Dancing at Death


Sermon by Derek Thomas on June 27, 2004 Mark 6:14-29

The
Lord’s Day Evening
June 27, 2004


Mark 6:14-29
“Dancing at Death”

Dr.
Derek Thomas

I think it has to mean something
that you’re singing a hymn that’s over a thousand years old, and we still
believe those words a thousand years later: that the blood of the martyrs is
indeed the seed of the church. And I chose that hymn, I searched in vain for
the right hymn before this evening’s service, last week, in our Trinity
Hymnal
. We’re dealing with a very solemn, solemn account of the death and
beheading of John the Baptist in Mark, chapter six. Our reading this evening
occurs in the Gospel of Mark, chapter six, and beginning at verse fourteen.

And while you’re looking for
that, let me say that this is the last sermon in Mark for a little while. I
think –Ligon and I haven’t signed the dotted line, but I think we’re picking
this up in the fall on Wednesday nights. I think that’s what we’re going to
do. But beginning next week and running through July and August, I begin a new
series on the doctrine of guidance, and there’s some information on that in that
little brochure that came to you. And if you didn’t get one, there’s one lying
around here somewhere.

Now, before we read the
Scriptures together, let’s come before God in prayer.

Our Father, once again we
bow in Your presence. Help us not to take it for granted, the means of grace
that we as but mortals can come and speak to You, the immortal, ever-living God
of heaven and earth. We thank You now for Your Word, and for this particular
passage in Mark’s gospel, and the account of the death of John the Baptist.
Though dead, he still speaks to us, and we thank You for the assurance that he
is indeed alive, and that his soul is in Your presence and mingles with angels
and archangels in Your praise and adoration. We pray that as we read Your Word
that we might read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest all that it contains. And
we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Mark 6:14:

“And King Herod heard of it…” (and I need to pause and explain what it is
that he heard, and just before it is the account of the sending of the disciples
two by two into all of the villages and towns of Galilee, and I suggested last
week that that could have taken as much as five or six months to accomplish, and
during that time, and what resulted in that missionary journey of the disciples,
King Herod heard of it.) “His name had become well known, and people were
saying ‘John the Baptist has risen from the dead, and that is why these
miraculous powers are at work in Him.’ But others were saying, ‘He is Elijah.”
And others were saying, “He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.” But
when Herod heard of it, he kept saying, “John, whom I beheaded, has risen!” For
Herod himself had sent and had John arrested and bound in prison on account of
Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip, because he had married her. For John
had been saying to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s
wife.” (19) And Herodias had a grudge against him and wanted to put him to
death, and could not do so; for Herod was afraid of John, knowing that he was a
righteous and holy man, and kept him safe. And when he heard him, he was very
perplexed; but he used to enjoy listening to him. And a strategic day came when
Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his lords and military commanders and
the leading men of Galilee; and when the daughter of Herodias herself came in
and danced, she pleased Herod and h is dinner guests; and the king said to the
girl, “Ask me for whatever you want and I will give it to you.” And he swore to
her, “Whatever you ask of me, I will give it to you; up to half of my kingdom.”
And she went out and said to her mother, “What shall I ask for?” And she said,
“The head of John the Baptist.” And immediately she came in haste before the
king and asked, saying, “I want you to give me right away the head of John the
Baptist on a platter.” And although the king was very sorry, yet because of his
oaths and because of his dinner guests, he was unwilling to refuse her. And
immediately the king sent an executioner and commanded him to bring back his
head. And he went and had him beheaded in the prison, and brought h is head on
a platter, and gave it to the girl; and the girl gave it to her mother. And
when his disciples heard about his, they came and took away his body and laid it
in a tomb.”

Amen. And may God bless to us
the reading of His holy and inerrant Word.

Patrick Hamilton was 24 years
old when he died in 1528, in St. Andrew’s, in Scotland. He had written a book
by the name of Loci communes,
a sort of systematic theology. And
in it he had defended the doctrine that Ligon expounded on this morning: the
doctrine of justification by faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone. And for that,
he was charged with thirteen charges–charges of heresy, and he was taken out
and burnt at the stake. He was 24 years old.

This passage before us tonight
is about the death, or the martyrdom, of John the Baptist. There are, in fact,
only a couple of passages in Mark’s gospel that are not directly about Jesus,
and both of them are about John the Baptist. Jesus, you remember, said of John,
that “…among those born of women, there has not risen anyone greater than John
the Baptist.”

“I came to Irvine…” ( a place in Scotland…this is
an account of an English businessman who went on a trip from London to Scotland,
and he’s recalling the trip)… “I came to Irvine and heard a well-favored,
proper, old man…” (he’s referring to David Dixon) “…with a long beard, and that
man showed me all my heart. Then I went to St. Andrew’s, where I heard a sweet,
majestic-looking man…” (he’s referring to Robert Blair) “…and he showed me the
majesty of God. After him, I heard a little, fair man…” (and he’s speaking of
Samuel Rutherford) “…and he showed me the loveliness of Christ.”

Now, I daresay we would all want
to hear Samuel Rutherford, who showed this man the loveliness of Christ, but in
God’s purposes there is a place, too, for the David Dixon’s of this world: a
man who will show you your heart, a man who will show you your sin, and your
need. It takes an extraordinary amount of courage to be a man like John the
Baptist. I suppose if you could choose who you would want to be, I don’t
suppose there’s anyone in here who would want to be John the Baptist. You’d
need therapy, I suppose, if you did.

I’ve been thinking about John
all week: this extraordinary man, this strange man; this man who lived out in
the desert; this man who ate locusts and wild honey; this man took Nazarite
vows, whose hair was never cut, and so on; never imbibed alcohol; never touched
the carcass of a dead person; this man whose message was always about
repentance; and, he preached the law of God; he called men and women to account,
and to their accountability before God. And it takes a great deal of courage
and of conviction to be a man like that, especially to point out the sins of the
great and powerful, like Herod Antipas.

Mark, you’ll note, refers in
verse 14 to Herod Antipas as King Herod. You know, technically, he
wasn’t a king. He was a tetrarch. He’s one of the sons of Herod the Great.
Now, it’s one of those quiz questions that you have in ordination exams. There
are four Herod’s in the New Testament, and it’s so very easy to get them
confused, and I looked at several sermons in the course of the week, on John the
Baptist, and several have got the Herod’s confused. And I’ve got this feeling
in my head I’m going to get one of these Herod’s confused tonight!

There are four of them in the Bible. This is the
son of Herod the Great. Herod the Great is the Herod who’s alive when Jesus is
born. Herod the Great dies at around 4 B.C., or so. And just after–I know you
think Jesus was born at “zero”, but that’s not actually true, He was born before
that, we won’t go into that now–he is the Herod who is responsible for the
massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem. He dies when Jesus is in Egypt. And at
his death, he divides his large kingdom between his three sons, one of whom,
Herod Antipas, gets the territory of Galilee (and if you’ve got a map in the
back of your Bible, perhaps you need to look at this), but he gets the territory
of Galilee to the north and west of the Sea of Galilee, and also a strip of land
going all the way down the eastern side of the River Jordan, and almost half-way
down the Red Sea, the region of Perea. He’s not, technically, a king. He
would call himself king much later, actually after Jesus has died, by the behest
of his wife, Herodias, he begins to call himself king. It gets him, as you can
imagine, into an enormous amount of trouble with the Roman emperor in Rome. He
gets banished to Gall, and ends up dying in Spain. Mark is writing after all of
this, and I think Mark is just being a little bit sarcastic. ‘This is “King
Herod,” you understand, the man who thought he was king.’

Let’s look at this somewhat
solemn account tonight, of the death of John the Baptist. His last few hours
here on earth, his courage, his bravery, his resolution to follow the Lord no
matter what, and it costs him his life.

I. Herod’s sin.
First of all, I want us
to see Herod’s sin. Herod’s sin. What led this man, Herod, to have John the
Baptist killed? Herod Antipas married Herodias. Herodias was the wife of his
brother Philip–you remember, Herod the Great has three sons, one of whom is
called Philip Herod–Herod Philip–and this is the wife of Herod Philip. He
marries his brother’s wife. His affair with his sister-in-law was well known
and widely spoken about. It had led to the divorce of his first wife. His
first–follow this!–his first wife’s father was also a king. He had a kingdom
just to the south of Perea. His name was King Aretas. He will go to war
against King Herod Antipas much later in the story that’s being recorded here,
and he will lose that battle.

Marriage to the ex-wife of one’s
brother was actually not uncommon. Actually, after all, Herod Antipas’ father,
Herod the Great, had perhaps a dozen or so wives, and not necessarily in
succession.

Herodias–and now it gets
complicated–because Herodias was also a niece to Herod Antipas, and in marrying
his sister-in-law, who was also his niece, he had violated Levitical law. He
had violated Levitical law, and John the Baptist, even though he is technically
outside of the land of Israel as such, John the Baptist calls him to account for
violating the moral law of God. And calls him, publicly, a sinner–that he has
broken God’s law. John the Baptist teaches God’s Word to one of the most
powerful figures in the land at that time. The brother of Herod Antipas, who
was ruling over the territory that we would think of as Jerusalem and its
surrounds, has long since gone. He actually only lasted for maybe five or six
years. He made a complete mess of it, and he was removed. So, technically,
there is no ruler apart from Pontius Pilate, who is the Roman delegate of that
particular territory.

So here’s John the Baptist: the
courage, the conviction to preach God’s Word, to preach God’s law–John has
called him into line. In verses 17 and 18, it was Herod who “had sent and
seized John and bound him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother
Philip’s wife, because he had married her. For John had been saying to Herod,
it is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” He wasn’t talking here
about what we might call “party politics.” He’s talking here about God’s law.
He’s talking here about the Ten Commandments. He’s talking here about the moral
code.

Herod was a powerful man. Herod
had built one of the most prestigious cities in honor of one of the Roman
emperors, Tiberius. He had founded the city of Tiberius, on the southwest shore
of the Sea of Galilee. Unfortunately, this city had been built on what was a
Jewish graveyard, and this had caused not a little measure of unrest in
Galilee. The people were angry with Herod Antipas. He was a Jewish leader–at
least, he liked to play the Jewish card. Apparently Herod Antipas would
occasionally go to Jerusalem, and he would celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem.
You remember what Jesus called Herod Antipas: “that fox,” He called him. “That
sly fox.” And John the Baptist, the courage of it! It’s like John Knox, isn’t
it? If you’ve ever read the story of John Knox in the early Reformation in
Scotland, calling Queen Mary –“Bloody Mary,” as John Fox came to call
her–calling her to account. You remember what Bloody Mary, Queen Mary said of
John Knox, that she “feared his prayers more than the gathered armies of
Europe.” And here is John the Baptist. The courage of it! Calling public
officialdom into line with the moral code, the moral law of God.

We live in an age, you and I,
when public sins of this sort are common. Yes, they are. We’ve just lived
through a period where our own president questions the meaning of what “is”
means. Over this very issue.

And here is John. Think about
him for a moment. Let his courage, let his steadfastness, let his zeal for the
honor and the integrity of the law of God seep under your skin a little.
Because this was Herod’s sin. He called King Herod, Herod Antipas, the ruler,
the tetrarch of Galilee and Perea–he called him a sinner, and called him to
repentance before the justice of God.

II. Herod’s conscience.
The second thing I
wanted us to see is Herod’s conscience. Herod’s conscience. The historian,
Josephus, tells us that John was executed in a place called Machaerus. Now, if
you can imagine a map of Palestine during the time of Jesus, and if you’ve got
one in the back of your Bible, just take a look at it. You see Galilee up in
the north, and then the River Jordan. Then, down below you’ve got that long
stretch of water, the Dead Sea. And to the east of that about half way down and
to the east, you’d find Machaerus. On the other side of the Dead Sea, you’ve
got places like Hebon and En Geddi. So it’s a long way from Tiberius. It’s
desert. If you go there today, today it’s in western Jordan, of course, but if
you go there today, it’s a hilly, woodless, desert. It’s a rocky desert.

And on one of the promontories
was built this magnificent palace. Herod the Great had begun this great
building, and Herod Antipas, the son, completed it. And this is where he would
go for his summer vacations–like many of you would go down south to the beach,
somewhere, Herod Antipas would go to this place called Machaerus. Josephus
describes Machaerus as “magnificently spacious, with beautiful apartments.” And
deep under the palace were dungeons, and in one of these dungeons (and by the
way, you can go and see the dungeons–you won’t see any of the palace, that’s
long since gone–but you can actually visit the dungeons. To this day you can
see some of the iron work that–well, according to archeologists may well go back
to this very period of time, and may be some of the iron work in which John the
Baptist would have been tied to). And deep in those dungeons, John the Baptist
was imprisoned, and bound. And Herod–and imagine this–Herod would go down
there, and he would listen to John the Baptist. Evidently, John the Baptist
would preach to him. John the Baptist would open up the Word of God to him.
He’d bring before him his great need, his sin, that he had violated the law of
God.

Now think about it! Why would
King Herod, why would this powerful, powerful man–why would he be afraid of this
wild man from the desert? This crazy man from the desert? Why would he be
afraid of him? Why would he need to lock John the Baptist in a dungeon in this
fortified palace in the middle on nowhere? For the same reason that modern
Islamic countries are frightened of Christians who display their godliness and
their zeal and commitment for the truth of the Word of God. Why did Mary, Queen
of Scots, say that she feared the prayers of John Knox more than all of the
assembled armies of Europe? Because the testimony of godliness is powerful!
It’s powerful.

Herod knew that he was wrong.
That’s the point. He knew that he was wrong. And that’s why we’re told in verse
twenty, he tried to protect John. Protect him? Yes–from his wife. This
powerful king, this powerful figure, is trying to protect John from his wife!
This man would speak to Herod’s conscience. You remember there is another
figure in the Bible very similar to this one, Felix, who in very similar
circumstances would go to the Apostle Paul and listen to him preach, and then
when Paul, as it were, got under his skin–as you say, Paul began to meddle–he
would shush Paul up and say “no more! I will hear about this some other time.”
And he’ll send him back to his cell.

Do you see what this is saying,
my friends? That it’s not enough to have one’s conscience touched by
something. You can go to hell with a bad conscience–you can go to hell with a
bad conscience. Herod had a bad conscience. John the Baptist was like someone
touching a sore. John the Baptist, as he brought the law of God, was like
somebody exposing something that’s sore. And Herod…Herod had a bad conscience.

III. Herod’s wife, Herodias.
But let’s look in the
third place at Herod’s wife, Herodias. As you can imagine, if John was saying
this marriage was more or less incestuous, you can imagine that she nursed a
grudge against John the Baptist. And she wants John dead. It’s a Lady MacBeth
figure, isn’t it? This is Lady MacBeth urging MacBeth when he’s capitulating,
and he’s lost all of his fiber and energy, and she is the one motivating him.
She is the one who gets her hands bloody! It’s Herod’s birthday. Do you know
this is the only place in the Bible where a birthday is actually mentioned?

And it’s a grand, grand
occasion. And there is this enormous party that must have taken weeks to
organize. Herod has invited all of the important folk in office and in the
military, and those up in Galilee, and they’d take several days, perhaps weeks,
to get from Galilee to this nowhere place called Machaerus. And there’s a
party, and there’s food like you’ve never seen, and there’s wine like you’ve
(hopefully!) never seen, and there’s a show.

And, my, what a show it is! The
queen’s daughter–not Herod Antipas’ daughter, you understand–but the daughter of
his wife’s former husband. She dances before him. Her name (and again, it’s
Josephus who tells us this), of course, is Salome. It’s the stuff of great
literature and opera. Some of you know Richard Strauss’ grand opera, Salome.
It’s– some of you might know Oscar Wilde–hope you don’t know Oscar
Wilde’s book called Salome. This was a men-only occasion. You notice
that this girl has to go outside to speak to her mother. Her mother isn’t
there. It’s a men-only function. I don’t’ need to spell it out to you, do I?
They’re drunk. What’s taking place is obscenity. She’s probably a young girl;
it’s conjectured she might have been fifteen or sixteen years of age. And she’s
got Herod in the palms of her hands. She dances, and Herod is taken with her,
and this sop of an individual says to her, if you do the dance of the seven
veils–that’s basically what he was saying–I’ll give you whatever you want, up to
half of my kingdom.

And she goes out, she asks her
mother. And do you notice, it’s instantaneous: her mother says “ask for the
head of John the Baptist.” And she goes in, and she says to Herod she wants the
head of John the Baptist. And Herod is stunned. He’s caught! Because there’s a
half of him, there’s a part of his conscience which knows that this is wrong!
But he’s given his word, he’s given an oath, and all of these guests are here,
these important people. He can’t step down from this. He can’t be seen to be a
man who breaks his word. And he sends the executioner to the dungeons, and
John’s head—he’s beheaded. She asks for John’s head on a platter.

It’s shocking, isn’t it. It’s
awful. It’s disgusting. Do I need to describe…?… some of you ladies are
shaking your heads. These are two women who asked for this: Herodias
and her daughter.

And John is executed. He’s
dead. There are no last words from John the Baptist. No great speech, like
some of the Covenanters who were executed for their faith, and they gave these
monologues that were recorded and taken down in shorthand, and we can still read
them. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs records all of them for us. Famous last
words of Christians who were put to death. There’s nothing from John the
Baptist. He probably knew very little about it. It came all of an instant to
him.

A man’s lust got him into this.
That’s the power of it. You mess about with lust, men, and you think it’s a
small thing, and it’s a trifling thing, and it breaks your marriage, and it
breaks up your home and it breaks up your reputation. Lust led to this.

You know, this is what
happens to one of God’s choicest saints. Come to Jesus, and you might get your
head cut off: there’s the message.
It must have stunned the disciples when
they heard it. You follow Jesus, and you could get your head cut off. Many of
us are thinking of that South Korean in Saudi Arabia, who was apparently a
professing Christian. I don’t know the details. You know, later Herod would
come face to face with Jesus. He’d ask Him many questions, his conscience still
troubling him. I’m sure he had nightmares, and he especially had nightmares when
he heard the reports of this mission up in the cities and villages of Galilee,
because he kept saying to himself, ‘this is John the Baptist, and he’s risen
from the dead! He’s come back to haunt me!’

IV. Application
What
are we to make of all of this? Let me say quickly three things–very quickly.
There’s a pattern to sin and temptation.
You understand that. There’s
morphology to sin and temptation, that one sin will lead to another. If you can
justify one sin, you can justify two, you can justify three, and you can justify
ten or twenty. And rather than repent of the first sin, Herod performs more and
more sins to try and cover up for the first sin. And that’s what sin is like.
You’re always a slave to it, and you’re never its master. The second thing is
that unconfessed sin will harden your heart to Jesus Christ.
You know, when
Herod met Jesus on the night in which Jesus was betrayed, you might think that
Herod was ripe for the plucking, as it were. But his heart was hardened, my
friends. His heart was hardened because he had refused to repent of his sin.
And the third thing I want us to see, and it’s this, my friends:
that
there are some things for which we must be prepared to die.
Surely that’s a
lesson from this passage. There are some things for which we must surely be
prepared to die.

I wonder what you would die for
tonight. For the honor and glory of Jesus Christ? We all long that we would be
like that in the hour of death. You know, in the 1680’s–oh, we’re forty years
after the Westminster Assembly–it was said that there were three books that were
read in every Christian home in England: the Bible, of course; John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s ProgressFoxe’s Book of Martyrs.

You remember in Pilgrim’s
Progress
, it’s just after Christian has passed through the Valley of the
Shadow of Death, and he comes out on the other side, and there’s a cave. And
there’s an old man standing in the cave, and strewn on the floor are the
corpses–bodies, bones and ashes–of dead people. And this old man says to
Christian, “You will never mend till more of you be burned.” That sounds really
strange, reading it today, I suppose. In the 1680’s it made a whole lot of
sense. It was Bunyan who was in prison, remember. It was Bunyan reminding the
Christian public that it costs something to follow Jesus, and it may cost you
your life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a book called The Cost of
Discipleship
, in which he said, “Every commandment of Jesus is a call to
die.” And on April 9, in 1945, three weeks before the end of the Second World
War, the Nazi’s took him from his prison cell in Flossenburg and hanged him.

My friends, what are you
prepared to die for? As you think about John the Baptist tonight? And though
dead, he still speaks to us. Think of that. What am I prepared to die for?
Let’s pray together.

Our Father in heaven, this is
such a solemn passage. Could we dare to pray that You would make us like John
the Baptist? We feel ourselves so weak, and so easily led to compromise at the
slightest provocation of trial. Steel us, give us courage. Help us to love You
more than this world. And grant that the life of John the Baptist, as it
reflects something of Jesus, might impress itself upon our souls and
characters. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Please stand and receive the
Lord’s benediction. Grace, mercy and peace from God our Father and the Lord
Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.


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