‘The political violence of Herod’

Preachers spent last week preparing their sermons for Sunday morning only to have all of that preparation disrupted by a big breaking news story on Saturday night — a mass-shooting and attempted assassination at a Trump rally in western Pennsylvania.

Surely that meant they’d need to rework their finished sermons to work in some lamentation and condemnation of political violence. Surely, whatever else they had planned to preach about, they would now need to include something along the lines of what President Joe Biden said in his address to the nation, “There is no place in America for this kind of violence. …  We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”

The Rev. Maria McDowell added something like that to her sermon on Sunday at Christ Episcopal Church in Tacoma. But she offers something far better and deeper than a rote condemnation of some forms of political violence. That’s what the lectionary Gospel reading had cued up for her.

That reading was the story of the death of John the Baptist. This story has inspired paintings, novels, and even an opera, but for all that it’s still an odd, ugly little story, as McDowell says:

What in the world am I supposed to say about this terrible, awful, and somewhat disgusting story. It is brutal on so many levels.

Herod Antipas is not a wonderful person at all. He is the son of Herod the Great, the man who killed innocent children at the news of the birth of a potential rival Jewish king. He is one of many sons and they are competing for power, and for some reason that I don’t entirely understand given the politics of the day, Herod Antipas would have more power if he was married to the wife of his brother Philip. So Herodias divorces Philip and moves into a marriage that is probably far more beneficial for her as well, bringing along a daughter, and a niece. who is invited to dance. To dance in front of a bunch of politically ambitious, well-moneyed men.

This is a Hollywood scene gone horribly wrong. Drunken powerful men watching a young girl, a family member, dance in a way that I am sure was suggestive enough that all of them cheered Herod on when he says “I will give you whatever you want. Whatever you want….”

And she being innocent, or perhaps shrewd having been raised in a politician’s family, goes to her mother and says “what do you want” and Herodias says she wants this man who has spoken against her and her power moves silenced.

So she asks for John the Baptist’s head on a platter. And that is what they get.

Herod executes John the Baptist and has the prophet’s head placed on a silver platter and delivered to his new wife.

That is “political violence.” That is the violence that we must never accept and the violence we must always resist. Hence the title of McDowell’s sermon, “Resisting the Political Violence of Herod (and others).”

Killing the prophets is political violence — whether it is direct, as in Herod’s case, or the indirect, “stochastic” approach of “will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Voter suppression and voter intimidation is political violence. Forcing women to carry health-threatening, nonviable pregnancy is political violence. Deporting 20 million people is political violence. Declaring some presidents to be above the law is political violence that endorses political violence.

Yes, the rarer forms of political violence that President Biden mentioned in his address are also political violence and are also wholly deserving of condemnation. Assassination attempts, the shootings of Reps. Gifford and Scalise, the attempted murder of Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the attempted kidnapping of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 — those are all also forms of political violence.

But the most common form of “political violence” — one that has already, for millennia, been utterly normalized — is the political violence of Herod, the political violence used by the powerful to retain their power.

Here’s more from McDowell’s sermon:

The whole story is a horror. It says something about how power that doesn’t want to give itself up, works. … When push comes to shove and reputation is on the line power uses violence, political violence, to bring an end.

… Violence begets violence, and what we see around us is a world so invested in preserving itself and the ways that we do things, the ways that we do things that ensure that the wealthy stay wealthy and the powerful stay powerful, that we will use violence to bring that to an end.

We are going to spend the next months, if not years inundated, inundated with stories that will increase our anxiety and our fear, and it is anxiety and fear that lead to violence, to that need to defend by any means necessary.

Mark offers us this story as a contrast to the story of the world that Jesus is inviting us to participate in. Instead of a world of political violence, it is a world where Jesus stops and listens to a woman on the outside on the way to the home of a powerful man to heal his daughter. Where the privilege of a position of power does not obviate the vulnerability of a person. Where the healing of Jairus’s daughter includes the healing of a woman bleeding for twelve years. Where healing for one is healing for all.

That is the invitation of the world that we are called to be a part of, to help create. To do it as a part of the life of this community, part of the larger community that we are a part of. To use our gifts in whatever way God has called us, to use them to care for those around us. It’s not a world where we will be particularly welcomed well, where compassion, joy, kindness, treating everybody as if they deserve health and shelter and education. That is a world that challenges the way power works around us, but it is the world that we are invited to be a part of.

McDowell goes on to share the stories of two people who exemplify what it means to live in opposition to political violence. The first is the lawyer and priest Pauli Murray and the second is Elizabeth Skobtsova. If you don’t already know their stories, follow the link and read on.

Those are the stories of people who lived and acted in hope. Reminding ourselves of such stories — reminding ourselves that hope is good, and beautiful, and true — is probably more important than simply reciting the condemnation of “political violence.” As Martin Longman wrote today, “The tonic for violence is hope, and hope has almost left the building.”

That’s why McDowell’s examples of Murray and Skobtsova are so well chosen. Things may be grim in America right now, with ethno-fascism seemingly on the rise, cheered on by a corrupt and lawless Supreme Court. But Murray lived in an era of Jim Crow and legalized ethnic terror, and “Mother Maria” lived in Nazi-occupied France. If they could find the courage to live and act in hope, rejecting violence and despair, then perhaps so can we.