8th Sunday after Pentecost
Amos 7:7-15; Psalm 85:8-13; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:14-29
The 8th Sunday into the season after Pentecost brings to us an ugly scene full of human moral corruption that is perhaps second only to the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus. Not by coincidence, what takes place is the beheading of our Messiah’s herald, John the Baptizer.
The whole situation stinks. The royal court vassal king Herod Antipas – son of Herod the Great – is rotten to the core, beginning with its head. Antipas, following the footsteps of his father, has surrendered God’s people Israel to the exploitive and abusive Roman economic practices. While the people were being impoverished by their occupiers, their “king” was throwing out parties and banquets on the backs of the people thanks to a taxation system that benefited the upper echelon while depriving the average Israelites of basic dignity. The behavior is so egregious that it risks making an afterthought of the fact that Herod Antipas illegally married his brother Phillip’s wife, Herodias, and seemed infatuated, alongside his male guests, with his stepdaughter. His character is so shallow that he feels he has to save face in front of everybody. He surrenders his actual personal appreciation of John the Baptist to Herodias’s vindictive scheme, which finds in her daughter a willing participant. The young lady adds to the cruelty of the scene by requesting John’s head to be put on a serving plate. Almost forgotten amid all this horror is the courage of John’s disciples, who step to the plate and provide their teacher with an honorable burial.
The prophet Amos is another example of an ordinary person God calls into extraordinary things (Amos: 14-15). Much like the Herodians, King Jeroboam’s royal house had corrupted God’s gracious covenant of peaceful and just prosperity through the Torah – or shalom – by failing to tend to the poor and most vulnerable (Amos 4:1; 5:11; 6:4–6) and by the misguided notion that proper rituals and offerings would cause the privileged to find redemption with God (Amos 2:8; 4:4–5; 5:21–24). These transgressions would cause Jeroboam’s house to find the sword of the Assyrians and send Israel into exile in a distant land (7:11), a proclamation that was rendered true some 30 years later.
Paul proclaims God’s restorative plan for the “fullness of time” through his letter to the early church in Ephesus: redemption through God’s sufficient self-sacrifice at the cross out of God’s good pleasure and lavish grace poured over us, the Beloved (vs.6-10). Those marked with the cross and sealed with the Holy Spirit, who trust in the world of truth and set their hope in Christ, will receive the promised inheritance (12-14).
The psalmist rejoices:
“Let me hear what God the LORD will speak,
for he will speak peace to his people,
to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts.
Surely his salvation is at hand for those who [revere] him,
that his glory may dwell in our land (Psalm 85:8-9; NRSVue).”
Bridging Faith 