John the Baptist. And the arrest, execution, and burial of John the Baptist merely foreshadows the arrest, the crucifixion, and the burial of Jesus Christ. John was arrested and bound. Jesus would be arrested and bound. John was executed. Jesus would be executed. John’s disciples took his body away and laid it in a tomb. Jesus’ followers took His body away and laid it in a tomb. Those who follow Jesus, who speak the truth regarding moral and spiritual issues — when they do that, they will indeed face the second aspect of taking up one’s cross and following Christ. They will face mocking and rejection by the world. That includes family members and friends and relatives who disagree. Disagreeing is one thing. Mocking is another. But they both end up in the same spot. Mark is emphasizing that all who preach the same Word, and who live in the pattern of the reign of heaven, will be in danger as long as they are strangers and pilgrims in this world. This, though, is exactly what we are called to do. It seems foolish to the world, but Jesus says the opposite is true. In His kingdom, the one who wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will save it, through the Gospel.
“Why be John the Baptist?” the world will ask, “when one’s head can be severed from your shoulders? Why not enjoy the comforts of this world, the comforts of Rome?” The pleasures of Herod and his kingdom are temporary. The gifts, though, of eternal life, the forgiveness of sins, a heavenly home — they are, in fact, forever. Herod Antipas eventually made a journey to Rome. He went there to beg Caesar for the title of king. He was refused. Instead, because of his pride and his behavior, seeking the spot of Caesar, he was exiled and disgraced. But a Roman official, a Roman government official, did in fact grant Jesus a title. He gave Him the title “King of the Jews.” I’m, of course, referring to Pilate. He became the King of the Jews at His crucifixion, foreshadowing the day when He would show all who have ever been that He is indeed truly King, where every knee would bow, in heaven and on the earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Those who follow the way of the cross, repenting of their sin and trusting in Christ, will be vindicated in the end days, as they stand with their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and will share an eternal life in the fullness of the only world that will exist after Judgment Day, namely your heavenly mansion, where your sins have all been forgiven, washed away, and forgotten, and you live in pure holiness, innocence, righteousness, and blessedness, forever and ever, in the only one Kingdom there is. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.