A Reflection for the Memorial of the Passion of St. John the Baptist
"I want you to give me at once
on a platter the head of John the Baptist."
For the last few months, my husband and I have been working our way through some of the TV shows that often show up on the “greatest of all time” lists: ‘The Wire,’ ‘Deadwood,’ ‘Game of Thrones.’ They are great dramas with ensemble casts of tragic characters and webs of intertwined plots, but watching each of them, my stomach has churned at the violence—the utter disregard for human life that the drug dealers, cowboys and despots show.
It would be one thing if this kind of violence were relegated to fiction, but it isn’t: In the evenings I watch the shows, and in the mornings I wake up to news of yet another shooting downtown, an Instagram feed of bloodied Palestinians holding dead or injured children in the rubble, the latest details on the Trump shooter’s homemade explosives. I know I am lucky to be distant from all this violence, watching it unfold on a screen, but it is real, and the weight of that reality sits heavy on my chest.
Today’s memorial commemorates the beheading of John the Baptist, which the New Testament describes as being ordered by King Herod after his wife’s daughter performed a dance that pleased him. In front of all his courtiers, he promised to give the girl whatever she wanted, and on her mother’s orders, she requested the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Herod, the passage says, was “deeply distressed,” but ordered the execution anyway so as not to break his promise in front of the courtiers.
The narrative reads like something out of ‘Game of Thrones’: The king, sympathetic to John but more concerned with maintaining a powerful image, throws away the life of his righteous prisoner, essentially as a party trick. Although the narrative isn’t corroborated by Josephus, an important historian of the time, the beheading of John being ordered by Herod is. The exact unfolding of the drama may be open to debate, but the violent killing of a man today revered as a prophet in several major world religions is a fact.
The passion of John, like the passion of Jesus, holds up a grim mirror to humanity: God sent us an emissary of his love, and this is how we responded—an ax through the neck, nails through the hands, a head on a platter, a spear in the side.
I don’t understand humanity’s obsession with violence, in reality or in fiction, in history or today. It seems to be our preferred response when our sense of power is threatened. Its prevalence, I suppose, underlines just how radical and necessary the message of Christ continues to be: Blessed are the poor, the persecuted, the peacemakers, the merciful.
