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.