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Rev. Tom
Lenhart
Sermon
July 16, 2006
“Is It Enough
To Have Clean Hands?”
Mark 6: 14-29
Let us pray.
Hatred, abuse of power, moral weakness and
the ghastly killing of a good man -- sounds like something that we might
read in the newspaper, especially the tabloids at the check-out counter, or
see on the big screen in some grade “B’ movie. What a seemingly grim story
we have in our passage from Mark! Why is it in the Bible? Indeed, why does
the lectionary choose this passage for our cycle of Sunday preaching texts
-- when so many others in the Bible are passed over? Perhaps even more the
question in your mind may be why your preacher chose this text to preach on
today.
First, let me tell you what
I am not going to preach on from this text. Think back to the beginning of
the passage -- that somewhat strange report of Herod’s apparent impression
of Jesus. This passage is in Mark in part to make a point about Jesus’
identity -- about how so many people failed to understand who Jesus was.
Some thought he was Elijah, others like Herod -- thought him to be John the
Baptist’s spirit returned in a new person, and others thought of him as a
prophet. Indeed, much of the gospel of Mark is a lesson in the failure of
even the disciples to understand who Jesus was. They too often believed him
to be the Messiah, a new Davidic King, who would lead them to victory -- not
the suffering servant, Mark ultimately reveals, who was to die on the Cross
. That question of identity would be a worthy subject for a sermon but it is
not what I want to talk about today.
Rather, I want to talk
about the conduct -- the sublime and the detestable -- that is, I believe,
the focus of this text. We have three central figures in our passage: John
the Baptist, Herodias and Herod. Each has something to tell us about
navigating in our world faithfully. John’s conduct in this passage is a
beacon illuminating the power and the importance of right and moral conduct.
The conduct of Herodias and Herod on the other hand illustrates the reasons
many often fail to make those morally right decisions that faith demands.
What was John so indignant
about here? Herod had married his brother’s wife. Not an unheard of event
even in our world. However, Herod’s marriage to his brother’s wife was a
direct affront to and a violation of Jewish law. Indeed, Leviticus intones;
“If a man takes his brothers wife, it is impunity….” (Leviticus 18:16;
20:21). The Jewish marriage rules were complicated and not entirely
consistent and so the purposes served by them are likely varied and not
entirely consistent. The restrictions on the marriage of a sister-in-law may
have served at least in part to minimize the treatment of women as chattel.
A major risk of allowing what happened here – whether because a more
powerful brother takes a woman from a weaker one or because he is given the
prized woman as a way of currying favor -- is the same. The woman is nothing
more than chattel. And, of course, in our passage Herod is the possessor of
great power in Galilee as Rome’s designated leader there and the potential
for the ignoring of a woman’s interests is even greater. What a terrible
precedent for women, even if as appears to be the case here, the particular
women, Herodias, was in favor of her new lot in life.
Additionally, John’s
indignation may have reflected a concern that such conduct diminished the
other brother. Whether in life or in death the weaker brother is potentially
demeaned and reduced to secondary status by the actions of the powerful
other brother. How fundamentally at variance was Herod’s conduct with the
love and respect of neighbor that was Jesus’ great commandment given to us
for use as our moral compass.
History has given us other
examples of similar moral conduct as an expression of faith. We have for
example, Sir Thomas More, whose life was depicted in the great movie of the
late 60’s, A Man for All Seasons. Sir Thomas was Lord Chancellor of
England and one of Henry the VIII’s closest advisers. Thomas refuses to
sanction Henry’s first divorce and remarriage as a matter of religious
principle and conscience. The King believes that he cannot continue to allow
Thomas’s opposition -- for the public revered Thomas as an honorable and
pious man and as a moral compass. Despite pleas to compromise, Thomas
refuses in the words of the old cliché “to live and to fight another day” --
to the horror and disbelief of his family and friends. He ends up in the
Tower of London where he is ultimately put to death. Why did Thomas and John
the Baptist stand firm? They both recognized that righteousness,
especially as practiced in one’s conduct, mattered. Both understood that
faith compels that we live a certain way – in accord with Jesus’ teaching
including the great commandment. The risk of death does not outweigh the
mandate expressed in Micah (6:8) that we “do justice, and … love kindness
and …walk humbly with [our} God.”
Ours is not a
“consequentialist” faith. What do I mean by that? John the Baptist could
quite easily have held back and said nothing. Herod was one of the most
powerful people in Galilee and it was unlikely that John was going to change
his behavior. Indeed, there were more important issues and things for John
to do, including baptizing people into rebirth and new life. And yet he did
not pull his punches. He responded to what he perceived as immoral conduct;
the potential dire consequences of his action did not enter into his mind.
Indeed, Jesus could have temporized -- could have compromised to live
another day. Some of the disciples wanted him to do this. Yet, he did not.
To be a suffering servant as Jesus was --meant to be the servant of God sent
to restore creation to that which God had intended. As Jesus lived and
preached -- life is about committing to something beyond one’s self -- that
is to God. And thus life is not about falling into a trap of testing every
moral action by the consequences of such action on oneself And that leads to
the other point that John and Jesus reveal -- sometimes there is suffering,
disappoint, loss of a job or promotion that comes with making faithful and
right moral judgments and acting on them.
In two of Plato’s plays the
Apology and the Crito, Socrates -- having been tried,
convicted and sentenced to death for allegedly corrupting the youth of
Athens -- discusses whether he should take action to avoid death by escaping
or recanting. He refuses to recant -- in effect to admit to the crime though
he could have with minimal consequences. Likewise, he refuses to escape when
it could easily have been arranged. To do either would have undercut his
moral position. As Socrates said I would not be true to what matters most if
I rationalized a way out of my dilemma --for in his words “a miserable
desire of a little more life.”
So it is that I think Mark is
reminding us that living as Jesus did –living in a way that is being true to
our faith is not justified by a guaranteed positive outcome in this world.
There will be times when we shall not prevail and worse will suffer for our
conduct. There was no happy ending in this life for John the Baptist. Yet,
persevere we must. Those who withdraw to fight another day -- most often
withdraw the next time as well. The gravestone of many good causes says
“died still waiting for the right time.”
We are “consequentialists” -- to be sure
weighing the impact – the consequences on ourselves of our actions. But
there are other all too human traits that also get in the way of our living
in faith and making good moral judgments. The easiest to see is revealed in
the conduct of Herodias. Here is woman who is consumed by hatred for John
the Baptist. We can assume that she hates John because he is a busybody –
poking his preverbal nose into other peoples business. But more than that he
had threatened the comfortable life with her former brother-in-law – the
Tetrarch -- to which she doubtless had become accustomed. She represents
those of us who at times make decisions based on emotion not thought. She
represents those of us who at times make decisions based on self interest
rather than the greater good. And she represents, albeit in a most extreme
form, those who at times make decisions that reflect the devaluation of
another human being. Perhaps none of these ring true for you but they do for
me. “Look out for yourself no one else will,” “take care of number one,”
these are certainly clichés, but like all clichés they reflect our view of
real life all too often.
Do we have any doubt that
at times self-interest reigns when it perhaps shouldn’t? I spent much of my
last 10 years in private practice leading investigations into allegations of
corporate wrongdoing. Some of these allegations were unfounded but on
occasion we discovered misconduct. Those individuals involved often fell
into one or the other of two broad categories. First were those who were
simply venal. These were the individuals -- prepared for personal gain -- to
defrauded shareholders and others and to imperil the jobs of innocent
employees. But I find those examples not particularly helpful or edifying.
Most of us are fundamentally honest and would not think of defrauding
anyone. No, it is the second category that is more appropriate to look at.
These are the generally honest employees who get leaned on to be cogs in the
larger fraud. They would never have undertaken it on their own. But {under
pressure} they rationalize to themselves that their little part is not
wrong though in fact they know or strongly suspect what is going on and that
it is wrong. And they go along. Why -- because they had tuitions and
mortgages to pay. To blow the whistle is hard and risky.
In Germany during the late
thirties there was a core of unthinkably evil people who charted out the
mass and diabolically efficient destruction of the Jews and others. But
there were also others – not bad people – who arranged, for example, for the
trains to move boxcars to a spur that lead to a camp near a small Polish
town named Auschwitz. They may not have known specifically what was
happening, but they knew enough. But they did not rock the boat.
Self-interest is a terribly human desire. We are challenged not to place it
at the center of our life. And we are challenged as a society to find ways
to help people more easily to make good decisions. Legitimate whistle
blowers should never be pariahs in our society.
Finally, Herod serves as an especially
helpful example of the challenges we face. He was not a bad man. He was
drawn to the truth and power of John’s message. And he was doubtless
genuinely dismayed when his wife and step-daughter, Salome, required him to
satisfy his flippant promise by killing John. This is not a tyrant of the
types we have seen so much in the world. No, in this passage Herod is almost
a regular guy. So where does he go wrong? First, he will not break his
promise. He is a posture child for living by the rules. He said he would do
anything Salome asked. And, of course, he can’t go back on his word. Now, I
am a believer in the rule of law. Without it we would be in a state of
nature and life in Hobbs’s famous words would “be nasty, brutish and short.”
And yet the slavish following of rules is not always right. There are at
times that other principles and values outweigh them. Life – John’s life --
certainly did. Keeping one’s promises and truth telling are fundamentally
important. But love of neighbor and the respect for life at times trump
those. Sometimes the terrible truth of a hopeless prognosis must be conveyed
to a patient, but I am also convinced that at other times it should not be.
The second reason why Herod failed was peer
pressure. How could he in front of his guests renege on his promise? Peer
pressure gets our young folks into trouble – it did for me. But it is not
just the young who fall prey to such pressure. We simply do things because
we do not want to be different or found wanting by our peers. We all know
anecdotes that suggest that people in groups do and condone acts that they
would not do or contemplate on their own.
We are human -- we care about our
self-interest, act emotionally at times, place too much faith in rules and
bend to peer pressure. So is it hopeless. If I ended here I would be guilty
of the criticism of much preaching that it ends every Sunday morning with
the glass half empty and leaking. So let me add a final note. This passage
is in our lectionary because there is help and guidance for us in it. John
acted appropriately. He led his life faithfully – he placed his faith in God
and put that at the center. And that demanded that he love and value all of
his fellow children of God. Langdon Gilkey, formerly Professor of Theology
at the University of Chicago, wrote a wonderful book about his time in an
internment camp during WWII called Shantung Compound. In the book he
struggles to understand the less than stellar actions and moral choices made
by his fellow internees. In the end he wrote this prescription for faithful
living which I think captures what is behind our passage and may just offer
us a compass for our own lives:
[t]he only hope in the
human situation is that … men find [their] true center in God, and not in
the many idols that appear in the course of our experience. If men are to
forget themselves enough to share with each other, to be honest under
pressure, and to be rational and moral enough to establish community, they
must have some center of loyalty and devotion … beyond their own welfare.
This center of loyalty beyond themselves cannot be a human creation, greater
than the individual but still finite such as the family, the nation,
tradition, race or the church. Only the God who created all … and lives and
cares for all, can be the creative center of human existence.”
It is not enough to have clean hands and to follow the
rules. It is enough to have a faithful heart and to act on it. Amen
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