A sermon preached by Pastor Lewis Polzin on July 11, 2021 at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on Mark 6:14-29. You may play the audio of the sermon here.
A mostly unedited transcript of the sermon follows the jump:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
The text this morning is from the Gospel according to St. Mark, the 6th chapter:
King Herod heard of it, for Jesus’ name had become known. Some said, “John the Baptist has been raised from the dead. That is why these miraculous powers are at work in him.” But others said, “He is Elijah.” And others said, “He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.” But when Herod heard of it, he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.” For it was Herod who had sent and seized John and bound him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because he had married her. For 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. But she could not, for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he kept him safe. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed, and yet he heard him gladly. But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his nobles and military commanders and the leading men of Galilee. For when Herodias’s daughter came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests. And the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it to you.” And he vowed to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, up to half of my kingdom.” And she went out and said to her mother, “For what should I ask?” And she said, “The head of John the Baptist.” And she came in immediately with haste to the king and asked, saying, “I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.” And the king was exceedingly sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests he did not want to break his word to her. And immediately the king sent an executioner with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison and brought his head on a platter and gave it to the girl, and the girl gave it to her mother. When his disciples heard of it, they came and took his body and laid it in a tomb.
Thus far the text.
My dear friends in Christ,
We have nothing to fear from the world, although the world has much to fear from us. It's true. The world should be very afraid of us, even though it's not. The world should be very afraid of us because we have Christ, who is Lord of all, dwelling within us. And the Lord has promised that he will take his recompense against this world for what they do to His saints. And so when the world sees us, they should see the Christ who has vowed to avenge his saints in this place. But the world doesn't fear us. And that is because the world is very dumb.
It's true. The world does not know what it should know and rejects what it should hold dear. But you have not. The fact that you are here today testifies to the fact that you have within you this Christ, this Christ who will protect you in all things. And that is a very good thing for you because, though we should fear Christ for he is the one who is the judge of the living and the dead, He has promised to have mercy upon you. And so, while we fear him as the judge, we have no fear of judgment. There's a big difference there.
To fear judgment is to think, well, maybe Christ will send me to hell. Maybe I haven't done enough. And the answer to this, of course we know, is you have not done enough, but your Lord has promised not to send you to the place that you deserve, the place that's prepared for the devil and his angels, but has instead promised to welcome you into his kingdom. Not because you've done anything, but because he has done everything.
If you were to fear the judgment of Christ, well, you would at least know what the world does not, but it would show that you have a very weak faith, if you had faith at all. Instead as Christians, we don't fear the judgment. We know that we will be called on the last day to stand before Christ. And he shall declare us righteous, again, not because of the work that we do, but because of the work that he has done for you. Every saint has this hope. Every saint from Adam and Eve, all the way through David, all the way through Amos, all the way through until today has this hope. Now it may not be that every saint was able to testify that the name Jesus is the one that would be given to the Messiah, but from the very beginning, this has always been the hope, that the Lord would come and redeem his own. Every saint, every one, including you, and even John had this hope.
I know sometimes we seem to give John a little bit of a bad rap as he's in prison, right? Herod has imprisoned him. And we don't know all of the reasons why, except of course, that John was preaching against his marriage to his brother’s wife, Herodias. And I know that's always a little weird: Herod married to Herodias, but there it is. And John, languishing in prison sends his disciples to Jesus to say, are you the Christ or should we seek another? And we think, well, maybe John is losing a little bit of his faith here. The other theory of course, is that John is letting his disciples find out for themselves that Jesus is the Christ. It might be a mixture of both. But, I would tell you that John’s faith, as the last prophet of the old Testament is unshakeable. He knows that his Messiah has come and that this Messiah is the Lamb of God who will take away the sins of the world. John's faith was in this.
You see an example of the world then today, as we look at Herod, who kind of, sort of, maybe feared God, but not really. Herod feared the judgment of God more than he feared God himself. You see Herod is a little bit of a mixed bag. We've talked about this before, that Herod is of mixed lineage. He had a little bit of the Gentile in his Jewishness. And for that reason, that is one of the reasons that he was set above all the Jews. Herod the Great, his father, would have been set over all these things as king, even though, of course, he wasn't really a king, because Caesar is king, but that he was given power and authority over this area. He was seen as somebody who, well, he's Jewish enough to rule, but not Jewish enough to rebel. So, Rome enjoyed having this guy in power, but the Jews hated it and couldn’t do anything about it.
And so here he is sitting here in his throne room and seeking all this wisdom of God. He's really no better than the Greeks in this way, seeking all the wisdom that he can attain, to find out what it is that God would demand of him. And really all that he needed to do was to listen to the word of God, which John preached. This is why Herod enjoyed John's preaching even though he was greatly perplexed by it. Herod thought himself a man of faith and but he had no fear in the one who could destroy his soul and his body in hell; he didn’t understand the preaching of John. But then John is murdered. And so, when Herod heard of this Jesus coming onto the scene, he thought back to this man who, he beheaded. John was dead, but he hears of Jesus and he thinks John has come back from the dead. Think about that for a moment. John knew his Scriptures. He was a prophet. And as a man of God, John was preaching about the one who would die and return to life. And so, Herod, who despised God and didn’t know the Scriptures, thought that it must be John who's come back to judge him.
I love the picture of Herod in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s, Jesus Christ Superstar. Of course, the musical is wildly blasphemous, but this is something that I think Weber got close to right. Herod is depicted as this flamboyant character, always getting what he wants, raucously enjoying his power. And we see this play out today, and we see it in Jesus’ trial before His crucifixion. Herod’s basically throwing a party in front of this man who comes to him bound and tied and beaten. But he knows of this Jesus, and since He’s not John, since Herod would have expected John to take recompense on him, Herod had no fear. He might’ve looked at Jesus’ face and studied it, thinking, Do I see John there? Do I see the Baptizer in you? Are you him? No. He’s not. And so he begs of this miracle worker that he would do a sign. If you'll only do these things, I'll set you free. Herod might’ve feared God’s judgment, but he certainly didn’t fear God.
John told him well enough, you're going to go to hell unless you repent of the sin. And Herod should have repented, but he feared his new wife, his sister-in-law and wife, more than God. Herod throws John in prison, and you have to believe John never stopped preaching, maybe not even to Herod himself. It kind of reminds you of Paul, as he would be taken into prison and he would preach to everyone around him, and many would be converted. But John couldn't convert Herod. He was interesting, but he was perplexing.
So it comes to be that Herod throws this great party. And his stepdaughter Salome is dancing. Now we actually know Salome's name from other sources. It's not in the biblical record. It's in the record of Josephus. Josephus was a wonderful historian, but he was a traitor to the Jewish faith. He went over to the Roman side and was giving an account of Israel for the Romans to basically be propaganda, to show why it was okay to kill all of the Jews. Salome would go on to do horrible things, and to think, it all could have begun in this party. Salome is dancing for Herod and all of his leaders and all the leaders throughout Galilee. Salome’s dancing wasn’t for the faint of heart. The implication is that it wasn’t exactly ballet. It's more like what we would call stripping. I mean, give the girl a pole and she would have been on it in the middle of the room. And the idea here is Herod, being drunk, received his stepdaughter into his lap and she got him a little excited. And in his drunken stupor, he decided to say a really, really dumb thing. He would have given away half of his kingdom, at least if it was in his power to do so, to this girl who got him excited, but that's not what Salome asked for. Instead, she goes to her mother, Herodias, who is so incensed at the Baptizer that she says, I want his head on a platter. How grizzly that must have been. You kind of wonder how long she would have kept the head of John the Baptizer. Probably quite a while, just rotting there in the corner of the throne room as a reminder that, you can be about God, but you can't stand in the way of my power. She asks for the Baptist's head and she gets it. John the Baptizer, in true faith, gave his life as a martyr of Christ.
Because the world didn't fear God, the world is dumb. The World doesn't know what it should fear. Instead it fears that which confronts its own power. The world is going to persecute us. That's the way that it goes. The world is going to come against you, Christian, because the world doesn't fear the one who is in you like it should. If the world knew who lived inside of you, the world would bow down in worship, not to you, of course, but to the one who lives in you. The world would fear you. It would elevate you above all things. It would try to put on a show, at the very least, to say, don't judge me too harshly, God, see how I'm treating your children. But the world is dumb. The world is going to come at you with everything that it has. The world is going to make sure, instead of listening to you, that it disqualifies you even from speaking. It’s going to come to you. It's going to lill you. It may do this figuratively though what we’ve been calling cancel culture. But through most of the history of the world, the world has actually killed the saints of God in that very real sense. And in fact, even today, when the world comes up against Christians, the majority of them are murdered, murdered for the sake of Christ. In fact, there is more martyring of the saints today than there has been at any point in history. I think of the suffering church in China, I think of the suffering church in some African nations, that any time someone is proclaimed as a Christian, they face death immediately because the world cannot stand a threat to its power.
Make no mistake you are a threat because you will not bow down and worship what the world tells you to worship. You are a threat. We see that in Amos today, as Amos is preaching against the nation of Israel, where God says, I will no more pass by Israel. The idea there is of the Passover, right, when the angel of death passes over the children of God. But now God will no longer pass over them. Instead, he will send his angel death to kill them. And, in fact, make it so that Jeroboam himself will die. Jeroboam in fear says, get out of here. Maybe if you're not preaching here, I'll be okay. But Jeroboam would be judged as evil, no matter where Amos went. Amos, to his credit, went on to preach up at the more faithful nation, Judah. He did God’s will and was willing to lay his life down for it. And we see the same thing, of course, in John the Baptizer, the one who is preaching Christ, the one who will lay his life down for all things for the sake of Christ. It’s really not going to be all that different for you, I believe. I've said this before, too, that we in America, or at least we, the Western world, are entering a time when we are post-Christianity, and the Christian Church does not matter as much to the world. The world is growing emboldened in their stand against the church. The world is growing more emboldened in their stand against you. They will come for you. They will demand your obedience to them. But you, Christian, cannot give in. You, Christian, are held to the plumb line.
You know what a plumb line is. A plumb line is basically a string that is straight. It's held up in one place so that you can build up a house against that, nice and straight each corner. You are being built into the house of God, you are being built against this plumb line. And that plumb line is Jesus the Christ. You will be held to that standard because you are a member of this house of God, the body of Christ through all space and time. You have within you, by faith, the courage to stand against the world and make a confession of Christ. When the world comes to you and tells you to renounce your God, you have the strength of faith within you to say, I shall not. The ancient saint, Polycarp, when faced with death, cried out, “86 years have I have served him, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?” Still, the fire was prepared and he was roasted to death. This faith to endure is in you, too. Your Lord will protect you, not from death, because we know that that is the wages of sin, but from eternal death, which is the wages of the judgment against those who are unrighteous. The Lord instead has promised to you, just as he promised Amos, just as he promised to John the Baptizer, eternal life through Christ.
Because Christ is risen from the dead, you shall live forever with him. Again, you are shown to have faith because you are here gathered around his Word and his Sacraments and our Lord will not leave you nor shall he forsake you. John, even here in his death, was not left by Christ. Jesus may not have been in the prison with him bodily, but God is always with those who love him. God will protect you and guard you in all things. When Christ returns, John the Baptizer, his head wherever it is in all this world, will be joined together with his body. And that mouth that once was silenced by the ax will speak forth the testimony of Christ. And so it will be for you, that our Lord will return to you life forever that you may be with him.
How can we do less than make the good confession. Our Lord has brought you into his salvation and we are called then to give testimony to him forever. The world will hate you for this because the world does not understand what it is that you have within you. It does not understand the hope of life that you have because the world is dumb, but you, my friends have been enlightened by the Holy Spirit. You, ,y friends, have been brought to faith by him who gives you the gift of forgiveness and life and salvation. And you have that promise of Jesus now and forever. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Now may the peace of God which passes all human understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord! Amen.
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