by Parrish W. Jones, Ph.D.
©All rights reserved 2000

Mark 6:14-29

Humans seem to like spectacles. We just finished celebrating one of the most spectacular holidays of the year, July 4th. The celebrations of that weekend show how much we love spectacles. Fireworks, picnics, and grand services of worship and patriotic ceremonies punctuate the weekend.

Besides holidays are the huge events of sports and entertainment that happen nearly every day in our nation and around the world. Two weeks ago our mission team from the Presbytery of Redstone was returning from Mexico. The other minister on the team and I went into the bar in the St. Louis airport to talk and have a beer. As we talked we glimpsed the ball game. St. Louis was playing someone. But what a spectacle! St. Louis was behind by one run in the 7th inning when someone came to bat and hit a home run. Moments later with two men on base, another batter hit a homerun. What a spectacle of enthusiasm swept the stands and I guess all of St. Louis and perhaps the uttermost parts of the U.S.

The announcers were beside themselves. That homerun was the fifth or sixth of the game. Finally, baseball is becoming a reasonably exciting game because homeruns are not so rare as in the old days. I don't like baseball because for the most part in my life it lacked spectacle.

Turning another direction consider entertainment. This summer there are two films portraying the Roman spectacle of the coliseum. There are more action films than one can count. The Dinosaurs appear alive and well on the actual face of the earth. There is a movement afoot in the film industry that requires that the next film be more daring, more animated and more spectacular than the one before. The next sitcom on TV has to be more sexy, more daring, more risqué than the ones last year. Advertising has to be funnier, glitzier, more sexy, and daring, or all of the above, or we won't buy the product. Sometimes even the quality of the event is determined by its cost. If it did not cost enough, it was not good.

In the midst of this spectacle laden world, people ask, "What ever happened to our values?" "Why are our kids killing each other?" "Why do little league and soccer dads punch each other out?" "What is happening to our world?" And you are asking, "What's this got to do with Herod killing John the Baptist.?"

This love for the spectacular is nothing new. The purpose and point of the spectacle and entertainment has not changed for thousands of years. The conflict between the spectacle and what we call humanistic, if not Christian values, is as old as the day Herod ordered that John the Baptist be beheaded.

The context of this decapitation must be noted. Jesus has come to preach Good News and Mark sets from his first verse a conflict between the Good News of Jesus and the Good News of the world. So does it surprise us that there is a conflict today between the good news of our world and the good news of the Gospel.

In Jesus day the good news of the empire was that Rome had conquered another nation. It mattered little or perhaps a lot that perhaps hundreds of the conquered people had been slaughtered in the process. Today, we celebrate U.S. victories just as ardently and ignore the innocent people who get maimed and mutilated in the process. We are told that contemporary weapons permit a cleaner war but fail to be told or to hear that warfare affects civilians far more today than ever before.

In Jesus day the spectacle of the coliseum was designed for two purposes—bloodthirsty entertainment for the masses and reinforcement of the authority of the emperor or governor over life and death. The message sent at the coliseum is that the emperor or governor has arbitrary control over the lives of their subjects.

Marks Gospel shows Jesus bringing a different good news which was that the good news of the empire is bad news. Jesus comes to liberate people from what really oppresses them whether that be the demons of the mind or the demons of government, whether it be the physical infirmities that oppress them or the moral bankruptcy of government, whether the mindlessness of everyday struggle or the mindlessness of the spectacle.

One of the purposes of the spectacles of Rome was to take the minds of the people off their misery. That is to anesthetize the masses to the moral reality of their day, which is to say their misery and the real cause of their misery. Has anything changed? So the good news was that one gladiator had beaten and cut off the head of another. The St. Louis Cardinals cut off the head of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The good news of Jesus is that what really matters is that the kingdom of God is at hand: how do you know? The blind see, the deaf hear, the crazy man becomes sane, the dead are raised, and Herod decapitates John the Baptist as a gift to his lusty step-daughter.

Wow! Rewind! Back up a bit! It's good news that Herod decapitated John the Baptist?

Yes and no! Notice that this event occurs between the rejection of Jesus by his home town that led to his first mission trip with his youth group we call his disciples. Following the beheading of John the Baptist, Jesus feeds the five thousand.

Jesus family and home town folk found it hard to understand the fame of Jesus so Jesus sent his disciples elsewhere. Jesus's fame has spread throughout the Middle East and Herod was asking who this guy was. Notice the contrast of poverty and blessing.

Then this most impoverished of all scenes taking place in the lap of luxury. How seedy? How base? How lascivious? How immoral? How amazingly spectacular it is? A grand birthday feast, a spectacular dance, and a spectacular gift that demonstrates Herod's power over life.

But in Mark Herod's power is shown in all its mythological grandeur. This is no power. Herod has no more power over life and death than he has moral credibility. His behavior not only is base but a debasement of anything that counts as human.

One wonders why all Mark says of this is that John's disciples buried John. We may say to Mark, "How can you just say this and then let it pass?"

But Mark doesn't. Mark has much to say about it. The good news is Jesus. We do not have time to deal with the Five Thousand because you will only tolerate a 15 minute sermon. But let me give it to you in a shot. Jesus feels impoverished—in need of rest—perhaps by the sense of moral drain over the news about John or perhaps because they were tired from the mission trip. Have you ever taken a youth group on a mission trip? But he sees the crowds and their impoverishment—no shepherd. Then from their poverty of means—apparently there are only two fish and five loaves of bread among them—he provides wealth.

Here we see the moral brilliance of the spectacle of the feeding and the moral bankruptcy of the human created entertainment industry. We fool ourselves if we think there is any difference today. Government and industry like us to be morally distracted so they give us elections, advertisement and entertainment—the contemporary coliseum and state dinner—to distract us from the true poverty physical, emotional and spiritual.

The true spectacle is divinely broken open for us in places like this week in and out as we come before the Lord to be fed on what appears so impoverished. An impoverished world without a shepherd comes to the Shepherd to receive the word of the Lord and to have a loaf broken and the juice of crushed grapes and to be filled full of God's grace, forgiveness, faith, peace, hope, comfort, assurance, love, kindness, joy, and to learn self-control and true value. We then go away filled not with false hopes and confidences but with a clear vision of who and what we are. Then we are able to entertain the human spectacle correctly.