"Whatever You Want"

We conclude the Orthodox Church year with a great solemnity: The Beheading of the Forerunner of God. Let us step back, then, to survey the scene before us as St. John the Baptist would have. At first glance, we are privy to a royal court of Israel. Glorious associations flood into the Hebrew imagination. For kingship and royal rule cannot help but point to King David and King Solomon, who reigned over a United Kingdom. But as the details here come into focus, we see that this is no United Kingdom, but rather a breadcrumb of a once glorious unity. And this is no son of David, God's own chosen king, but rather an Arab who is client king to an empire of Gentiles. We heard in our Epistle reading this morning from the Book of Acts, St Paul, referring to John the Baptist,

Now, Herod was surely no son of Abraham, not in the minds of these men.

Neither was he a circumspect Solomon but rather a drunkard who in his debauchery solemnly pledges half of his already small fiefdom to an object of passing sexual desire.

Did we say, "king"? That is not quite right, for it is his wife who rules. St. Mark reports that he has undertaken fearful things "for the sake of Herodias" (Mk 6:17) and now prepares to commit one of humanity's heinous crimes in order to please her. The message of the Gospel cries out to the first-century reader, Is this the deplorable state to which royal Israel has fallen?

Rich symbolism hovers before us in other respects, and a cloud of witnesses presses in. In both the foreground and background of this "icon," we locate the greatest kings of Israel's history; the greatest heroine, single-handedly defeating the Assyrian army; the greatest arch-enemy whose Babylonian Captivity would ultimately sound the death-knell of Hebrew religion; and even the mother of all our woes, Eve. All of these are brought together in a single icon (figuratively speaking) of St. John the Forerunner. And what is the theme that ties all these threads together? The theme is beheading. The gruesome elevation of a head separated from its body.

This icon is also about thresholds. John the Baptist is called the greatest of prophets (actually Jesus says "none is greater") suggesting that a very great era has come to completion.

His name, Forerunner, suggests an incommensurable threshold: the Advent of God, which is the Threshold of thresholds, the turning point of human history.

We call John the Baptist "the man of Eden", who wore natural clothes, not the soft clothes of kings' courts; who lived in a solitary wilderness; who subsisted on a kind of manna made from wheat and honey — in Greek, akris, not the similar sounding enkris (locusts); who in his purity was fragrant of the morning of the earth. Indeed, which man in that lifeworld is so completely defined in terms of purification than the Baptizer? The name Eden in Ugaritic means "the place of many waters," reminding us that Eden is the epicenter of the Forerunner, whose ministry St. Peter likened to a flood sweeping over the entire Levant, that is the cleansed world, "the Second Eden." Eden, of course, is one of the great thresholds: humankind's entry into the fallen world of disease and death.

The mere mention of his name calls us to reflect on Eden .... and inevitably to our greatest cataclysm. What happened? we rightly ask. Why did this occur? The answer points back to the passions. Our first mother, Eve, lusted for power. She aspired to supplant God just as the angels had done giving rise to a War in Heaven. She would vanquish Adam (whose name means "good soil") depriving him and his descendents of eternal life and communion with God. Her sin was rooted in her insatiable desire for more — she who who already possessed literally everything in the world.

And what was Adam's sin? How did he fall? Famously, it was uxoriousness, an overweening submissiveness to his wife. He sees Eve with the forbidden fruit still in her hand and asks, "What have you done?" And he has a choice. But which will he choose? Will he choose faithfulness to God or will he choose his treacherous wife?

This theme of Eden, which so often is passed over in silence, has to do with the lusting power of "the woman" and her degenerate victory.

What is it to cut off God from the human lifeworld? It is a beheading. Is not Jesus Christ, "begotten before all worlds" (Credo), the Head (Col 1:18)?

And this, of course, is the same theme before us this morning: the overweening submissiveness of a sham king and the degenerate victory of his sham wife.

But let us look at this scene from another direction. Could we ever hear the words, Israel's Royal House and Beheading, without thinking of King David? Instantly, the picture of the victorious, young David holding aloft the head of the Philistine giant, Goliath, comes into view. It is a stunning detail, therefore, that King Herod is no Hebrew and no Jew but is rather himself a Philistine — a Philistine who is the patent counterfeit of David and a Philistine who is causing the head of another colossus to be removed, the Forerunner of God. Do you see that this is crafted to be a grotesque, that the details of history (which has an allegorical meaning) have been prepared to depict a groteque of the holy? Beyond dispute, Herod is emphatically the anti-David.

The lusting heart of Eve also haunts this stench-filled court, which is famously an archetype of the passions run-wild. Herod lies along side of the adulterous Herodias, "who took upon her to confound the laws of our country" (Josephus, Antiquities) by divorcing her husband Herod II in order to marry Herod Antipas. Adultery also hangs heavily upon the soul of Herod Antipas .... and incest. For he has divorced his own wife without a cause and then married his brother's wife. On the present occasion, Herod's eyes are fixed upon his own niece and stepdaughter gyrating erotically before both her mother and stepfather. But it is Herodias' lust for power not sex, her violation of the inviolable, which evinces her most clearly as the willing daughter of Eve.

There is another layer here, though, another threshold story, whose epic scale forbid that it go unmentioned. Now, which story featuring the beheading of a great man by a woman could fail to invoke Judith and her decapitation of the Assyrian general Holofernes. Indeed, so closely linked are these two stories that in later ages painters were obliged to include the platter in order to contradistinguish Herodias/Salome from Judith. It was an instant association in the minds of centuries of people .... before we lapsed into illiteracy in the current age.

You know the story from the Book of Judith. On the eve of the Exile to Babylon, King Nebuchadnezzar sends an army to exact revenge on Jerusalem for refusing to render military assistance. But his greatest general, Holofernes, would be vanquished by Judith causing his troops to flee in disarray. How could this have happened? The greatest army on earth defeated by a woman? The chaste widow Judith saw the general's immoderate sexual lust and his propensity for strong drink. Thus, leading him on in a show of seduction, she watched as he drank himself into a stupor and then cut off his head elevating it in victory.

Erotic lust, drinking-unto-drunkenness, the display of the head .... and a great threshold lying just ahead (the Babylonian Captivity) all St. Mark's listeners and readers could not fail to have noticed. For these were not obscure details. This is not aracana, but rather the most imposing names and themes of Israel's history.

Judith could not have known that beheading the Assyrian general would not forestall the imminent Exile of Judah's elite to Babylon. And Herodias could not have known that beheading John the Baptist would not forestall the Advent of the Kingdom of God. Nonetheless, these are the great themes: the woman, the beheading, and the greatest thresholds of Hebrew history, indeed, of human history.

Today, we stand on a threshold: the end of the old year and the beginning of the new. Our faith is founded on this premise: of discarding the "old man" (said St. Paul) and choosing to become the new.

The themes are familiar. Primorial passions churn within us. They embolden us to seize the mirage of power or of sexual fulfillment .... both of which always mock us nearly as soon as we have chosen them. John the Baptist is the man of the new Eden, the anti-Adam:

God's Forerunner was no sensitive plant, but rather a mighty man. This was no pusillanimous man whose hopes rose and fell at the next whim of his imperious wife's moods. Had the Baptist encountered Eve in her act of betrayal, her "adultery" we might say, we do not have to ask what he would do .... which he would choose.

Yes, John the Forerunner was a most fitting herald of the Second Adam. Just as he was first to cry, "Metanoeite," calling the people to purity, so he also was a new Adam who announced the New Adam completing our first father's course, and perfecting obedience appropriate to Eden.

This morning we have permitted our souls to drift in contemplation reflecting on an imagined icon. But this icon is no less real for that. All of these elements stand out brightly in their truth. All of its associations are sure and right. And they all participate in the close of an age. They all look back to a Hebrew history that is about to come to a most glorious culmination: King David, chaste Judith, King Nebuchadnezzar, and the mother of mankind. All look forward to the son of God, the Advent of God and to the Forerunner who both embodies them all even while pointing his finger forward as a figure straight out of Isaiah:

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.