READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Revelation 6:9-11
Jeremiah 1:17-19
St. Mark 6:17-29
To you all, the Elect Exiles of the Dispersion; may Grace
and Peace be multiplied to you (1 Pet)
Who speaks to you today, from His Gospel heard in His
Church, saying:
“And immediately the king sent an
executioner with orders to bring John's head. He went and beheaded him in the
prison”
Make no mistake. We live in the Last Days and you all are
witnesses. More to the truth of the word “witness”, you are martyrs for Christ.
Your witness includes death whether its death to sin in baptism or death in
front of councils and their congregations or governors and their constituents
for Christ’s sake (Matt 10:17-18).
So it is that when we speak of the witness of St. John the
Baptist it is always in connection with his death, which we celebrate today,
and it is always in connection with Christ’s death, as is all our witness.
Last week, we spoke of the false idols of self-worship and
how our bodies are hostile to God. when we sin, we sin in our hostile bodies
and when we try not to sin, we try in hostile bodies. We are baptized into the
Resurrection of Christ, and the Word and Sacrament keep us from false idols in
that new life of Faith.
We are also baptized into the death of Christ. Communing
with God is a much better prospect, to us, than dying with God. Yet, if your
goal in life is to be more Christ-like and be His imitator, as Ephesians 5:1
says, then you must realize that imitation of Christ does not end with being as
nice as He was to the poor and the oppressed.
In St. John the Baptist, we truly are brought to understand
that this death is not a metaphor either. We cannot get away with imagining we
are “dead to sin”, it must really happen. St. John faces this very literally,
because for Herod, John must die.
Nothin personal, John, I just have to be able to have my
brother’s wife and her daughter. I am king. God chose me, so I get what I want,
in God’s Name.
Between John and Herod we have a tale of two men who come in
the Name of the Lord and reveal to us a little of who their gods are. One man
reveals a God of the hard life: camel’s hair, wild honey, and locusts and death
for all your trouble. The other reveals rewards for service, pleasure, and most
importantly a long life.
Both gods demand sacrifice. Both gods offer a reward of
sorts. But one gives stability and the other only promises such on the campaign
trail. Herod’s god allowed him his brother’s wife, but demanded payment of his
integrity and apparent belief in what St. John was preaching to him, as is said
of him, “he was greatly perplexed and yet he heard him gladly” from
verse 20 of our Gospel today.
Herod gains an exciting life of hedonism, but its only a
rental. It will fade, he and his excitement will grow old and die. All of his
rewards will fade away as quickly as he got them.
St. John has Jeremiah 1, which we heard this morning. In
those words, God promises to make him, “a fortified city, an iron pillar,
and bronze walls, against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, its
officials, its priests, and the people of the land. They will fight against
you, but they shall not prevail against you”.
Repent! St. John dies, which makes him not so much an iron
pillar, as a broken reed. The Baptist could die, because he already died in
faith. Not just died in the faith, dead. He was already dead when Herod’s
executioner found him, because His God had already filled up that sort of
death.
Yes, St. John will receive his reward in the Resurrection,
but it is not the Resurrection that gets him to that reward, it is the dying of
Jesus Christ. Jeremiah 1 was certainly on the lips of St. John as he was
awaiting his temporal death. But we know for certain they were on Jesus’s lips
as He faced His own suffering and death.
How do you completely defeat your enemy? You beat him at his
strongest, you beat him at his own game, and when he has his greatest weapon.
Sin, death, and the devil have no access to Resurrection, thus they have death.
So where is Jesus?
Three times in St. Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells us, “that
the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the
chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again”
(8:31). That is where Jesus is. He is going to the cross. He is going into
death to force it to produce life.
It is in the dying of Jesus Christ on the cross, that all
things pertaining to salvation and eternal life are procured and secured. It is
not the Resurrection. Easter is there to prove that His claims about being the
Son of God were true (Rom 1:4), to prove that His doctrine is true (Jn 8:28),
and to prove that He is raised and alive today (1 Cor 15:17).
There is also the teaching that all believers in Christ will
then rise to eternal life with Him, but not before death. St. John 11:25-26
says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he
die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never
die.”
Through His suffering and dying, Christ has triumphed over
death. 2 Timothy 1:10, “our Savior Christ Jesus…abolished death and brought
life and immortality to light through the gospel.” “not with perishable things
such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a
lamb without blemish or spot” (1 Peter 1:18-19).
The Christian finds comfort in death, because His
ever-living God has suffered death in his place. Jesus is God’s man Who is made
“a fortified city, an iron pillar, and bronze walls, against the whole land,
against the kings of Judah, its officials, its priests, and the people of the
land. They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you” in
order to conquer death and remove Herod’s and the devil’s greatest weapon.
With that Iron Pillar, St. John can face the Executioner’s
ax, because his death is swallowed up in victory. Death has a full belly.
Having taken into his stomach, God Himself in the flesh, there is no more room
for anything or anyone else’s death. Death’s stomach is also full of
Christ-shaped ulcers that allow Christians to walk out scot-free.
Does Herod think he is doing The Baptist a disservice? On
the contrary, there is no greater prayer that St. John has than, “Come
quickly, Lord Jesus” (Rev. 22:20), “Thy Kingdom come” (Matt 6:10).
He prays thusly, not because he expects the armies of God to swoop down and
destroy Herod. Rather, he expects the armies of God to swoop down and retrieve
him from this world of death.
In fighting your own sinful self, you must die. But your
death must be sufficient. This is why we baptize in the Name of Christ.
Christ’s death is sufficient, cancelling all our debts towards God, and His
resurrection will be ours.
Do not trust in the armies of God to back you up or get you
out of deadly situations. Trust, rather, in your baptism to negate that evil,
cause you to die towards your sin, and be raised to God in new life, because it
was God who worked that in and with you. This is St. John’s confidence and this
is your confidence.
In the washing of regeneration and rebirth in Baptism, God
unites Himself to you. What happens to you happens to Him, but more
importantly, what happens to Him now happens to you. He is immortal, you are
immortal. He is pure, you are pure. He has conquered sin, death, and the devil,
and in Him “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Rom 8:37).
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