Herod and John, Herodias and Mary, Seventeenth Saturday (I), August 3, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Saturday of the 17th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Help of Christians
August 3, 2019
Lev 25:1.8-17, Ps 67, Mt 14:1-12

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:  

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Over the course of the last ten days we have pondered, through the use of Jesus’ seven different parables, what the Kingdom of God is and how we enter it. He taught us about good soil and the three types of insufficient soil: stubborn, superficial and dissipated by pleasure or fear. He taught us that the Kingdom comes into contact with both wheat and weeds, that the dragnet of the Church encompasses both “good” and “bad” fish. We saw these parables played out yesterday in Nazareth, where the stubbornness and superficiality of Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes against both seed and Sower in the synagogue is contrasted with the faith of Mary and Joseph. We see it play out again today in the forest of thorns in the flesh of Herod and the receptivity of St. John the Baptist, who had made God his treasure and pearl. It’s important for us to see the huge contrast between the slavery that bound Herod even though he was externally a free king with the power to determine life and death and the freedom of John the Baptist, even though he was arrested, bound, imprisoned and eventually martyred. And it’s important for us to see the contrast of Herod’s actions and those of God as seen in the practice of the Jubilee in today’s first reading and in Jesus’ words in the Nazarene Synagogue.
• King Herod was so enslaved by lust and ego. We see this in his not only cavorting with but stealing and marrying the wife of his half-brother Philip. The book of Leviticus had said clearly, “You shall not have intercourse with your brother’s wife, for that would be a disgrace to your brother” (Lev 18:16). Herod had gone to Rome to visit his brother and while there seduced his sister-in-law, persuaded her to leave his brother, divorced his own wife and married her. To make the incestuous matters worse, Herodias was Philip’s and Herod’s niece as well. For all these reasons it was not right, as John the Baptist said, for Herod to have Herodias as his wife. His lust led to the eclipse of his conscience. With a string of violent verbs, the evangelist tells us that Herod had John arrested, bound, and imprisoned. He wanted to kill him, St. Matthew tells us, but he feared the people. He was eaten alive by fear. Eventually Herod would kill John when his vindictive putative bride pimped her princess daughter to do a striptease before her step-father/uncle and all his drunken courtiers to seduce him into vowing to give her anything she wanted. And when she asked for John the Baptist’s head on a platter, Herod gave the command. And to the Aramaic tune of Happy Birthday to You, the soldiers brought in, instead of birthday cake, the Baptist’s severed head and presented it to this lustful, power-hungry, self-important little assassin. But while that day was a tragedy for Herod and all those participating in his Satanic liturgy where lust ruled instead of sacrificial love, where immoral oaths dominated over the truth, it was a triumph for John the Baptist: in essence, his spiritual birthday in which he was born into eternity and we believe leaped for joy again. John the Baptist was free to say the truth because he was free ultimately of the fear of death. When Herod hears of Jesus, eaten alive by fear, he thought he was John the Baptist, saying, “He has been raised from the dead,” the very words the angels will use at the tomb about Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus was certainly not John reincarnated or resurrected, but John would share in Jesus’ resurrection and he in essence was a precursor to Jesus as the Resurrection and the Life, just like he was in birth, in preaching, and in martyrdom.
• In contrast to Herod’s slavery to lust, we see in today’s first reading and in Jesus’ messianic mission God’s call to be free in order to love. God announces a Jubilee to be celebrated every fifty years. It would be a time in which people would be reconstituted. Slaves would be freed. People would return home. Debts would be forgiven. It would be a chance for a new beginning. There is a lot of scholarly discussion as to whether or how often this Biblical concept of the Jubilee was practiced during Old Testament times, but there is no doubt that when Jesus appeared in the Nazareth synagogue and began to proclaim the Prophet Isaiah’s messianic job description and give his one sentence homily that Isaiah’s words were fulfilled in him that he was proclaiming this Jubilee, this new beginning. St. Luke tells us that Jesus “unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.’ Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and … said to them, ‘Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing’” (Lk 4:16-21). That year acceptable to the Lord is the Jubilee Year with no last day. It was meant to be a time of liberation, of proclaiming liberty to captives and letting the oppressed go free. That’s what Jesus came to give us at a supernatural level and to help us to give others at a supernatural and natural level. Rather than the egocentric lust filled slavery to our flesh, Jesus was making possible for a theocentric love of God and others, sacrificing ourselves for others rather than sacrificing others for pleasure, and rather than offering others half our kingdom, seeking to conform everything we do to help others, with us, seize all of God’s kingdom.
• Someone who shows us this right path is Our Lady, whom we invoke on this Saturday. Rather than a mother like Herodias who will induce her daughter to sin to seek revenge, Mary is one who seeks to induce her daughters and sons toward holiness, toward continuing the mission of John the Baptist in making the way for her Son. Today that Son, surrounded by all his courtiers in heaven — St. John the Baptist, the Blessed Virgin and all the saints and angels — are throwing a feast far greater than any that Herod in his fallen state was ever capable of. And into this feast will be brought not a martyr’s head on a platter, but our whole lives on a paten, in order to be united with Christ’s self-offering to the Father and receive from God in return not just a percentage of his kingdom, but the King himself. We turn to the Lord who would give us all this and ask him for the grace to help us truly welcome to the full this gift of liberation Christ offers and, like St. John and Our Lady, to give our lives joyfully to spread Christ’s liberating mission.

The readings for today’s Mass were: