Mark 6:14-29, from Proper 10 (15).
I bet you can’t name all the villains in Mark’s account of the conspiracy that led to John the Baptist’s grisly execution. Ready? OK, go!
There’s Herod, of course, who was responsible for arresting and jailing John. And as the story unfolds, we learn that Herod did so to placate his wife, Herodias, who – scandalously – is also the wife of Herod’s brother Philip. She has harbored a death wish against John ever since John pointed out to Herod that that Herod’s marriage to her was unlawful. But Herod fears, respects and even kind of likes John and thus protects him from Herodias.
Until, that is, Herod’s birthday bash, when the story’s third villain, Herod’s daughter (or Herodias’ daughter, depending on your translation) so thoroughly wows Herod and his guests with her dancing that Herod swears before a room full of courtiers and big shots to give her anything she wants, up to half of his kingdom. Prompted by her delightful mother, the girl asks for John’s head on a platter. Trapped, Herod obliges.
The degree of blame apportioned to the daughter in this hideous conspiracy expanded rapidly in the years after as people – men, really – relied on conjecture, imagination and outright fantasizing to fill in the substantial amount of blank space in Mark’s story. We don’t even know the girl’s name fore sure. Neither Mark’s nor Matthew’s accounts name her, and the only “Salome” who appears in the Gospels is a woman who, in Mark’s version, belongs to a trio of women who witness Jesus’ death and venture to his tomb on Easter morning. “Salome,” derived from the Hebrew word for “peace,” was a common name, and the “Salome” in Mark’s Gospel is certainly not girl who received John’s head from Herod. The Jewish historian Josephus mentions that Herodias and her first husband had a daughter named Salome, and the girl in Mark’s narrative clearly defers to Herodias, so odds are the girl and Salome are the same person. But Herod could have had other daughters, including daughters by Herodias.
Even if the name is wrong, though, history and culture have given us far greater distortions about what happened at Herod’s party that night. In Mark’s text, the Greek word used to refer to the girl, korasion, is the same word the text uses to refer to Jairus’ 12-year-old daughter in Chapter 5. But this fact didn’t stop artists throughout subsequent ages from depicting her as a full-grown young woman and, increasingly, a seductress, who aroused Herod with a striptease. In Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, the daughter develops an unrequited crush on John and, in a climactic scene, kisses his severed head in a sort of “I’ll have you one way or another” moment. More recent manifestations of this hypersexualized “Salome” include her depiction as a seductive, manipulative vampire in the HBO series True Blood. As Marg Mowczko convincingly argues, the stories in Mark and Matthew, taken at face value, minus all the freight added by subsequent cultures, may depict Herod as a father delighted, not aroused, by the playfulness, not the eroticism, of a tween daughter, not a grown-up temptress.
But getting back to my dare about your ability to name all the villains in the story: Have we identified all of them? I don’t think so. Stretching things a bit, you might indict the “soldier of the guard” whom Herod tasked with fetching John’s head, or Herod’s party guests, who watched this train wreck unfold without raising a single recorded objection.
But there remains a hidden villain, camouflaged behind the little-noticed fact that none of the people mentioned above would have brought about John’s death without the involvement of at least one of the others. Herod probably wouldn’t have arrested John had it not been for Herodias’ hatred. Herodias had no opportunity to slay John until the daughter’s dance provided one. The daughter’s request could not have trapped Herod were it not for a political structure that put unchecked power over life and death in the hands of a man given to acting on impulse, and Herod could have backtracked on his rash promise to his daughter had it not been for the social ramifications of reneging before his guests.
The hidden villain, in short, is the systemic evil that unified these individual moral failures in a way that cost John his life, and history’s evolution of the daughter into the chief cause of John’s demise has perhaps served, among other things, as a way of not talking about systemic evil’s reality. We like our systems. We often recognize their flaws, but we understand that, for most of us and for most of the time, they protect us, provide for us, and give us a measure of control over what happens to us. If the occasional prophet, peasant, black man, Native American, woman, gets caught and crushed in the gears, well, that’s just unfortunate, and there’s usually a Salome somewhere whom we can blame. Doing such is much easier, and far less costly, than implicating a whole system.
In one of the other lectionary texts for this week, God gives the prophet Amos a vision of a wall and a plumb line. Most translations indicate that the wall had been built straight, a property verified by the plumb line. God then drops the same plumb line among his people, the people of Israel, showing how crooked they are not so much as individuals but as an entire nation. Judgment of your whole system is coming, God says, a message Amos gets in trouble for repeating. But if you’re the type of Christian who relishes the idea of God’s judging your nation, you might consider taking a deeper dive into the systemic evils Amos pointed out. To give you a hint of what you’ll be in for, consider that when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in his “I Have a Dream” speech that, “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he was alluding to Amos 5.
Maybe another reason we don’t like to talk about systemic evil is that it seems there is nothing practical we can do about it. Realistically, what can a single brick to do about the whole wall’s being out of square? Common sense suggests not much. Better to mind your own business, keep your own toes on the line, serve where you are planted, and all of that. Stick your neck out like John did, and you, too, just might get your head cut off for no good reason.
But be brave. Amos was just one brick in the wall. So was John. So were the disciples. So was King. It’s not easy being a prophet. But it’s not hopeless, either.
