The Man Who Counted For Nothing

Every room has a pecking order, and most of us can read it in ninety seconds. Who gets deferred to. Who gets interrupted. Where you fall on that ladder and what it would cost you to slip a rung. We tell ourselves we’re only being prudent, keeping our standing so we can use it for something good later on. Then we spend forty years keeping it and never spend it on anything.

Herod’s banquet hall had every somebody in Galilee under one roof: the government men, the officer corps, the leading families. And the only man in that building whose word could be trusted was chained in a cell underneath it. By every measure the guests would have recognized, John the Baptist counted for nothing. No office, no property, no patron. Paul has a phrase for men like him. God chose “things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:28).

Today the Church keeps the Memorial of the Passion of Saint John the Baptist. Look at what that means. The calendar remembers the prisoner and not the king. Nobody anywhere on earth keeps a feast for Herod Antipas. So the day asks you a question. Would you have said what John said, knowing the room, and knowing the price?

The Readings

First Reading: 1 Corinthians 1:26-31

For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption; therefore, as it is written, “Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord.”

Gospel: Mark 6:17-29

For Herod had sent and seized John, and bound him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife; because he had married her. For John said to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not, for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and kept him safe. When he heard him, he was much perplexed; and yet he heard him gladly. But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers and officers and the leading men of Galilee. For when Herodias’ daughter came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will grant it.” And he vowed to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.” And she went out, and said to her mother, “What shall I ask?” And she said, “The head of John the baptizer.” And she came in immediately with haste to the king, and asked, saying, “I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.” And the king was exceedingly sorry; but because of his oaths and his guests he did not want to break his word to her. And immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard and gave orders to bring his head. He went and beheaded him in the prison, and brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl; and the girl gave it to her mother. When his disciples heard of it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.

Scriptural Analysis

Paul has just told the Corinthians that the cross is the wisdom and power of God (1 Corinthians 1:18-25). Now he turns and points at them. “Consider your call.” The Greek verb is blepete, literally “look at,” used here of a mental act, and it’s the first command Paul gives in the whole letter.^[1] He wants them to stare at their own membership roll.

What they’d see is a church made mostly of the wrong sort of people. Paul lists three qualities: wise, powerful, of noble birth. All three describe the upper class of a Greek city, and the third one, eugeneis, “well born,” appears nowhere else in Paul’s letters. He says “not many,” which quietly admits “some.” Corinth had a few: Erastus, the city treasurer (Romans 16:23), and Crispus, an official of the synagogue (Acts 18:8). But the striking thing about Paul’s communities was that they held all social classes at once, which the voluntary associations of that world simply did not do. Those clubs sorted by class the way clubs still sort by class. The only thing accounting for a mixed church is that its members came together by a divine call rather than by natural attraction.^[2]

Then Paul says it three times, hammering: God chose, God chose, God chose. The verb is eklegomai, and he uses it nowhere else in the Corinthian correspondence. The choosing is what does all the work here, and Paul repeats the verb until you can’t hear anything else.^[3] And watch how the list escalates. Foolish, weak, low and despised, and finally ta mē onta, “the things that are not,” set against ta onta, “the things that are.” That phrasing was ordinary rhetoric in the Greek world, roughly what we’d mean by the haves and the have-nots.^[4] Paul takes the language of the social ladder and turns it inside out. The nothings are chosen to cancel the somethings.

Why? “So that no human being might boast in the presence of God.” Boasting, in Paul, means humanity’s claim of independence from God, treating your intelligence, strength, and standing as if they were yours by right instead of on loan. He’ll put the question flatly later in the same letter: “What do you have that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7).^[5] Saint Basil the Great read the verse the same way, that we boast rightly only when we stop taking pride in a righteousness of our own and admit we’ve been made righteous by faith in Christ.^[6]

And Paul closes with a quotation he’s been circling the whole time. Verse 26 alludes to Jeremiah, and verse 31 quotes it: “Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord” (Jeremiah 9:23-24). Jeremiah’s line forbids the wise man, the strong man, and the rich man from boasting in what they have. Paul lets the prophet’s three categories do the sorting.^[7] Here’s the part worth slowing down for. In Jeremiah, “the Lord” is YHWH. In Paul, “the Lord” is the risen Christ, who has just been named our wisdom, our righteousness, our sanctification and our redemption.^[8] That last word, apolytrōsis, meant the buying back of a slave by paying a ransom.^[9] Paul has taken a divine title straight out of the prophet and handed it to Jesus of Nazareth. Everything the Corinthians were tempted to boast about, Christ already is, and he is it for us.

Mark gives this argument a face, a room, and a date.

The placement is deliberate. Mark slides the death of John between the sending of the Twelve and their return (Mark 6:7-13, 6:30-32). John’s passion happens while the apostles are out preaching, the way Christ’s passion will give birth to the Church’s mission.^[10] This is the only extended story in Mark’s Gospel that isn’t about Jesus, and it’s told so that you can’t miss the rhyme.

The offense was legal and public. Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, ruled Galilee and Perea as a client of Rome from 4 BC to AD 39. He was a half-uncle to Herodias, who was already married to another half-brother, and both of them divorced their spouses to marry each other.^[11] The Law was not ambiguous about it (Leviticus 18:16, 20:21). Plenty of Jews in Galilee knew the marriage was unlawful, and stayed quiet. John said it out loud, to the man’s face, because he understood that what a ruler does publicly reshapes what an entire country believes it may do.^[12]

Now read verse 20 slowly, because it’s the strangest line in the passage. “Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and kept him safe… he was much perplexed; and yet he heard him gladly.” Saint John Chrysostom noticed the same thing and drew the obvious conclusion: Herod honored the man even while the man was rebuking him, so great a thing is virtue. The Venerable Bede saw why Herodias couldn’t rest: she feared Herod would eventually take John’s correction seriously and end the marriage.^[13] Herod, in other words, is the rocky ground from Jesus’ own parable, the hearer who receives the word with joy and has no root in himself (Mark 4:16-17).^[14] He liked the preaching. He liked it in the same way that people like a podcast.

Then the birthday. The Greek word Mark uses, genesia, was in classical usage the term for a memorial kept on the birthday of someone who had died, and there’s a dark joke buried there: Herod’s birthday would forever be remembered as the day John was killed.^[15] Look at the guest list Mark bothers to give us. His courtiers (megistanes, literally men of power), his officers (chiliarchoi, the military), and the leading men of Galilee (prōtoi, the elites). That’s an accurate description of the top of a Hellenistic city.^[16] It’s also, almost word for word, Paul’s triad. The powerful and the well-born are all in the banquet hall. The thing that is not is in the cell.

A note on the dance, since the popular retelling has hardened into something the text doesn’t say. Mark calls the girl a korasion, the same word he uses for a twelve-year-old in Mark 5:42, and the verb translated “pleased” carries no sexual overtone in Greek. The seductive dance of later painting and opera may be right, and given Herod’s character and an all-male party with plenty of wine it’s a reasonable guess, but it’s a guess.^[17] What the text does say is that a powerful man made a grand promise in front of an audience he wanted to impress, and offered half a kingdom he had no authority to divide, borrowing the line from the book of Esther (Esther 5:6, 7:2).^[18]

Then Mark tells us the king was “exceedingly sorry.” The Greek is perilypos, and Mark uses that word exactly one other time, of Jesus in Gethsemane: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death” (Mark 14:34).^[19] Herod felt the full weight of what he was about to do. He did it anyway, “because of his oaths and his guests.” Saint Ambrose refused to let that stand as an excuse. It was shameful to promise a kingdom for a dance and cruel to kill a prophet to keep an oath, and where a promise is wicked it is far better broken than kept. Then Ambrose asks the question that ought to keep all of us awake: what could be more vile than a murder committed so as not to displease the dinner guests?^[20]

That is the whole of it. Herod knew the truth, respected the man who told it to him, felt sick at what he was ordering, and killed him anyway to protect his standing in a room. His honor mattered more than a life.^[21]

Mark’s last sentence is quiet, and it matters. John’s disciples came, took his body, and laid it in a tomb. The Greek words for “body” and “tomb” here are the same two Mark will use when Joseph of Arimathea buries Jesus (Mark 15:45-46).^[22] The nothing gets an honorable grave, and his burial rehearses the burial of the Son of God. As for the somethings at the table, Herod’s marriage started a war with the Nabatean king Aretas, whose daughter he had discarded, and it ended with Antipas defeated and exiled in AD 39.^[23] Paul was not exaggerating. The things that are, get brought to nothing.

Daily Application

Herod had already agreed with John in private. What undid him was the audience. He reached the moment where the true thing and the safe thing pulled in opposite directions, and he found he’d built a self that couldn’t survive losing the room.

Most of us will never face that with a life on the line. We face it in smaller currency, and often. The relative who says the outrageous thing at the table and everyone studies their plate. The meeting where the decision being made is dishonest, and you tell yourself somebody more senior should be the one to object. The friend drifting into something that will cost them their marriage, and you have known for a year, and you keep not saying it because you’d rather be liked than useful. In every one of those, you already know the true thing. What you’re weighing is your standing.

Here’s the correction the readings offer, and it’s mercy, not a scolding. Your standing was never actually yours. Paul says so. You were bought back at a price, and everything you might have boasted about is on loan from the One who chose you when you were nothing worth choosing. A man who really believes that has almost nothing left to protect. That is why John could speak to a king. He was poor; he knew exactly how poor he was, and a poor man can afford the truth.

So take one relationship this week where you’ve been trading honesty for approval, and pay the real price. Say the thing kindly, privately, and without a speech, because charity is the whole point, and John spoke out of love for the man he was correcting. Then let go of the outcome. You are not responsible for how it lands.

And if you’re on the other side of Paul’s list, if you’re the one with no title and no platform and a life that has never once impressed a room, read these passages again. Baptism consecrated you, set you aside from the ordinary and handed you over to God for his purposes.^[24] You are precisely the material he prefers to work with. The world counted John for nothing, and the Church has kept his name for two thousand years while the king who killed him is remembered only as the man who did it.

Boast in the Lord. You have every reason to, and no other reason will hold.

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Notes

1. Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1999), 109. ↩
2. George T. Montague, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), 51. ↩
3. Collins, First Corinthians, 110; Montague, First Corinthians, 51. ↩
4. Collins, First Corinthians, 111. ↩
5. Montague, First Corinthians, 51. ↩
6. Basil the Great, Homily on Humility 3, quoted in Montague, First Corinthians, 52. ↩
7. Collins, First Corinthians, 99, 113. ↩
8. Collins, First Corinthians, 113. ↩
9. Montague, First Corinthians, 53. ↩
10. Mary Healy, The Gospel of Mark, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 118. ↩
11. Healy, Gospel of Mark, 119. ↩
12. Healy, Gospel of Mark, 119-20. ↩
13. John Chrysostom, homily on Matthew, and Bede as quoted by Cornelius a Lapide, both cited at Mark 6:20 and Mark 6:17 in CatenaBible, https://www.catenabible.com/mk/6/20. ↩
14. John R. Donahue and Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark, Sacra Pagina 2 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002), 198. ↩
15. Donahue and Harrington, Gospel of Mark, 198. ↩
16. Donahue and Harrington, Gospel of Mark, 198. ↩
17. Donahue and Harrington, Gospel of Mark, 198-99; for the contrary reading, Healy, Gospel of Mark, 120. ↩
18. Healy, Gospel of Mark, 120. ↩
19. Donahue and Harrington, Gospel of Mark, 199. ↩
20. Ambrose of Milan, Concerning Virgins, cited at Mark 6:26 in CatenaBible, https://www.catenabible.com/mk/6/26. ↩
21. Healy, Gospel of Mark, 120; Donahue and Harrington, Gospel of Mark, 202. ↩
22. Donahue and Harrington, Gospel of Mark, 200. ↩
23. Healy, Gospel of Mark, 119. ↩
24. Montague, First Corinthians, 53. ↩

Books Cited

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• Raymond F. Collins, First Corinthians, Sacra Pagina 7 (Liturgical Press)
• George T. Montague, SM, First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2011)
• Mary Healy, The Gospel of Mark, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2008)
• John R. Donahue, SJ, and Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, The Gospel of Mark, Sacra Pagina 2 (Liturgical Press)