The final scene presented in the narrative of John is the one preceding and immediately connected with his martyrdom.
1. Herod Antipas, to whom, on the death of Herod the Great, had fallen the tetrarchy of Galilee, was about as weak and miserable a prince as ever disgraced the throne of an afflicted country. Cruel, crafty, and voluptuous like his father, he was, unlike him, weak in war and vacillating in peace. In him, as in so many characters which stand conspicuous on the stage of history, infidelity and superstition went hand in hand. But the terrors of a guilty conscience did not save him from the criminal extravagances of a violent will. He was a man in whom were mingled the worst features of the Roman, the Oriental, and the Greek.
Yet even this man heard John gladly, and did many things because of him. Even Herod was not all bad. Deep down, under all the hard crust of evil that had covered over his life, there was something that could yet be touched. His eye could be made to see fair visions of a life unlike his own, visions which he would long to clutch and keep. He was able to wish his past undone. Moods of tenderness, for long unwonted, returned. There were moments when he felt broken. He longed to escape the entanglements which bad men and worse women had woven around him. Such moods were perhaps temporary; he forgot them, and became again what he had been before. Such moods we all have at times; and we often wonder what their meaning may be, what worth they have in God's sight, what possibilities may be in them for ourselves.
But “our pleasant vices,” it has been well said, are made “instruments to plague us.” From the moment that he carried away his brother's wife there began for Herod Antipas a series of annoyances and misfortunes which culminated only in his death, years afterwards, in discrowned royalty and unpitied exile.
2. The Baptist had no cause to apprehend immediate danger from Herod; but behind the tetrarch there stood another figure, whose attitude was ominous. This was Herodias. What Jezebel was to Elijah in the Old Testament, Herodias was to the Elijah of the New Testament. She was worse. Elijah escaped from the deadly hate of Jezebel, and, as he had prophesied, her bones were devoured by the dogs of Jezreel; but John did not escape the vengeance of his enemy.
It has often been said that women are like the figs of Jeremiah: when good, they are very good, but when bad they are very bad.
For men at most differ as heaven and earth,
But women, worst and best, as heaven and hell.1 [Note: J. Stalker, The Two St. Johns, 277.]
3. Herodias had very good reasons for hating John; for if Herod put her away as John advised, where was she to go? For her the enjoyment and glory of life were over for ever. A woman's hatred is different from a man's. It sees its purpose straight before it, and no scruple is allowed to stand in its way. Herod, bad man as he was, feared John and reverenced him. Not so Herodias; for her there was no halo round the prophet's head. Either he must die or she be banished from the sunshine, a disgraced and ruined woman; and she did not hesitate a moment between the alternatives.
The birthday of Antipas had come round, and, to celebrate the occasion, he summoned his leading nobles and officers to a banquet in the princely castle of Machærus. In the midst of the revel an unexpected diversion was introduced by Herodias. She had, by the husband whom she had so shamelessly abandoned, a daughter named Salome, who by and by became the wife of Philip the tetrarch of Trachonitis. The young princess, a mere girl some seventeen years of age, was sent by her wicked mother into the banquet-chamber to entertain the wine-inflamed company by executing a lewd dance before their lascivious eyes. It was a shameless performance, unbefitting alike a princess and a maiden. Nevertheless it evoked rapturous applause, and the gratified host assumed an air of maudlin magnificence. He was only a humble vassal of Rome, but in popular parlance he was styled “the King,” a reminiscence of the days of Herod the Great; and his vain soul loved the title. He summoned the girl before him, and, sublimely oblivious of the fact that he durst not dispose of a single acre of his territory without the Emperor's sanction, vowed, in a strain of Oriental munificence, to grant whatever boon she might crave, were it half of his kingdom. She went out and consulted with her mother, and that wicked woman, exulting in the success of her stratagem, bade her request the head of John the Baptist served up, like some dainty viand, on a trencher. The tetrarch was deeply distressed, and would gladly have withdrawn from his engagement; but, according to that age's code of honour, he durst not, and sorely against his will he sent an executioner to behead the prophet in his cell. The deed was done, and the dripping head was brought on a trencher into the banquet-hall and presented to Salome. She bore the ghastly trophy to Herodias; and it is said that, not content with feasting her eyes upon it, that she-devil emulated the barbarity of Fulvia and pierced with a bodkin the once eloquent tongue which had denounced her sin.
Just for the sake of them that sat with him
At meat, King Herod kept his sinful oath
And slew the Baptist, though his heart was loth
To crown his record with a crime so grim.
We live in fuller day; his light was dim:
Yet oftentimes we make high heaven wroth
By deeds which stay our souls' eternal growth,
To satisfy some senseless, social whim.
We laugh with flippant scorn at what full well
We know we should adore on bended knees;
We trample our ideals 'neath our feet:
And this for no great cause approved of hell,
Which devils might applaud; but just to please
The whims of them that sit with us at meat.1 [Note: E. T. Fowler, Love's Argument, 136.]
4. Wherein lay the greatness of John, and what was the work he did? His greatness lay largely perhaps in his genuineness, in the grasp of reality which he had of human life. He saw it in its simplicity and its reality. He laid an emphasis on sin and duty. He was a man who looked behind conventionalities, and stripped off coverings, and showed men as they are. But if this had been all, he would not have been the greatest of those born of women. The painter who paints reality merely, however graphic and powerful his delineation may be, fulfils only half his task. He must also teach us by showing us what should be, what might be. Nay, we look that he should be in some sense prophetic, and encourage us with visions of what will be in a better future. It is not the real, but the ideal, in art and in all things, in which power to make us better resides.
And John did not merely show what men are, or what they should be; he had visions of what they were to be, of what God was about to make them. He had presentiments of a Divine day, which was about to dawn. He did not tell men their duty merely, and leave them with the impossible task of fulfilling it. He knew that power to fulfil it came from on high; and he was gifted to perceive that the power was at hand, and about to be revealed. He showed men not earthly things only, but heavenly things. He did not say “Repent,” but “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” “I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, who will baptize with the Holy Ghost and with fire. Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,” he said, pointing to Christ.
Like Moses preparing Joshua to lead his people into a land which he himself may see only from afar; like David preparing the materials with which Solomon may build the temple which he himself had longed to build, but which is never to bear his name; like every true prophet who has the “intuitive grasp of novelty, whose mind discerns, though it may not understand, the coming of a change long before it can be known by other men,” John the Baptist, that strange figure watching and waiting in the desert for some mighty event which his heightened powers could feel in its approach, but could not see, remains the type of self-effacement, the type of a passing generation which can recognize the rise of new ideals and nobler aims, and leave them room to develop in God's own time.
It is this that makes men great, whatever they be, whether inventors or statesmen-the vision of the future, of possibilities which men cannot yet realize. And especially here lies the greatness of the preacher-in his sensibility to the nearness of something not yet manifest, to a revelation of Christ which is at hand-that, in all he is doing, he feels himself on the marge, on the outskirts, of a great manifestation of Christ, when He shall baptize with the Holy Ghost, and take away the sin of the world. And this is his message still to us. God has come nigh. The Redeemer is here. Receive Him. The Kingdom of God is among you. The door is open. Enter in, that you may see the light.
“The word of God came to John in the wilderness.” This is the irony of the situation, that through this fanatic in the wilds of Judæa came an uprising of spiritual force, a shattering word of God which has run on from that day to this. Not from the throne of all the Cæsars, not from the haughty tributaries of empire, not from the priestly circle at Jerusalem, although Herod's splendid temple was their shrine, and a great inheritance seemed to invest them with authority, but from a rude, passionate soul, touched with flame. Not all the dignities of that age could produce one authentic word of God possessing permanence and revelation; not one influence that had within it the powers of a world to come. But it was given to this man to see the heavens opened, and the Spirit descending like a dove upon the Son of Man. That was the supreme event, at that historical juncture, as the spiritual event must always be, even in the most dazzling periods of secular splendour. You may conclude that you have failed to analyze any great movement that means progress or enlightenment until you can lay your finger here and there and say, “There came the spirit and the word of God.”
John the Baptist, that strange figure watching and waiting in the desert for some mighty event which his heightened powers could feel in its approach but could not see, is the real link between two levels of humanity. Freed by his ascetic life from the fetters of the obvious, his intuitive faculties nourished by the splendid dreams of Hebrew prophecy, and by a life at once wild and holy, which kept him closer than other men to the natural and the supernatural worlds, he felt the new movement, the new direction of life. Though its meaning might be hidden, its actuality was undeniable. Something was coming. This conviction flooded his consciousness, “inspired” him; became the dominant fact of his existence. “A message from God came upon John,” speaking without utterance in the deeps of his soul. He was driven to proclaim it as best he could; naturally under the traditional and deeply significant images of the Jewish Scriptures and apocalyptic books. Hence he was really its Forerunner, the preparer of the Way.… If he is to be taken as a true harbinger, as an earnest of the quality of the Christian life; then, how romantic, how sacramental-above all, how predominantly ascetic-that life must seem! Nothing here forecasts the platitudinous ethics of modern theology. Deliberate choice, deep-seated change, stern detachment, a humble preparation for the great re-making of things: no comfortable compromise, or agreeable trust in a vicarious salvation. As a matter of fact, in the lives of that small handful in whom the peculiar Christian consciousness has been developed, the demands of John the Baptist were always fulfilled before the results promised by Jesus were experienced. Asceticism was the gateway to mysticism; and the secret of the Kingdom was only understood by those who had (in the literal meaning of the Greek of Mat_3:2) “changed their minds.”1 [Note: E. Underhill, The Mystic Way, 85.]
Thine, Baptist, was the cry,
In ages long gone by,
Heard in clear accents by the Prophet's ear;
As if ‘twere thine to wait,
And with imperial state
Herald some Eastern monarch's proud career;
Who thus might march his host in full array,
And speed through trackless wilds his unresisted way.
But other task hadst thou
Than lofty hills to bow,
Make straight the crooked, the rough places plain:
Thine was the harder part
To smooth the human heart,
The wilderness where sin had fixed his reign;
To make deceit his mazy wiles forego,
Bring down high vaulting pride, and lay ambition low.
Such, Baptist, was thy care,
That no objection there
Might check the progress of the King of kings;
But that a clear highway,
Might welcome the array,
Of Heavenly graces which His Presence brings;
And where Repentance had prepared the road,
There Faith might enter in, and Love to man and God.2 [Note: Richard Mant, in Lyra Messianica.]
