Readings – 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19; Mark 6: 14–29
“‘He went and beheaded him in the prison, brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl.”
In the name of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Salome receiving John the Baptist’s head on a platter is one of the most grizzly images in the Gospels. It remains shocking not least because so many Christians have died throughout the ages for telling powerful rulers truths that they don’t want to hear. When you next go to Salisbury, look at the rows of statues which adorn the West Front of the Cathedral – there is a helpful Wikipedia article which has information on each one of the one hundred and ninety-six of them – and note how many of them were martyred for their faith.
The last few decades have added to the numbers of those martyred for speaking truth to power. I think of St Oscar Romero, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador, who was shot dead by members of a far-right militia as he celebrated Mass in a hospital chapel in 1980; or Jerzy Popiełuszko, the Polish priest hunted down four years later by secret policemen of the then Communist regime in his country. In our own Anglican tradition Janani Luwum, the Archbishop of Uganda, was martyred in 1977 by Idi Amin for protesting that dictator’s murderous rule. Few people seem to know of the seven brave Anglican monks of the Melanesian Brotherhood, murdered in 2003 by a warlord in the Solomon Islands as they tried to mediate during a period of interethnic fighting. So, let me remember by name from this pulpit Nathaniel Sado, Robin Lindsay, Francis Tofi, Tony Sirihi, Alfred Hill, Patteson Gatu, and Ini Paratabatu.
Nor have these martyrs all been clergy and religious. Brave laypeople have also given their lives for refusing to collude in the lies of repressive régimes, like Steve Biko, the practising Anglican and founder of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, beaten to death by the police of the apartheid state.
David Russell praying with victims of homophobic violence in Cape Town, 26 August 2011, © Gerry Lynch
Indeed, it was in South Africa that I definitively got to know a prophet: David Russell, who was Bishop of Grahamstown from 1987 until 2004. David radiated the peace of Christ and was very good to me at a difficult time. He could have had a much easier life than the one he led. South Africa-born, he came to England to train for the priesthood and studied to postgraduate level at Oxford. As such an able man, he could have become a Prince Bishop of the Church of England, and campaigned against the repressive government of his homeland from a powerful pulpit. Even in South Africa, he could have ministered in a White suburban parish, and challenged the government from there. That wouldn’t have been entirely comfortable, but it would have been a lot easier than what he chose to do. Instead, he rejected the arrant heresy that a priest must be of the same race as the people he or she serves by ministering in illegal shantytowns on the Cape Flats, home to people banned from living in the second city of their own country simply because of the colour of their skin. This led to several years of house arrest, an actual spell of imprisonment, and being constantly spied upon by the security services. It also led him to meet his wife, to become a highly respected bishop important in his country’s transition to democracy, and in the fullness of time to become an officially honoured national hero. While some prophets face death, David lived to find a sort of Resurrection in his later years.
Our Old Testament reading this morning was about another David, the great King David, at a moment of political triumph. While his kingdom had flaws, and David himself had serious flaws, that so much of its culture and literature survives and is appreciated three thousand years later gives witness to this being an unusually gifted and enlightened reign. The kingdom David ruled would outlive him by nearly four hundred years, but it was eventually destroyed by our old friend Nebuchadnezzar II. All earthly kingdoms eventually crumble, just as all earthly lives eventually end. Why this is relevant this morning is that my friend, Bishop David, was perceived as being all about challenging political injustice and building the Kingdom of God on Earth. Yet today’s democratic South Africa, which he helped to being about, is hardly utopia. So it is important to note that there was also a profoundly transcendent dimension to his faith.
Just weeks before the world shut down last year, I was doing research for my Master’s degree in the South African church archives in Johannesburg when I stumbled upon something a little photocopied booklet that David had written about evangelism. It was one of the most beautiful bits of Christian writing I have ever read. In it, David wrote that to share our faith with others we must display the wounds of Jesus Christ.
John the Baptist witnessed to his faith in Christ by losing His head; you will be relieved to hear that I do not think most of us are called to martyrdom. The Church needs its Marys and John the Evangelists, as well as its Baptists. But all of us bear wounds and scars on our bodies and in our souls because that is the nature of the human condition. I have long believed that our wounds are our most powerful witness to the Resurrection; Thomas was only convinced of the Resurrection when he was able to touch the risen Christ’s wounds. The Church certainly needs its Thomases – and where will it find them if at least some o0f us will not display our wounds?
So here’s a story of some of my wounds and how they confirmed me in my faith that there is eternal life, and it is as Jesus Christ taught, as told in the Scriptures.
As some of you know, the love of my life was a man very much older than me; and in the way of very old men, there came a point when his body started to break down. One winter Friday, he was struck by a vicious chest infection, leaving him both delirious and suffering physically. I had him given the last rites. It was a crucifixion for him, and most of you will have experienced the crucifixion of tending to a suffering loved one who is essentially beyond help. Nobody could tell me whether he was going to linger for days or for months, so on Sunday evening I had to leave him – by that stage he was in a nursing home – and travel back to Wiltshire to go to work the next day. I prepared myself for the possibility that I would never see him alive again.
I managed to take a few days off at the end of the week, and got back to him on Thursday morning. The staff had told me he had improved a bit, but it was still a shock to find him sitting up in a chair being washed and shaved by his carers, with a beaming smile, and full of chat. I had to let the carers finish their jobs, so I wandered round the grounds of the home, stunned. I bumped into one of the other residents, a rather old-fashioned priest, whom I doubt accepted same-sex relationships easily. And I just said to him, “Chris is sitting up in a chair chatting and for the first time I know what St Thomas felt when he touched Christ’s wounds.” And he answered me, “Ah, Gerry, we love singing about Resurrection but we don’t like going through the things we need to to get there.”
The following night, I visited a close friend who has no Christian Fith and told him the story. He just said, “Now you’ll have to get ready for the Ascension.” And that’s just how it happened, because just when we thought he was over his illness, Chris died the following Monday, suddenly and peacefully, with a cup of tea in his hand. In fact his last words, said to his favourite carer, were: “Thanks. That’s a lovely cup of tea.”
Crucifixion and death, these are inescapable realities of the human condition, not least in this time of pandemic; but so are Resurrection and Ascension, stamped everywhere in the structures of the universe, from the way the beetles and the worms turn dead trees into rich soil for more trees, to the fact that our physical existence depends on chemical elements formed when stars ended their lives in supernovas, billions of years before our Earth was even formed.
Our supposedly rational, scientific, culture always runs a risk of bludgeoning us with so many facts that it blinds us to transcendent truths. Our era also tends to be rather in love with its own sense of enlightened progress, despite the way in which we’ve made a mess of our environment, and despite the fact that billions of people, from North Korea to Belarus to Ethiopia, still live under despots who are much like Herod. Don’t put your trust in our supposed cleverness and enlightenedness, but instead trust, as John the Baptist did, that Jesus Christ is the Messiah; for in that trust is the path to Resurrection, and in Devizes in 2021, it is unlikely to cost you your head.
Now to the only wise God our saviour, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.
