Mark 6:14-29 — The Death of John the Baptist

I.) The Characters

Herod Antipas (ca. 21 B.C. — post-A.D. 39): tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, answerable to the Emperor Tiberius.

Herodias was a daughter to one of the sons of Herod the Great (A chap named Aristobulus). This Aristobulus had half brothers who would have been Uncles to the she wolf Herodias. Their names were Uncle Herod Philip and Uncle Herod Antipas. Herodias had been married to her half uncle Herod Philip. Herodias then left him for an adulterous relationship with his brother and another half Uncle, Herod Antipas.

This lends new meaning to “keeping it all in the family.”

We should be reminded by this that the more things change the more they stay the same. I suppose we should be pleased that Herod Antipas took his brother’s wife and not his brother’s husband. It would seem that the household of Herod was less twisted then many households in our own culture.

Herodias’ Daughter — Thought by some to be named “Salome.” She is thought to be the daughter of Herodias by Herod Philip and so not the blood daughter of Herod Antipas. Herod Antipas would have been to her both her step-dad and her great-uncle. Obviously, though the text does not state it she has an interest in shutting John the Baptist up as well.

John the Baptist as Herald for Christ — John was the one who came preparing the way for Christ. He was the one who was a model of OT prophet desert dwellers. He was known as a rough man wearing camel hair for clothing and dining on locust and honey. He was the one who came saying “Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” He said of Jesus “Behold the lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the World,” thus emphasizing from the beginning the redemptive work that would end in a sacrificial death as substitute for our sins.

II The Background

A.) But when Herod’s birthday was kept,…. The birthdays of princes, both of their coming into the world, and accession to the throne of government, were kept by the Gentiles; as by the Egyptians, Genesis 40:20 and by the (n) Persians, and Romans (o), and other nations, but not by the Jews; who reckoned these among the feasts of idolaters.  So, the very fact that this birthday extravaganza was being held is testimony of how afar Herod was from really being concerned with Jewish protocol. Herod was a pretender to the throne.

B.) The Background of the role of Prophet

John the prophet …. long line of prophets

Some thought John the Baptist to be Elijah (6:15a). This might make some sense since Elijah was another prophet who collided with another weak king named Ahab as manipulated by another murderous wife named Jezebel (1 Kings 18–21). So, John’s actions here calling out Herod would have looked familiar to those who knew their History.

Whether John the Baptist or Elijah part of the prophetic function throughout God’s revelation has been to hold up God’s standard before those think themselves above God’s standard. Whether it is Moses with Pharaoh or whether it was Nathan with King David or whether it was Micaiah with Ahab or whether it was Amos as speaking before the rich and powerful women who he styled “Cows of Bashan,” God’s mouthpieces have almost universally courted trouble by speaking God’s standard to those who have forgotten themselves to be but mortals.

So John is a flashback of what once was but He is also promissory of Christ who is to come. Christ Himself would speak God’s standard to those in Power and the same resentment that killed John would be part of the mix in the murder of the Lord Christ.

We should especially note here the work of the Prophet in what has been styled by some as “the common realm.” John the Baptist, in this rebuke of Herod is poking his nose in political business …. a business that many Reformed clergy and Seminary professors argue today is none of our business. Many modern Reformed clergy argue that John the Baptist belonged to a different age then the one ushered in by Christ. John the Baptist, they argue, belongs to the Old Testament but we live in a new age where men of God are not to speak to the common realm. These modern Reformed Seminary professors and clergy argue this way with only the slimmest of evidence and by conjecture built upon conjecture. They insist that men of God today should not speak to the common realm because with the arrival of Jesus we have the hyphenization of reality as between the Church realm and the common realm. With the new and better covenant, as brought in by the Lord Christ, the explicit Lordship of God is split in twain so that God in Christ only rules in the common realm via Natural Law. So part of the new and better covenant is the reality that God’s singular revelatory hegemony over all of life, as found in the old and worse covenant, is eclipsed so that now God’s revelatory word and rule is now only for the Church realm in the new and better covenant. All common realm issues are not to receive a “thus saith the Lord,” from God’s spokesman or God’s Church.

Of course all this is balderdash and a completely unique and innovative way of reading the Scripture. Repeatedly in the New Testament we find Paul disagreeing with the powers that be. From his refusal of the proper authority’s demand to skulk away quietly after wrongly being beaten, to his defense against the powers that be on Mars Hills, to his work in Ephesus that led to common realm riots and book burning St. Paul was repeatedly involved in the common realm.

What we see in the work of God’s spokesman, John the Baptist, is that Christianity applies to all of life. The Christian, as prophet, priest, and king, under sovereign God, brings all of God’s word to bear on all of God’s world. There is no area cordoned off area where a “thus saith the Lord” as given by God’s spokesman from God’s Holy desk, is not potentially applicable.

C.) The Dance

Very possibly a lascivious and sexually suggestive dance.

Salome’s dance was a particularly popular subject during the Renaissance and Baroque periods and her popularity continued well into the 19th century. I don’t know how old Salome was when she danced before Herod, but artists tend to portray her as a sultry, confident (young) woman. To most of art history, Salome is the sole, conniving figure behind John’s death.

III.) The Occasion

The occasion for this is John’s work in upholding God’s law. Torah in Leviticus clearly taught against Herod’s behavior,

Lev. 18:16 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother’s wife; it is your brother’s nakedness.

Lev. 20:21 If a man takes his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing. He has uncovered his brother’s nakedness. They shall be childless.

Obviously John’s preaching hit home (6:17). Herodias was exposed as the trollop she was and her memory required the silence of the one who was making known what she preferred to be unknown.

Interesting, that regardless the century, speaking out against improper sleeping arrangements always seems to be a flash point. There is something about upholding God’s standards in terms of sleeping arrangements that will  earn enmity in an accelerated fashion. Pagans want to sleep with who they want to sleep with … God’s standards be damned and pagans will damn whoever stands for God’s standards on sleeping arrangements.

We should note here before we move on that while we can admire John for championing God’s truth before Herod and Herodias we must concede that speaking God’s standard to the rich and powerful often does not end well from a merely temporal perspective. John is another example of one who obeyed God and was persecuted for obeying God. Not all who obey God end up with what we would style as temporal blessings hunting them down. Many who obey God, by holding up God’s standards are, as Hebrews tells,  “tortured, and have chains and imprisonment. Many have been sawn in two and were slain with the sword. If it were true for Apostles

God has exhibited us apostles last of all, as men condemned to death; because we have become a spectacle to the world, both to angels and to men.

How much more true might it be for we who are far far less than Apostles?

IV.) The Purpose

The purpose is hinted at in the way Mark arranges his material. Mark, known for his pithy and straight to the point story-telling ability gives us his longest narrative of his Gospel. I believe this is so not only because it is giving us John the Baptist as one who stands as the apogee (climax) of OT prophets in his role of holding up God’s standard but I think Mark also spends time here because in John’s story we find the foreshadowing of the story of the Lord Christ.

Scratch the surface of this narrative of John the Baptist and you will find the narrative of the Lord Christ.

Right out of the gate Mark tells us in this account of John the Baptist’s death that there is confusion over just who Jesus is. Indeed, that confusion over who Jesus might be sets the table for telling the account of the death of John the Baptist. Interestingly enough Mark will use this same confusion over who Jesus might be in chapter 8:27-29 as the table setter for Christ’s words about His coming death and resurrection.

In Herod’s work with John, we see foreshadowed the coming work of Pilate with Jesus (1:1-15; 9:9-13; 11:27-33). So, Herod here is to Pilate as John is to Jesus later.

1.) Both Herod and later Pilate are nominally in charge but in the end their authority is eclipsed by events.  Yet, of course, both remain responsible.

2.) Like Herod here with John, Pilate will later be “amazed” (6:20; 15:5) by circumstances surrounding an innocent prisoner (6:17, 20; 15:1, 14a).

3.) Both Herod here and Pilate later are swept up in events that fast spin out of their control (6:21-25; 15:6-13).

4.) Both Herod here and Pilate later are unable to back down after being publicly outmaneuvered (6:26-27; 15:15).

5.) Like Jesus, John is passive in his final hours (6:14-19; 15:1-39).

6.) Both John and Jesus face with integrity their moment of truth (6:21: hemeras eukairou, “an opportunity came”; 12:2: to kairo, “the season came”).

7.) Both Jesus and John are executed by hideous capital punishment (6:27-28; 15:24-27), dying to placate those they offended (6:19, 25; 15:10-14).

8.) Both Jesus and John will die a shameful death. John’s shameful death is found in it coming at the instigation of a woman. In ancient history to be executed or to die by a woman’s design was a mark of shame. Jesus shameful death is being pinned on a Cross.

So, you take all these parallels in the story telling of Mark’s account of John’s death, and you place this death tale as sandwiched (intercalation) between accounts that are placarding the power and victory of the Kingdom of God in Mark’s Gospel and what you have is a theology of the Cross sandwiched between a theology of glory. The Kingdom is rolling forward. Preceding this account we are looking at many demons being cast out. Many are healed (Mark 6:13). Subsequent to this account of John’s death there is there is the feeding of 5000 and Jesus mastering the elements by waling on the sea. The Kingdom has come.

And yet Mark sticks this account in between the outrageous success of the coming Kingdom of God in order to remind us that there is about the Kingdom of God not only exaltation but also humiliation. The Cross awaits the Lord Christ.

Consequently there is an ability to preach the Cross from this passage. John the Baptist’s death adumbrates the death of Christ in many ways. Or course John the Baptist’s death is not redemptive, but it does point us to the death of Christ which is redemptive. John the Baptist’s death points to the death of Christ which is propitiatory, and reconciles. John the Baptist death points to the death of Christ which is substitutionary and works the work of reconciliation of God to man.

Everywhere through the Gospels there is the shadow of the Cross and that is no less true here in this account of John the Baptist’s death.

Christopher Isherwood & Disordered Affection

Christopher Isherwood was specific in his memoir about the need to have sex outside his class (with boys) and found it even more exciting when he was unable to speak the language of the person he had sex with.

Once learning German Isherwood reported that “it was a little saddening, because the collapse of the language barrier had buried the image of the magic German boy.”

E. Michael Jones
“Monsters from the Id.”

This quote reveals that which so often motivates sexual perversion. In God’s design, the radical personality differences between male and female (in general) and between two individuals (in particular) is simply not strange enough to satisfy a pervert. Rushdoony has a statement where he says that physicians were reporting weirder and weirder levels of sexual freaks as the person resorts to new methods of arousal. In Isherwood’s case, he cites not only same sex attraction, and not only the overleaping of economic class, but he also got a thrill out of going across language barriers in his conquests. The same idea is back of all sin: God is not truly God; the sinner instead is truly God and he will leap across boundaries with impunity. The language fetish is also revealing in what he says about being disappointed to learn German. Ordered knowledge is too, well, orderly. The pervert prefers the thrill of disorder and chaos and wants it to pervade his sexual romps as far as possible.

Hat Tip — Habakkuk Mucklewrath for the analysis

Homosexuality as Vampirism … An E. Michael Jones Quote

“Since sex for the homosexual is essentially an attempt to appropriate the masculinity that he feels lacking in himself from someone who seems to embody it, sex with girls has no purpose, since girls do not have what he lacks. Once it gets construed in this way, sex becomes essentially a vampiric act, It is either sucking the desired object to obtain its male essence, or being sucked for the same purpose. Isherwood makes this vampiric character clear but in a slightly veiled manner when he talks about Bubi, the first object of his homosexual attentions in Berlin: ‘Christopher wanted to keep Bubi all to himself forever, to posses him utterly, and he knew that this was impossible and absurd. If he had been a savage, he might have solved the problem by eating Bubi — for magical, not gastronomic reasons.’

Again, Isherwood refers to magic, this time to a magic form of cannibalism that will allow him to ‘keep Bubi all to himself forever, to possess him utterly.’ In other words, to appropriate forever from Bubi what Isherwood lacks in himself. Cannibalism, as the case of Jeffrey Dahmer showed, is nothing more than an extreme form of homosexuality. Both actions involved a ‘magical’ ingestion of the desired characteristics of the other. In this regard, cannibalism is but one term in a series of psychic linkages that radiate out from the vampire, the prime representative of Wiemar culture. With the breakdown of the family, the son does not get the needed affirmation of his own masculinity from the father. As a result, sex becomes an attempt to alleviate this male deficit. It becomes an exercise in feeding on another person which gets fantasized sometimes as cannibalism but more often than not as a sucking off of the liquid essence from the desired object in the act of fellatio or in the symbolic act of vampirism. (Hirschfield, by the way, in his magnum opus listing all the sexual variants, lists vampirism as one and cites a specific case of a man who could not reach orgasm without first ingesting the blood of his spouse. The Marquis de Sade lists a similar instance in Justine.)

In either case the point of the act is to assuage the hunger-like feeling that is the physical manifestation of the deficit nature of homosexuality but also of lust. As one of Nicolosi’s clients explains about his sexual involvement with a male he admired: ‘That power and control — I’ve always wanted to draw off that, to be so together.’

Like a vampire, the homosexual ‘draws off’ that power by sucking, by draining the desired object of its life force and absorbing into himself in some ritualistic ‘magical’ banquet. Of course, this magic never works; in fact it only exacerbates the loneliness and inadequacy which drove the homosexual to this form of sexual activity in the first place, and so what arises in place of the ‘magic’ is a compulsive, addiction-like vicious circle, in which the homosexual tries to compensate for a sense of masculine inadequacy by engaging in homosexual activity, which, once it is over, only makes the inadequacy seem even worse.”

E. Michael Jones
Monsters from the Id — pg. 192-193

Hart’s Hysteria

Isn’t monogamy Christian? That’s what gays have lurched into. I’m sure they will follow heteros in recognizing the weaknesses of fidelity to marital vows.

Darryl Hart
R2K advocate
Adjunct Professor Westminster Seminary California

1.) Ask yourself if in the context of a biblical definition of marriage is it even possible to talk about monogamy as existing between two men or two women? In the context of a biblical definition of marriage only a man and woman as married can be monogamous.

2.) It requires a willful torpidity to think that what sodomites really want (were it even possible) is monogamy and to think that, except in a very small percentile there is any desire for fidelity.

Sex in America: A Definitive Survey, by authors Michael, Gagnon, Laumann, and Kolata, cites a study of homosexual male couples conducted by gay researchers.

The couples who participated had been together between 1 and 37 years.

Findings were as follows:

  • 100% (all) of the couples experienced infidelity in their relationship within the first 5 years.
  • Couples who remained together past the 10-year mark were able to do so only by accepting the painful reality of infidelity in their relationship
  • More than 85 percent of the couples reported that their greatest relationship problems center on issues related to outside relationships.

 

Darryl’s R2K Confusion On Display

“Two steps forward (Christian norms now govern same-sex marriage), one step backwards (Christians may still object to Christian norms governing same-sex marriages).,,,

But the weeping and gnashing of teeth about gay marriage has yet to acknowledge that gays (whether they know it or not) want to be like Christians. That’s one way of reading this. Why is that so much of a threat to Christian morality?”

D.G. Hart, — 7/1/15
Westminster Seminary California adjunct professor
Torchbearer for R2K

1.) I’m sure sodomites will be amazed to learn from Darryl that they aspire to “be like Christians.”  The plan to wed homos to each other is all in keeping with their unconscious desire to emulate Christians and through them Christ. Gottcha. By simply going through the ceremony, they will be moving in the right direction towards Christ. Further, we know that sodomites want to be like Christians by embracing marriage because, after all, in sodomite marriage sodomites are loving their husbands as Christ loved the Church.  Er, No. Wait. Rather it is that husbands are submitting to their husbands as the Church submits to Christ. Wait … that’s not right either.

Never mind.

2.) According to Darryl’s R2K “theology” there is no such thing as “Christian Marriage,” so I’m not sure why Darryl would say that “gays (whether they know it or not) want to be like Christians.” According to Darryl it is not possible to want to be like Christians when it comes to marriage because there is no such thing as “Christian marriage.” How can one desire to be like someone (a Christian) in something (Christian marriage) that doesn’t exist?

3.) Also Darryl, quite contrary to all his R2K theology, is telling us that there is such a thing as “Christian morality” in the common realm. And yet R2K has relentlessly taught that morality in the common realm is common and not Christian. According to R2K nothing in the common realm counts as particularly “Christian morality.”

4.) Here Darryl speaks of Christian norms in the common realm and yet R2K has relentlessly told us that, when in comes to the common realm, what norms the norms of the common realm is not Christianity. So then how can Darryl speak of “Christian norms” when speaking of matters in the common realm?

It’s not like I need to demonstrate it again but here we have before us the utter confusion that R2K and the hyphenated life offers. There is no rhyme or reason to R2K. It is completely random and chaotic.