2 Samuel 6:1-19
Mark 6:14-29
SERMON “Head on a Plate”
I like opera, one of the few things that allows me to keep my gay card, but my taste in opera is rather suspect. I like Puccini, so that goes in the plus column, but I also quite like modern operas, works by Thea Musgrave’s “Simon Bolivar,” John Adams’ “Death of Klinghoffer,” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” dubious taste to the tasteful folks up in the Muppets boxes who really just want to see “Tosca” for the twentieth time.
I can take or leave Wagner, life being finite and the Ring cycle seemingly infinite. At my crankiest, I wonder if I’m listening to a work by Richard Strauss, or someone strangling a cat, despite the critical acclaim in his lifetime and his stellar partnerships. You have never heard of his first two attempts at opera, Guntram and Feuersnot, but his third opera was a smash hit. “Salome” opened in 1905 with a libretto by Oscar Wilde. Stefan Zweig, one of the most popular authors of the age, served as librettist for three of Strauss’ works and the inspiration for a fourth.
And before you wonder if you have stepped into a music history lecture rather than a sermon, I should explain that Salome, subject of that wildly successful third opera, is maybe or maybe not the young woman who asks for the head of John the Baptizer.
The Greek manuscripts are a mess, so scholars debate whether it is Herodias, daughter of Herodias or otherwise unnamed daughter of Herodias. A non-biblical source, “Antiquities of the Jews,” written in 94 C.E. by Flavius Josephus, names Salome as a step-daughter of Herod Antipas, and this has dubiously stuck in the popular imagination, at least the popular imagination of people who imagine ancient decapitations.
This is the same Herod who is portrayed in the Passion narratives, Rome’s puppet-ruler in Galilee, not to be confused with his father, Herod the Great, who restored the Temple and ordered the murder of the infants of Bethlehem, or his brother, Herod II, one time puppet-ruler of Judea who was replaced by direct Roman rule under Pontius Pilate. Herod II is mistakenly called Philip in the Gospel According to Mark, though other sources say that it is Salome who is eventually married to another brother of Herod Antipas, her uncle Philip. You got all that? There may be a pop quiz…
In the opera and in art, Salome is usually portrayed as a young woman, a femme fatale, when the Greek text indicates she is in fact a child. Either way, she is used by her mother to set in motion the execution of John the Baptizer. The reason has to do with the usual scheming of the elite. Herod the Great killed a couple of sons, disinherited another, women married uncles and half-brothers, including the Herod in our reading who is married to Herodias, his brother’s ex-wife. The attempt to keep wealth and power in the family is pretty much the same today, maybe with a little less inbreeding, though I sometimes wonder.
John the Baptizer had a thing or two to say about this conduct, especially the incestuous marriages, which ran contrary to Jewish law. But Herod Antipas both respected and feared John as a religious reformer, as indicated in our text, hence John’s survival in captivity. That is until a girl/woman named something or another dances, and Mommy gets her revenge.
The execution of John the Baptizer fits the religious framework for Israelite prophets, persecuted and sometimes executed, and foreshadows the later execution of Jesus. In both cases, reluctant rulers, Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate, are manipulated by third parties to order the execution of someone who is innocent in the eyes of God. But this is really where the comparison stops.
No special or divine meaning is attached to the human violence in the murder of the Baptizer. It fits nicely, however, in the mimetic theory of Rene Girard, source of our first reading this morning, so much so that it merits an entire chapter in his foundational text.
If that murder is set as senseless human violence, our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures depicts senseless divine violence, though it does share the provocative dancing. Uzzah reaches out to steady the Ark of the Covenant when the cart carrying it hits rough ground, and is immediately killed by an angry god.
This is a stupid story. We brush it off immediately as nonsense. God would never act that way! A god who would do this, would engage in this senseless violence, would not be good.
And yet, we do not blush in the face of divine violence slaughtering the first-born males of Egypt, even of the livestock. We do not blush when we hear that God uses foreign nations to destroy first Israel and then Judah as punishment for religious infidelity.
We do not blush when we are told that God demanded the brutal torture and execution of Jesus in order to reconcile with humankind. For as Girard notes, like every people in every age, we sanctify that violence.
And Girard, atheist French philosopher driven to Christianity by his studies, says that God in the crucifixion is showing the emptiness of human violence, the senselessness of human violence, for the scapegoat hanging on the cross is wholly and holy innocent, as was Uzzah, as was John the Baptizer, as was the eldest son of the Pharaoh.
And yet we still try to sanctify violence. We declare some wars to be both holy and wholly good, wars like World War II, raising our brutality to levels of Homeric heroism, forgetting that the ancient Homeric narrative is not flat and simple, not just the violence of the gods, but is human ego, vengeance, and sexual violence. And where a war is clearly bad, which usually means we lost, we still valorize those who murdered on our behalf, “thank you for your service!,” to women and men who are morally injured and sometimes physically devastated by what they have done in our name.
There is a straight line between the cult of “the greatest generation” and those who seek to turn the United States into an oppressive violent theocracy that considers women to be ultimately disordered and unclean, that would drive out all that is queer and non-Christian, that would make us a Euro-Christian version of Iran.
And we, all too often, participate in the cult of war, telling the story of the children at Auschwitz, and ignoring the children of Dresden, the children of Nagasaki, the children held at Manzanar.
There is violence in creation. There are predators and prey. The cycle of life is quite efficient, when we get out of the way, at balancing populations and circulating the raw materials of life. It is a quite miraculous system. But there is a special evil in intra-species violence, a violence at which primates excel, and none more so than homo sapiens.
Every single time we seemingly celebrate a violent patriotism, we must include a confession. For our violence is always a failure.
Even if only the bad guy dies in the shootout, we must ask why she or he did not receive the care they needed, why they were not surrounded by community, why they grew up with parental violence or violent religion, why they had access to the tools of violence, and these are our failures, hence our confession.
If we accept stories of stupid divine violence, then we leave room for stupid human violence.
Here the head of a prophet on a plate, there a brutalized body on a cross, as countless bodies hung on crosses throughout the empire, a reminder of human violence, which Rome saw as justified, violence for the greater good in the name of the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, that was maintained through un-peace.
As the curtain rises on the modern opera by John Adams, we find ourselves on the MS Achille Lauro, a cruise ship registered to Rome’s modern successor, and named after a prominent figure in Mussolini’s Fascist regime. And there are the terrorists from the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and there is Leon Klinghoffer, Jewish-American, a navigator on B24 bombers dropping bombs in that supposedly good war, then longtime successful businessman. And as the hijacking of the cruise ship goes on, as Klinghoffer is murdered and throw overboard, there is nothing sacred, no justice to be found, and while the Anti-Defamation League may bully those who might perform the opera, it tells only one story, that of violence begetting violence, of endless cycles of despair, and of nothing that is sacred except the lives of those who are lost, whether alive or dead.
God help us that we might cherish the lives of every human born of every mother, this day and always.
Amen.