Heads up!

 "Bring me the head of John the Baptist on a platter."

That's the signing of John's death warrant. He is going to be taken out and killed, based primarily on a whim. Herod promises his stepdaughter that he will give her anything, up to half his kingdom. A rash promise, but this is in a time where your word, you know, meant something. And if you made a promise in front of all your friends, you were going to pay for it. And that's exactly how it went. Herod promised his daughter that she could have anything, and she asked for something he didn't want to give. Bound by his rash promise, he was stuck with the offer he had made. Bad negotiations. 

But if you think about it, Salome who danced for Herod didn't really want the head of the Baptist either. Of what concern was it to her? Nah, the instigator for this murder wasn't Herod, nor was it Salome. It was Herodias, all the way. 

For what reason? It all comes back to John telling her that she was wrong. And that's the kiss of death, really. John had the absolute temerity, the audacity to say that she had done the wrong thing. So she straight up kills him. 

This shouldn't surprise you, of course, because you and I have the rank temptation to do the same thing. But we only do this for things that we are insecure about, that we think we might be wrong about. If someone were to come up to you and criticize you for eating all those vegetables, you'd roll your eyes and walk away chuckling to yourself about how silly that person is. But if they say 'you know, you probably shouldn't have seven beers,' you'll get mad. Why will you get mad? Because you know you shouldn't be having seven beers. And that's what matters. There's a great bit from the movie 'the swan princess' where the the evil sorcerer Rothbart says of his plan to marry the princess 'if you steal something, you have to fight forever to keep it.' If he marries the princess, he can have the kingdom legally. If he steals it from the existing king, he will have to fight to keep it forever, for his rule will always be illegitimate. 

It works the same way with almost all morality. If you are doing something that you know is wrong, if anyone brings that up, it stabs a pin through your self perception. And that's why we do horrible, unspeakable things to each other, in order to keep that self perception alive. We surround ourselves with enablers, yes men who will agree that we have only ever done the right thing. We will always keep up with only so many people, who will back up what we do and say and perpetually echo the refrain we need to hear 'you did the right thing.' And the abandonment that people who disagree with us encounter is legendary.  

But we don't have much power, not really. If you kill someone, you go to jail, so you do what you can, and what you typically can do is to cut them out of your life, not cut their heads off. You don't have tetrarch power, the power of life and death over people. If someone scolds you, or makes fun of you, or tells you that you were wrong in some way, the most you can do is to cut them out of your life completely. Unfriend them, block them, stop talking to them, so that you can preserve that self image. So you can think of yourself that you are good, and have nothing to change. But that comes at a terrible cost. The story of the beheading of John the Baptist is a start warning to all of us, a warning of our fragility, of how little it takes to go to an extreme. And it's a caution to us, who may be horrified and disgusted by the story of the death of John, to reconsider not just his death, but also his words. When John says to us 'bear fruit in keeping with repentance,' part of what he means is that he seeks to make things right between God and us, and between us and each other. To repent is to look sincerely at the life that we've made, and to understand that our boasting comes from Christ, not from ourselves. So when someone mentions to us casually that we shouldn't do what we are doing, which we are well aware that we shouldn't do, we don't have to respond by fighting to keep our self image. We can instead respond that we know we shouldn't and we struggle with it all the time. 

For this is honest, it is repentance, and it is good for us to continue to do. For the sake of ourselves, those around us, and our relationship with God. Heed the words of John, and see what happens if we ignore them. 

Thorn in the side

 It should be clear that a thorn in the side is aggravating. Most of us don't come into contact with thorns that often - this time of year it might be a thistle in some undergrowth, or when you're trying to pick a raspberry, that kind of thing, but most of the time, you're not going to be running into thorns all that often.

Most of that is because for a lot of us, we're not in thorn places all that often. Thorns are for the plant to protect itself against animals that might try to it, or from you for trying to stamp on it, pull it, or get it out of the way somehow. For a lot of human history, you would be navigating through the world through things like old goat tracks, fields, forests, that kind of thing, and not through roads cleared of any kind of natural hazards. In the time of Paul, people would have been moving around on Roman roads, which were a big deal for this reason - cleared of obstacles, cleared of hazards, level and easy to walk on, that kind of thing. Most other routes would have been in varying degrees of overgrowth, tough to make it through easily or cleanly. And if you're navigating these routes, you're going to end up with thorns, thistles and burrs that will poke, impinge on and irritate you. 

Now, if you have a splinter (or sliver) stuck in your skin, how do you get it out? Likely you would sterilize a needle, or get out some tweezers, and pluck that back out again. Do you legitimately think that in the time of Paul, people had access to the tweezers and such that we have now? Not likely. More likely than not, you would end up with a thorn stuck in your flesh, and no real way to pull it out. 

A thorn in your flesh, a pebble in your shoe, it's uncomfortable and unpleasant. Every step is uncomfy, and you really want to stop and remove it. Pebble in shoe, easy; thorn in flesh, harder. The thorn in your flesh digs in, and reminds you with every movement that something is jabbed into you. And this what Paul wants to propose to you as an image of what he has to deal with. He has to deal with weakness in his flesh. What is that weakness? Paul isn't real clear, and it doesn't matter. It's not important what his weakness is, it's important to know that he has a weakness. And his weakness keeps him humble.

Even though he has had surpassing visions, has been able to see Christ, and has had doctrine and grace be communicated to him, even with all that, Paul needs to remain humble. As do we all. One of the problems with what happens now is that things are, for a lot of people, too good. People have money and time, hot and cold running water, access to all the world's information in a second, information beaming into their brains constantly, that kind of thing. And as such, to quote Network - "all necessities provided. All anxieties tranquilized." We have the luxury now of being concerned about missing TV shows, not about surviving until we turn 15. And so when people are asked about their faith in the living God, and their thoughts about the life to come, they are naturally not too concerned about it, and in fact they believe that God owes them an explanation for why things are the way they are. After all, they're the main character. Even God himself should answer to them.

But you're neither Peter nor Andrew, James nor John. You're not Paul, and you're not Barnabas. You're you. And you, like the rest of us, do need to be kept humble. Paul understood his humility as being important, even crucial. A thing that he had to have to stop him from falling out of his need for the love of God. It's easy to think that you're everything, to lose all conception of anything beyond yourself, and to think that you are the measure of everything. So in his wisdom, God occasionally sends to us all a thorn in the flesh. What is it? It could be anything for you, but a reminder, certainly, of your frailty, something to keep you humble, and to remind you of your desperate need for the Lord Jesus, who is there to redeem the frailty of his fallen creation.