“If The Truth Be Told”

“If The Truth Be Told”

Text: Mark 6:14-29

© July 16, 2006 by C. Edward Bowen

To get your brain juices flowing, we’re going to start out this morning with a quiz. And the quiz question is this: Who has more teeth – a typical man or a typical woman? Well, how many teeth do you have? If you haven’t counted them lately, go ahead and move your tongue around in your mouth and take inventory. And then when you’re done, find someone of the opposite sex sitting around you and ask them to open wide and count how many teeth they have. What you should find, assuming that all your wisdom teeth have grown in and you haven’t had to have any teeth pulled, is that men and women have the same number of teeth – 16 on top and 16 on the bottom for a total of 32. Or if your wisdom teeth haven’t grown in yet, you should find that you have a total of 28.

But in the centuries before the time of Jesus, Aristotle – the great philosopher who followed in the footsteps of Socrates and Plato – taught that men had more teeth than women. The strange thing is that Aristotle was married, but apparently he never asked Mrs. Aristotle to open her mouth so that he could count how many teeth she had.[1] Instead, for some reason, Aristotle was just convinced that men had more teeth than women – in fact, he was so convinced of that fact that he never thought it was necessary to check and see if he was right or not.

But what I think is even more surprising is that apparently no one in that day ever had the courage to speak up and tell Aristotle that he was wrong. After all, you would have to imagine that out of all the thousands of people who heard Aristotle talk, someone would have had to have been aware that Aristotle was mistaken. But maybe since Aristotle was Aristotle, the great world-renowned thinker, no one had to the courage to take a stand and tell him that he was wrong.

When it came to Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist, though, he wasn’t the least bit afraid of telling people when they were wrong. You see, John believed so strongly in the truth, that he was willing to tell the truth to people even if it might mean that he would be made to pay a price for doing it. And that’s exactly what happened when he had the boldness to speak the truth to Herod and told Herod that what he was doing in his life was wrong.

Now, if you’ve read the New Testament before, you’re probably aware that almost every time there’s a king mentioned, the king’s name is Herod. But the thing is that in the New Testament there are at least three different kings who all went by that same name. It’s kind of like how it seems that almost every woman you read about in the Gospels is named Mary – there’s Mary the mother of Jesus, there’s Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus, there’s Mary Magdalene, and there’s still another Mary who went to the tomb with Mary Magdalene on Easter morning. At times it can get kind of confusing trying to keep all those Marys straight.

And likewise it can get kind of confusing at times trying to keep all those Herods straight. But let’s take a moment and try to sort them out. To start off, the one Herod was known as Herod the Great. He was the one who was king in Jerusalem at the time when Jesus was born, and it was that Herod, Herod the Great, who ordered that the babies in and around Bethlehem be killed when the wise men arrived and told him that the Messiah had been born. Then we run across another Herod in the book of Acts. That Herod, who was known as Herod Agrippa I, was Herod the Great’s grandson, and he had the notorious distinction of being the first ruler to order one of the original apostles to be executed, issuing the decree that the apostle James be killed with a sword.

And here in today’s reading in the Gospel of Mark we encounter the third Herod, known as Herod Antipas, who was a son of Herod the Great and who ruled over the region of Galilee during the time of Jesus’ ministry. And just like those other Herods, Herod Antipas wasn’t so much concerned about being a good ruler and taking care of his people. No, like those other Herods, Herod Antipas was primarily concerned about using his power for his own pleasure, to get the things out of life that he wanted to have. And it seems that one of the things that Herod Antipas wanted out of his life was his brother’s wife, a woman named Salome. And so to get what he wanted, Herod Antipas divorced his own wife, and Salome left her husband, and the two of them got married.

But even though everyone else in the kingdom was too afraid to say anything, John the Baptist knew that what Herod Antipas and Salome did was wrong, and he let them know it was wrong. He let them know that it was wrong for the two of them to have abandoned their spouses like that. And he let them know that according to God’s law, what they did was an abomination – for a man to take and marry his own brother’s wife.

And so John the Baptist spoke up and told the truth about what the king and Salome were doing. He spoke up and told the truth even though he knew full well that there might be consequences if he did. And sure enough, there were consequences, as Herod had John thrown into prison and eventually had him beheaded.

As we look at this gruesome story about what happened to John the Baptist, with his head being cut off and laid on a platter because he dared to speak the truth, we can’t help but ask ourselves, are we willing to stand up for what’s right even if there might be consequences? Are we willing to stand up for those things that God wants us to stand up for even if it might come at some cost to us, even if we might be made to suffer, even if we might be killed for doing so?

If we’re honest, we have to admit that those aren’t easy questions to answer. After all, it’s much more common nowadays to think in terms of what causes we’re willing go to war for, what causes we’re willing to kill others for, what causes we’re willing to make others suffer for. But as we look at the life and death of John the Baptist, and as we look at the life and death of Jesus, we see that John and Jesus don’t ask us for what causes we’d be willing to put others to death. No, John and Jesus ask us for what causes we’d be willing to be put to death. It’s like Gandhi, the great leader of India who led the movement that brought freedom to his nation, who said that he believed so strongly in the truth of his cause that he would be willing to die for it, but he said that there was no cause that he was ever prepared to kill for.[2]

So often in our world today, people see the wrongs that are taking place around them, they see what the Herods are up to, but instead of speaking up and taking a stand for the truth – for God’s truth – many people are content with just silently shaking their heads and whispering to themselves, “Ain’t it awful!” Many people just whisper “ain’t it awful” to themselves instead of speaking up, because they know that if their voice is heard, there might be consequences, and they’re not so sure that they’re willing to pay a price for standing up for the truth.

I felt myself really challenged earlier this year when I read a piece that was written by Jim Wallis[3], a Christian author and speaker who has tried to get American Christianity to move beyond the rut we seem to be in nowadays where you have one group over here saying that God is a Democrat and another group over here saying that God is a Republican. And in this particular piece that I read earlier this year Jim Wallis was talking about how many Christians today find it so easy to shake their heads and mutter “ain’t it awful,” but they often lack the commitment to take a stand and do something about the wrongs that exist in the world because they just aren’t willing to get involved if it means they might have to make some kind of sacrifice, if it means they might have to pay a price in some way, if it means they might have to suffer in some way.

Jim Wallis tells about how back in the early spring of 1978 he and a group of fellow Christians felt that God was calling them to speak up and take a stand for peace. And so what they decided to do was try to block the trains coming in and out of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Facility outside of Denver, Colorado. The Rocky Flats Nuclear Facility, you see, is the place where the triggers for all the nuclear warheads in the United States arsenal are made. And so on a certain Saturday afternoon, Jim Wallis and about 140 other Christians sat down on the railroad tracks outside the facility, not knowing exactly when the next train would be coming.

But just ten minutes after they sat down on the tracks, a winter storm began to move in. It started off as a hard rain, but soon the temperature dropped and it turned to freezing rain, then sleet, and finally to a driving snow. Within an hour or so, Wallis and the others were soaked and chilled to the bone. When doctors arrived on the scene, they advised the group to go home or else they would have a real risk of hypothermia. While many of those Christians did decide to go home, Wallis and some of the others stayed. Huddling under wet blankets, Wallis says that was the coldest night he had ever experienced in his life.

But all during that night, Wallis says that his mind kept being filled with images of soldiers who across the centuries had braved the elements, who had endured hardship, who had risked injury and death, and who had even given up their lives in order to wage war. Then, he says, it dawned on him. Why should we expect the cost of standing up for God’s truth to be anything less? What would happen if we were to commit ourselves to the causes that God wants us to take a stand for with the same kind of discipline, sacrifice, and willingness to suffer that we take for granted that soldiers will have when they go to war? Being faithful to God, he realized that night, is not just believing in better things than other people believe. No, being faithful to God means a willingness to hold on to God’s truth and to act on that truth no matter what.

In your life, what are the wrongs that you see? In your life, what are those things that you see around you that aren’t entirely the way that God wants them to be? Among your circle of friends, at work, at school, in the community, in the nation, what is it that deep down inside you know you should speak up about and take a stand for the truth? Sure, keeping quiet or just silently muttering to yourself “ain’t it awful” is the safe and easy thing to do. But if we want to be Jesus’ disciples, he calls us to something more than that. Because what Jesus calls us to do is to hold on to God’s truth and to act on that truth no matter what, no matter what the cost might be.