July 12, 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Mark 6:14-29
I like the Gospel of Mark, with its many abrupt, surprising acts that take place “suddenly” and “immediately.” It sometimes seems a little breathless—as though the story is still being told, years after the fact, with utter astonishment. And I like Mark’s frequent mention of how people felt: the crowds were “amazed.” The disciples were “filled with fear.” Everyone “marveled.” A woman “felt in her body that she was healed,” and she approached Jesus “with fear and trembling.” The book ends (at least in one version) with just such an aside about the feelings of the women at Jesus’ empty tomb: “trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
In this week’s text, Herod’s conflicted feelings about John the Baptist provide a curious footnote to a dark story of jealousy, seduction, and murder. Mark says Herod is “greatly perplexed.” The tetrarch is afraid of the prophet, intrigued by him, puzzled, and threatened—but disinclined to hurt him. It is not an unusual predicament. King Lear might have felt this way about his candid fool; Captain Ahab about his sober first mate, Starbuck; Henry VIII about his friend Thomas More, who set a standard of conscience the king couldn’t meet; George Wallace about Martin Luther King, whose prophetic voice trumped the power of the governor’s office. Prophets and political leaders have generally been at uneasy odds, often bound in intimate enmity that leaves the latter greatly perplexed.
It is easy to see how prophets threaten established power, especially where power is being abused. What is not so obvious is how the prophet’s greatest success may lie in the perplexity of the powerful—how the prophet’s job is not only to speak truth but also to bemuse. The root meaning of perplexity is “completely entangled.” When perplexed we find ourselves wound up in the strands of a problem, unable quite to distance ourselves or to retreat into indifference. Herod seems to harbor this kind of fascination for the wild man who wandered his territory eating locusts and honey and preaching some sort of sedition. The most poignant note in the record of Herod’s tragic self-betrayal is the simple observation, “yet he liked to listen to him.”
