July 14, Ordinary 15B (Mark 6:14–29)
Who knows what took place in Herod’s guilty heart after John’s death?
“Do not fear those who kill the body,” Jesus admonishes his disciples (Matt. 10:28). John the Baptist doesn’t. He challenges his listeners—the curious, the skeptical, the hostile—to repent. He confronts authorities, rejects polite conventions, shames hypocrites, and perhaps most offensively, makes a spectacle of himself. Still, his message rings true—even to Herod, who is troubled enough by it to be guilt-ridden and haunted later, after he kills John, by a nervous suspicion that Jesus is John returned from the dead. We may well imagine him pacing the floor of a lavish palace, not in satisfied vengeance but in fear and anxiety.
Mark enables us to see Herod not simply as an agent of evil but as a weak human being who has given way to temptation. But the consequences of his capitulation reverberate widely. Because he is in a position of power, his weakness, cowardice, pride, and shortsightedness have very public and lasting consequences. His predicament is not unlike that of Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, who cries in agonized confession after murdering his brother, “Oh, my offense is rank!” Or like Macbeth, riddled with depression and guilt and emotionally alienated from his vicious, avaricious wife after ordering assassins to kill Duncan. Portraits of weak, lustful, corruptible political leaders are plentiful in history and literature, some of them quite contemporary.
One of the most interesting features of Mark’s sketchy profile of Herod comes when the writer pauses to make note of the ruler’s emotional predicament even before the foolish agreement that leads to John’s beheading. “Herod feared John,” he writes, “knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.” This curious concession—that Herod actually found John credible and compelling—and the even stranger note that up until then he had “protected him” complicates our understanding of Herod. It clarifies that his evil is more cowardly than vicious.
