I was surprised at the portrayal of John the Baptist as some sort of loser in his day. Also I was surprised at the pastor painting this picture of a loving family who had no idea how their son would turn out. I don’t think it’s all that difficult, even for the world, to understand that someone with a wildly successful ministry, beheaded by the whim of a drunk king is not a loser. Also, I have no problem with trying to relate the people of scripture in what they were going through. But these people were not clueless and disappointed at how things turned out. They were far too wise for that, they were far wiser than we are.
First of all, John was not a loser. He was a super star. People flocked to the desert to see him. Everyone knew his name, including the King. People even mistook Jesus for John the Baptist (Matthew 16:13,14). People love fame today, almost more than anything from what I can tell. Some people are famous for being famous. People will subject themselves to almost any form of torture to appear on TV. And even committing grievous crimes is not outside the realm of possibility for someone who really wants to be famous. Shoot a bunch of people or commit suicide and you will be famous. I’m assuming it was the same back then. Herod put on shining armor and told all the people to look at him. Rulers built statues of themselves and held them up for the people to worship. John had this kind of notariety, and he was a faithful servant of God. He was so famous that the Queen and her Daughter couldn’t find anything in the whole world that they wanted more than him dead. Now even secular historians have to admit that people singled out for death by the royalty are significant.
In this and many situations we don’t have to wait for eternity to resolve who was right and who was wrong. The church made many such errors in the past as they executed people whom they later had to recognize as saints. Now I’m not for worshiping saints, but there are worse things and the point is that these martyrs had to be dealt with because their lives bore real fruit, and the church couldn’t ignore it. Things were rightly judged on this side of eternity. That is the case with John the Baptist. As I mentioned before choosing the drunk king and his incestuous marriage to his brothers wife or the prophet of God is not that difficult. We shouldn’t really be concerned if the world gets it, but even they could tell the difference between someone killed fighting for what was right, faithfully doing his job (more on this later) and some dumb actor who kills himself. And the Church should certainly be able to figure it out on this side of heaven, they always did in the past. In a post Jesus world, the power of martyrdom is almost unavoidable. I was reminded of this passage from G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:
About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker: he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe. And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr. Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers. All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist.
This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity entered the discussion. And there went with it a peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one. The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in modern morals. It was not a matter of degree. It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer in sadness just beyond it. The Christian feeling evidently was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far. The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other: these two things that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell. One man flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence. Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren’s. I am not saying this fierceness was right; but why was it so fierce?
The world gets this. I think of the last Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. At the beginning he fought because he didn’t care, he was suicidal. Later he learned to give himself for others, as a martyr.
I think the Church does a little too much of this waiting around for eternity and not deciding anything stuff. It’s cowardice. Jesus tells us that what we bind on earth is bound in heaven (Matthew 18:18), with regard to church discipline. What we do here matters and we can judge rightly, we have the tools. Rulers of old were commended for judging rightly. We are not to sue our brother because we, the Church of the all knowing God, keepers of the scripture, His very word, should be able to resolve conflicts between people in our midst better than the world (I Corinthians 6:1-8). We are the light of the world, not the lawyers of America and it’s judges who can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman or the difference between marriage and homosexual perversion. Knowing scripture is great but being able to apply it to every situation in life is the real definition of wisdom. It’s an applied science, not just a theory.
Secondly, the life of John the Baptist was not just a random shot in the dark. From the beginning the story is all too familiar. An old couple that can’t have children, suddenly is visited by an angel. Hmm does this remind you of any other Biblical stories? It should. How about Abraham and Sarah? Ruth and Naomi? Hannah? Barren women suddenly having children, is a sure sign that God is doing something. Not to mention the first chapter of Luke laying out the circumstances of John’s birth. These were not random people they were faithful Jews in every sense of the word. They got it. The same can be said of Mary and Joseph. The song of Mary is all the proof you need. It is very complex, and a reflection of the song of Hannah (I Samuel 2). They understood how God works.
It was even obvious that he would be a prophet (Luke 1:16). And as the faithful of Israel, they were looking for just such a prophet. And it was no secret what Israel did to the prophets, they stoned them (Luke 13:34). But like the Catholic saints, the people of Israel eventually figured out that the dead prophet was truly sent of God and their works were preserved in the Old Testament. And his job was also no secret. The rise of the prophets in the Old Testament came with the system of kings. Before the Kings you had Judges. Then Kings came on the scene and God’s method of communicating his will to the King was through prophets. They often performed allegorical acts or condemned the actions of a king directly. So, it was completely appropriate for John to criticize Herod for taking his brother’s wife. And it was, completely predictable that he would be killed.
John was the last of the Prophets, just like Samuel was the last judge and the first prophet to the kings. Both represent a change. The change was brought about by the faithful prayers of a woman, Hannah, Elizabeth and Mary, each a woman who was saved by childbirth (I Timothy 2:15) and who saved her people. Rather than blaming the leaders for their problems they raised faithful children with their prayers and remade the world. Rather than wallowing in depression, or getting a dog, they followed the Word of God and brought blessings to all.