Sermon Sunday 12th July 2009

Three weeks ago when I was last preaching to you, I finished up my sermon by telling you to 'wait for the next thrilling instalment.' Well, this is the next instalment but of course, since it is a sermon, I can't guarantee that it will be thrilling.

Last time we were looking at Job's account of creation and thinking about whether science and Christianity can co-exist together or whether, the more that the scientists know, the less there is for God to explain, until eventually perhaps some people would say we don't need God at all.

But I hope that now you would accept that, however you understand the mechanism of evolution and the story of nature, something or somebody had to start the whole process off, and that was God.

But of course I realise that you're not here because you want to worship the Unmoved Mover or the ultimate prime mover of the universe – you probably don't see God in those terms.

We Christians are fortunate because you don't have to be an analytical philosopher in getting to the point where you believe in and worship God and find that your life is transformed as a result. The reason is Jesus.

Once we know the story of Jesus we really can move on from the realm of natural philosophy – dry logical arguments about the existence of God. Because, whatever else the New Testament, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, St Paul's letters, are, they are narratives in the same way that history books are. They tell you who did what to whom and what happened.

All the four Gospels are remarkably consistent in the details of the story of Jesus, and there are other contemporary, non-Christian authors who refer to the Christian story in a way which works as a corroboration of the accounts in the New Testament. For example there is Josephus the Jewish historian and Tacitus the Roman, who both mentioned the phenomenon of Jesus and his crucifixion. We can rely on it as history.

Today's Gospel reading is about the forerunner of Jesus, John the Baptist, and his very unfortunate and very unpleasant death. The story is told both by St Matthew and St Mark, and in both cases we hear about Herod's granddaughter, who is said by Josephus to have been called Salome, dancing for Herod's birthday, and pleasing him so much that he in effect offered her a blank cheque ('You can have whatever you want'). Salome cashed it, in a ghastly way, after consulting her mother Herodias. Herodias had a grudge against John the Baptist because he had pointed out that it was against the law of Moses, as it's set out in the book of Leviticus, for a man to marry his brother's wife – Lev. 20:21. Herodias had previously been married to Herod's brother Philip.

Incidentally, this prohibition in Leviticus is what Henry VIII relied upon to try to have his marriage to Katherine of Aragon annulled, because Katherine had been previously married to Henry's elder brother Arthur, who died sixth months after they were married. So this prohibition in the law of Moses has a long and troublesome history, although since the days of the original Book of Common Prayer, it has not existed in modern Christianity.

The account of John's death in the Gospels differs in some details from what we learn from other sources of evidence about Herod and his family. There were in fact several Herods, several generations of Herods, and it seems to be the case that the account in St Matthew and St Mark may be a bit confused about who had actually married whom. (You'll have noticed that I read in the lesson 'when Herodias' daughter came in and danced', rather than as printed in your reading sheet 'when his daughter Herodias came in and danced', which makes it even more confused. What I read is shown in one of the Greek texts.) Certainly the historian Josephus does record that Herod executed John, but not because of Salome. His account says that he was afraid that John was stirring up civil unrest and he was put to death in order to try to stamp out rioting.

The story of the death of John the Baptist in the Gospels is a sort of flash-back which comes after the account of Jesus' first ministry in Galilee and his various miracles - before this passage we hear about him healing the woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages who touched his coat, and how he restored Jairus' daughter to life.

Then Jesus sends out the 12 disciples on their mission, travelling light, taking nothing for their journey except a stick, no food, no money, but they had to wear sandals and not put on two tunics. That's presumably why you sometimes see middle-aged men at church gatherings wearing sandals – although I have to say there's nothing in the Bible about wearing socks as well.

And then after the story of the death of John the Baptist, St Mark records that Jesus carried on teaching and doing miracles, feeding the 5,000, walking on the water and healing more sick people.

The Gospels, and the other historical account in Josephus, all agree that Herod had became concerned about the following that Jesus was building up. A crowd of 5,000 in those days would be huge. Herod was beginning to worry that it was a threat to his authority.

It looks as though, when Herod says that he worried that Jesus was actually John brought back to life, this is all reminiscent of the story of Jesus' passion and death. John's execution, as it's described, is just as undeserved and capricious as Jesus' was going to be.

The world that Jesus came into was pretty brutal and barbaric. The story of Salome serves to illustrate that this was not a time when the rule of law was very strong. A ruler like Herod, who was the ruler of Galilee, was what was called a 'tetrarch', a dependent ruler of a province within the Roman empire. He was like a nawab or a maharajah in British India. Within his district the tetrarch was an absolute ruler.

This is quite interesting when you realise that the law of Moses laid down in Deuteronomy actually allowed for what we would now call the rules of natural justice. Judges must be impartial, and no-one should be condemned except on the evidence of one or two witnesses (Deut. 16:19, 17:6). By the time of the Roman empire, in Judaea, the promised land of the Jews, by comparison with the standards laid down in Deuteronomy, the legal system had got into a degenerate state.

And if we look at the death of John the Baptist, and reflect on the story as a pointer towards the death of Jesus, we realise that this isn't just a brutal story. John has baptised Jesus and at the time of his baptism God has acknowedged him as his Son. How could God let his Son be killed? How could God let that good man, John, who had done nothing wrong, be bumped off by a sleazy local ruler – a sort of nawab or maharajah?

The purpose of the story is to emphasise that Jesus, and John before him, were men; and they were men subject to the injustices and the brutalities of real life. John, and then Jesus after him, were like us. They shared our pain.

In Gilbert & Sullivan's opera The Mikado there's an ironic conversation between Pooh-Bah and the Mikado, when the Mikado says to Pooh-Bah, 'Now let's see about your execution. Will after luncheon suit you? Can you wait till then?' And Ko-Ko, Piti Sing and Pooh-Bah all say, 'Oh yes, we can wait till then.' So the Mikado says, 'Then we'll make it after luncheon.' Pooh-Bah then says, (because he's for the chop), 'I don't want any lunch.' And the Mikado, trying to be sympathetic, says, 'I'm really very sorry for you, but it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.'

The trouble is, that satirical passage is still true today. The world is full of injustice, and even countries that say they stand up for fairness and the rule of law seem to do things that contradict those noble objectives. Why are people still locked up in prisons without a fair trial? And why do people come back to this country showing evidence - confirmed by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, but denied by our government - that they have suffered torture and that British policemen and representatives of MI5 were present, and indeed supplied questions, for the torturers to use?

Terrible injustice and suffering still happens as much in today's world as it did in the time of John the Baptist and our Lord Jesus Christ.

So in a very real way this part of the Gospel story, the death of John the Baptist, brings us face to face with real life where a good man who has done nothing wrong can be brutally killed by the government, by the proper authorities. This is setting the scene for Jesus.

If you use some imagination, some very challenging parallels become apparent. Let's adopt Josephus' version of John the Baptist's death for a minute. You can see the sort of argument which must have come up in Herod's cabinet. 'If we terminate this one man, we could well save thousands of lives. It's a matter of life and death to have stable government.' And today, what if torturing one man can get the information to save London from a terrorist bomb?

So did killing John the Baptist fix anything? Absolutely not. And does torture ever produce evidence which saves the city? I don't think so. So why should torture and death fix anything today? Our poor servicemen die – and many more Iraqis and Afghans also die; people are tortured. We haven't moved on at all since the time of Herod the Great.

This time we're not looking forward to the next thrilling instalment. We are compelled by the story; we can't put it down. This is as real today, in the era of Guantanamo, as it was when John the Baptist was beheaded and then our Lord was crucified. What are we going to do about it?

Amen

Hugh Bryant