Don't Lose Your Head

“Don’t Lose Your Head”
The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

Matthew 14.1-12
"At that time Herod the ruler heard reports about Jesus; and he said to his servants, “This is John the Baptist; he has been raised from the dead, and for this reason these powers are at work in him.” For Herod had arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because John had been telling him, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” Though Herod wanted to put him to death, he feared the crowd, because they regarded him as a prophet. But when Herod’s birthday came, the daughter of Herodias danced before the company, and she pleased Herod so much that he promised on oath to grant her whatever she might ask. Prompted by her mother, she said, “Give me the head of John the Baptist here on a platter.” The king was grieved, yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he commanded it to be given;he sent and had John beheaded in the prison. The head was brought on a platter and given to the girl, who brought it to her mother. His disciples came and took the body and buried it; then they went and told Jesus."

The English language is tough. I know this from studying other languages. Every time I study another language I am convinced: English is a hard to understand. There is the spelling and the constant fight of German and Latin. But what is really tough are all the idioms. The idioms are a real slap in the face. An idiom is a phrase that has a unique meaning in a language that is not easy to see in the literal translation.

To kill two birds with one stone literally means you are a very handy with a rock or you hate birds. That you are good at time management might not leap out. To cut to the chase makes no sense until you are familiar with cinema and that the chase scene in a movie proceeds the conclusion and thus a request to cut to the chase is for a story to have as few details as possible. No one is actually chasing anyone.

We use idioms so often they become invisible. We are under the weather (sick), we have gone cold turkey (sudden abstaining), we are looking for silver linings on clouds as well as a blue moon. We can be in deep water while burying our head in the sand all the while things are up in the air as a rule of thumb.

We can go whole hog or Dutch; we can be born with a silver spoon or go from rags to riches. At some point we all must face the music, pony up or find our feet, not to mention sea legs. There is the idiom of pulling one’s leg which somehow our eldest heard wrong and complained that we were “kicking his knee.” Given how bull headed he was as a boy there was no way under the sun that he would ever believe us. He thought we were pulling the wool over his eyes.

We all need to keep our head on straight and screwed on as well as not lose our head. English is hard enough without all of these idioms. This is one of the reasons I am always mindful of what an accomplishment it is to navigate not only the spelling of English, but the miscues of our conversations. How difficult it must be to understand someone who is on the ball waiting for the dust to settle all the while giving you a run for your money. I mean, this is no piece of cake.

Don’t lose your head can mean stay calm, but in France in the late eighteenth century, it can also mean something quite different. To keep your cool, to be chill, to stay out of hot water, to be all wet or go dry, meant different things at different times. Quite often, as my children remind me so often, no one who is hip says “hip” and to be fashion forward is something I can admire but never achieve.

Idioms come and go. Sometimes what goes is the origin; we no longer know from why we say it. My favorite example is to rain cats and dogs. That means to rain a lot, but the idiom comes from early modern roofs made of mud and thatch where cats and dogs would burrow a hole to sleep, which was fine until a big rain came and then they would literally fall through the ceiling.

Even though our language is always changing, ever in motion, we see it as constant. Definitions, traditions, places of trust: they seem as if they were always that way when in fact there is little that has not been otherwise or other or different. Definitions of family and marriage, gender and caste, race and religion: we think they are eternal, but they are all too pliable. We add insult to injury when we treat what is manufactured as eternal; we trip over ourselves when we treat what is written in the sand as written in stone even when it is the writing on the wall.

There is so much of John the Baptist that is idiomatic, or unique to his role in Jewish history, that we can miss the value of his life and his death. For instance, the idea that John the Baptist is Elijah reborn, returned, is not easy to see, to understand as Elijah is not part of our imagination. Now if I were to say that Elijah was the Superman of Old Testament, then we might begin to see his value. Elijah could bring fire from the sky, make it rain, single handedly slay the priests of Baal, and, wait for it, he could fly. Mostly we remember him as the one who didn’t die but was carried to God in a flying chariot. Yet, even this is iffy in terms of memory no matter how often people have heard or sung, “Swing low Sweet Chariot.”

After John is dead and Jesus asks his disciples who the people believe him to be, they say, Elijah or John raised from the dead. People thought Jesus was a continuation of John and John a continuation of Elijah. A godly person of great power.

While John the Baptist was not recorded as bringing rain or fire, flying or being taken up into heaven, he did take on the establishment, both religious and political. He spoke up about injustice calling the Pharisees a brood of vipers and condemning Herod of conduct unbecoming a leader of the people, or a human being. John was the prophet’s prophet. He lived and he died that way.

Through the years my idea of John the Baptist has changed. I first saw him as a hero of the faith, a martyr, a wild man in the desert. He is yet all those things, but then he changed into something more human. Kierkegaard helped me see him as a human being struggling to make sense of Jesus. Remember John sent his disciples to ask Jesus if he was indeed the Messiah. Jesus responded by saying, blessed is the one who is not offended in me. John the Baptist moved from hero to human.

He stayed that way quite a while until I began to ask a question about time. John was the end of the prophets, the last prophet. I began to ask, what does that mean? Too often Jesus will say something very mysterious and confusing, but since Jesus said it, it must be right and better to just let it be true. And I believe it is true. Just not sure what it means.

Since its inception the church has pondered this question: how is John an ending and Jesus a beginning? How is this a before and after? Something changed. But what?
The more I have sat with the question the more I come to a matter of vengeance and anger, wrath and judgment. Follow me for a second. The prophets are there to warn, to remind, to call a wayward Israel back to the path of righteousness. This tradition begins with Elijah. He is the first great prophet of doom and warning. And this persists through Elisha and Micah, Zephaniah and Zacheriah, Amos and Jonah, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Even in exile there were prophets: Ezekiel and Daniel. John is the end of this age, tradition, time. He is the fullness of the prophets. The ax is at the root he shouted.

And then this changed. Jesus doesn’t do this, shout like this in Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus does not warn of an angry God. He doesn’t tell people there is a time to change before they are destroyed. And there, right there, is the change. Jesus calls people to repent as a prophet does, but he does not warn of doom. He says, I didn’t come to change the law; I came to fulfill it. That is a big difference.

Unlike the apostle Paul, the Gospel of Matthew doesn’t speak of an angry God, a wrathful God in need of appeasement and atonement. Something doesn’t need to change to make God calm down. That is the prophet’s tradition. The gospels are different.

Matthew does speak of violence and destruction, but not in relation to God. In Matthew, in his Gospel, it is as if the potential for destruction has shifted from heaven to earth. Violence and wrath and destruction and doom all still exist. It’s just no longer a matter of appealing to God to avoid it. In John’s death we get a glimpse of the inevitable violence that will meet Jesus. That is what he tells his disciples. The son of man will be betrayed and crucified. The violence will be; it just won’t be about appeasing God or not appeasing God. It’s us. We are the wrath and violence and destruction and evil. It’s us not God.

That is a lot on January 2nd. I know. But there is good news here. Trust me. There is good news.

I read the good news the other day. Charlottesville, Virginia removed their statue of Robert E. Lee and gave it to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. The city gave the statue of the Confederate general with the understanding that the center would “repurpose it.” Repurpose means they melt it down and create a new monument for the city. So the statue will not be sent to a Daughter’s of the Confederacy theme park of nostalgia to remember Dixie, no museum will keep the statue for generations to interpret the heroic struggle of the Ku Klux Klan to continue Jim Crow. No. The center was given the freedom to melt down the statue and make a new one. That is the best news I have heard in a long time.

It is good news because the heroic struggle of the south and the north is being put aside for a deeper understanding. This is more than one side won and another lost. And the giving of the statute to be repurposed is also a leaving aside of pessimism. Too long we have tried to understand this moment as a battle of competing greed or changing economies or simply a mistake of geography and technology. The Civil War has been interpreted as all of these and more. But not yet has the Civil War been interpreted as a moment to leave behind, to look to a new way. Melt down the statue of Lee and make new art, a new monument for the city.

In the last few years I feel akin to the city of Charlottesville: I am ready for new art, new monuments. The grand tradition of the God who is appeased by violence, the image of a God who needs to be paid in blood, the purchasing of our salvation by equal vengeance it just doesn’t carry water for me. Is there yet violence and vengeance and destruction? More than enough to go around. But like Jesus in Matthew, this is about the earth; it is us; it’s not God. I no longer feel the need, the need the Apostle Paul felt, to make sense of an angry God. That is a statue in need of repurposing.

We have a lot of idioms in our faith. Sayings that are loaded with meaning that must sound odd to the unbeliever. Bought with blood, washed in blood, an atoning sacrifice, a glorious cross. That is a lot of purposeful violence.

I am ready to repurpose these; to allow the fullness to become fulfillment; to let the darkness of our deeds simply be our own. Violence is inevitable. It is who we are. John the Baptist can tell you all about that. But there is something more, something greater we can be. We can be born anew and find a new path beyond vengeance and anger and wrath. I am not sure what the new statue will look like in Charlottesville, but I want to see it. I don’t know what the future looks like, but I want to see it too. Amen.