#GalileanLivesMatter (Mark 5:21-43; Third Sunday after Epiphany: January 31, 2016)

#GalileanLivesMatter

Mark 5:21-43 Third Sunday after Epiphany January 31, 2016

Someone has called Mark's Gospel a passion story with an introduction and there is some truth to that. Of fifteen chapters, five chapters, fully one-third of the gospel, are given to the events in Jerusalem.

But Jesus' suffering and death are anticipated long before that. In the middle of chapter eight, Jesus predicts his own death, and again in chapters nine and ten. The first hint that the narrator gives us of Jesus' death comes in the early part of chapter three as the Pharisees and Herodians--two parties that got along about as well as Tea Party Republicans and Occupy Democrats--plotted together against Jesus. Not content to sideline him or even to have him killed, they planned to "destroy" him.

In our reading this morning we see Jesus rejected by the people in his hometown. They somehow cannot make Jesus' ministry and Jesus' history with them go together in their heads. Such was their rejection of him that he could not even perform the acts of power that usually went with his preaching.

After this rejection, he sent his disciples by twos on a mission trip through the region. They preached good news, healed the sick, and set free those who were possessed by evil spirits. They had strict instructions not to provide for themselves but to depend on their hosts for everything they needed.

The rumors of Jesus' ministry reached Herod and that reminds the narrator of John the Baptizer. Herod was convinced that Jesus was John come back to life.

Later, when Jesus first talked about his going to Jerusalem to die, we are told that the path of discipleship is the path that leads to death on a cross. But here, well before that, in three relatively short passages we are shown rather than told what this business of following Jesus will involve. If we are faithful, says Mark, we will find that it costs us dearly. We will lose the respect of our neighbors. If we are sent as Jesus' apostles we will have to be dependent on others for our needs. If we are persistent in following Jesus and announcing his good news, we will find ourselves at odds with the powers that be. It may even cost us our lives in a literal sense.

It's this last, religion-and-politics story that especially arouses my interest. Maybe it's because I can't turn on the television without hearing why it would be the end of the world if this or that candidate for President wins their party's nomination, or because the phone hardly ever rings without its being a robocall looking for my support... and my money. For two more days it's the crazy season in Iowa. And then we will be forgotten for a few months and after that left more or less in peace for another four years.

This last story tells me that John the Baptizer had never heard that religion and politics are supposed to be kept apart. John the Baptizer had no problem with calling out Herod the King.

This Herod is not the Herod who was king when Jesus was born; he was Herod Antipas, the son of the first Herod. Nor was he actually a king. With the permission of Rome he ruled over a quarter of his father's kingdom, so his title was actually "tetrarch"--ruler of a fourth. He was the tetrarch of Galilee.

In those days marriages were a way of securing alliances and, because the need for alliances changed, it was common practice in the Roman world to divorce an inconvenient spouse and marry another who would be more useful. Herod Antipas married Phasaelis the daughter of King Aretas IV of Nabatea, to gain an ally on his southern border. He later divorced her, though, to marry his niece Herodias who had been married to and divorced from his half-brother Herod II.

This shuffling of the marriage deck caused two sets of problems. The first was that it ticked off his first wife's father, King Aretas, who promptly waged war on Herod Antipas' southern border. Herod Antipas suffered a serious military defeat at Aretas' hands. He then appealed to Rome for help, but at about the same time Emperor Tiberius who was Herod Antipas' sponsor died and his brother Caligula became emperor. Caligula had a different idea than Tiberius about who should be tetrarch of Galilee. When Herod Antipas appealed to Caligula, Herod Antipas and Herodias were sent into exile to what is now southern France but was then considered even less fashionable and more barbaric than Galilee.

Incidentally, just to complicate things further, Herodias' daughter Salome--the one who did the dancing--was also Herod Antipas' niece. And, Herodias and Salome were not only mother and daughter; they were also first cousins!

That was one set of problems. Another also had to do with Herod Antipas' marriage. Musical marriage beds was a game that the Roman elites played for political gain, but Herod Antipas' divorce from Phasaelis and marriage to the newly-divorced Herodias violated three different Jewish laws. Divorce was quite possible, too possible according to Jesus, but remarriage while the first wife or husband was still alive was not legal. Both Herod Antipas and Herodias violated this law. Herodias was both Herod Antipas' niece and his sister-in-law. Either relationship made their marriage incest in the eyes of Jewish law.

Tradition has made this set of problems into a sexual scandal, but politics and power lay at the center of this scandal, not sexual pleasure. Herod Antipas like his father Herod the Great had hitched his wagon to the Roman star. He used his rule to extract money from Galilee. He used the money he extracted to build public monuments to his own rule and to flatter his Roman bosses. He built a Roman-style city to be his capital and named it Tiberius in honor of his patrón Emperor Tiberius.

To extract the money he needed for these things, he raised taxes on land so that peasants were forced into selling their land. This had two results: the creation of a large body of unemployed displaced peasants and the consolidation of land into the hands of fewer and fewer people. Any Galilean who grumbled or complained in a public way was violently silenced.

All of that, of course, was what John the Baptizer and anyone else in Galilee, expected of the Romans. What bothered them was that Herod Antipas, like the rest of his family, claimed descent from King David. They posed as children of the Torah, as sons of the covenant, but they kept only the the most convenient parts of the Torah. Any law that got in the way of their quest for power was simply ignored in the hopes that any problems would go away.

They would have, too, were it not for a prophet like John the Baptizer whose #GalileanLivesMatter movement insisted on exposing Herod Antipas' betrayal of the Torah and his disloyalty to the covenant. This did not sit well with Herodias who, if anything, was more ambitious than her husband. So John, Herodias, and Herod Antipas acted out the same drama that Elijah, King Ahab, and Queen Jezebel had acted out so many centuries earlier, with the difference that this time it ended in the death of the prophet, not the queen.

It seems that this is the reward for those who preach that God's reign is at hand and who call people to repentance. Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador who was killed by US-trained assassins in 1980, said that this is the sort of thing that happens when the Church is faithful. "[W]hen the Church is persecuted it is a sign that it is fulfilling its mission." [Homilia 25 de noviembre de 1977, I-II, p. 339. "Cuando la Iglesia es perseguida es señal de que está cumpliendo su misión." My translation.] There are some who claim that Christian faith is being persecuted in our land, but having to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple is not persecution when our business is to bake cakes for the public, nor is it persecution when we are told that we can't use tax money to erect a nativity scene on the courthouse lawn. If I read this passage correctly, I have to say that we are not entitled to the privilege of having our faith be a sort of de facto established religion.

The spiritual cost of this privilege has been very high. We have become accustomed to being inoffensive as the price of this privilege. The United Methodist Church has been silent too often in the face of war, greed and oppression. We have failed to name these things clearly for fear that if we do someone might be upset. We have looked instead to safeguard our institutional future with clever public relations campaigns and the outreach program du jour.

But this is not our calling as God's people. Our calling is to name and resist "evil, injustice and oppression in whatever form they present themselves." Our calling is to risk what Jesus risked, what John the Baptizer risked, what Martin Luther King, Jr., risked, and what Monseñor Romero risked. Our calling is to tell the truth even when no one wants to hear it. Our calling is not so much to honor Jesus, as to follow him.