The Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe

July 11, 2021  •  Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Saint Paul’s Within The Walls, Rome

Text: Mark 6:19: “And Herodias had a grudge against him...”

You might think that the people who put the lectionary together, who drew up the plans to appoint for us the readings that we hear every Sunday morning, had some kind of plan in mind. We live in a time rich with conspiracy thinking, where people are easily convinced that there are layers beneath layers beneath layers of meaning that hide some kind of nefarious intent; and many, many preachers fall into the trap of thinking that the lectionary is a kind of conspiracy, and that the job of preaching is the task of ferreting out the true meaning of what the people who chose the lessons intended.

But that turns out to be just plain false. The lectionary we have is a way of making progress through different parts of our scriptures. In the Old Testament, we have been hearing the stories of the kingship of Israel, with Samuel anointing Saul, the first king, and then the emergence of David as the man upon whom God’s favor falls. 

In the Epistles, we begin today a walk through Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, which we won’t finish until after Father Austin returns. And because we are in the second year of the three-year lectionary cycle, most of the gospel readings we hear are taken from the Gospel of Mark.

So all we’re doing is moving down three separate tracks at different rates of speed. There’s no more plan to it than that. Any similarity between these readings and a unifying theme is merely coincidental.

Except wouldn’t you just know—among these randomly chosen readings this morning, there actually is a hint of a unifying theme. I wonder whether you spotted it.

In the first reading we heard this morning, David is bringing the ancient ark of the covenant to a new home near his own house. The story tells us that he dances with all his might as the ark makes its way to its new home. It’s like a crazed procession through the streets, with the king leading the way.

One of the people who sees this spectacle is a woman named Michal. She is the daughter of King Saul—the king whom David has defeated, and replaced. But even more complicated, she is David’s wife; they had married when Saul was still the king. And the very brief appearance we get of her in the story this morning tells us that she looks out a window and sees David leaping and dancing with joy, and she despises him.

Now, maybe she thinks he’s just celebrating himself—giving himself something that centuries later, the emperors of Rome would call a “triumph” through the streets. Or maybe she’s just angry that this is the man who deposed her father from the throne.

But what is clear from the story, and from what follows in the story that unfolds after what we heard, is that this is a woman living with the spiritual malaise of deep, profound resentment. Later on, in a part we didn’t hear, she ridicules David for what he has done; David simply replies that he’d do it again. But the last thing we learn about Michal is this; she never bears children. It is as though the depth of her resentment shuts down the part of her that is life-giving.

Resentment is also the driving force of the story we heard about the execution of John the Baptist from Mark’s gospel. The family of King Herod is, let’s just say, a blended family. Both he and his wife divorced their first spouses to marry each other; to make matters worse, Herodias’s first husband is her present husband’s brother. 

Herod is supposed to be a leader of the Jewish people, a man who both advocates and lives by the Covenant Code of the Torah in the face of Roman occupation. The whole arrangement is offensive to the Jewish faithful. They feel let down by their own king.

John had harshly criticized both Herod and his wife, Herodias, for the choices they had made. Two thousand years later, even our sensibilities are a little offended. It certainly would make for an awkward family reunion. 

The story reads like something out of an opera. Herodias has a daughter, who is also named Herodias—or, in some accounts, Salome. We know what happens. 

But what’s important is why it happens. It happens because of resentment—the resentment of Herodias toward a man who has called her out for her behavior.

In the first story, resentment causes such a soul-sickness that it stops the possibility of life. In the second case, it festers into something that causes death. And before we set these aside as just more bible stories, let’s just stop for a moment and remember—almost every resentment we feel we imagine to be righteousness. 

Michal thought she was on the side of decency and order. Herodias thought she needed to defend her family and her choices. Those things aren’t wrong in themselves. 

But the moment we start feeling resentment that others are misunderstanding us or mistreating us, we start to get into trouble. Because the easiest thing in the world for us to do is to decide we are right as a way of distracting ourselves from honest self-examination. And that feeling of resentment is often a sure symptom of that spiritual sickness.

None of us want to think of ourselves as people who act badly, or think badly. We sit back in sorrow and sadness at how much evil, how much ill will, how much sheer human misery there is in the world. The Golden Rule is having a hard time of it these days. But never do we ourselves imagine that we have any part in it. 

It is both our great skill and our great curse that we are hard-wired to justify ourselves, to regard ourselves as good and decent people. We are not so good at honest and fearless self-examination. We hesitate to light the bonfire for our own vanities.

How can we better at avoiding this all-too-human trap? How can we be people who come to a more honest assessment of ourselves—to have the discipline of seeing ourselves at least a little more like God sees us?

Let’s face it, that is a frightening idea—because if we saw things that way, we’d be brought face-to-face with the desperate reality of our own situation. 

We have been struggling with this question for two thousand years, and it is not clear we in our day have come up with answers any better than our ancestors arrived at. Certainly we have deeper insights into human behavior—but we are not really much better at improving it.  

The wisdom of our faith is the reminder that we should always walk through this world with humility, with the simple, disciplined, practiced recognition that our choices are imperfect, our wills are easily distracted, our best intentions often pathways to our own downfall. 

Baptism, the scriptures tell us, is “an appeal to God for a good conscience”; and if we take that gift seriously, then we are equipped in our baptism with the single most important tool for coming to a right estimate of ourselves and our choices. 

So if the feeling of resentment is always a warning sign of spiritual danger, then the regular practice, the daily practice, of calling to mind our own frailty, of checking in with our conscience—which is not the same thing as shoring up our self-justifications—is the help the Holy Spirit offers to shield us against that danger. Amen.