There are two different gatherings mentioned in our readings this morning. One of them takes place in the court of King David, and the other takes place in the court of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Judæa. They are similar in that they tell about two powerful leaders putting on elaborate feasts of celebration for their people, but the end results of these celebrations could hardly be more different.
The celebration we find in Second Samuel surrounds the moving of the Ark of the Covenant from the house of Abinidab into the City of David. Moving the ark is no small feat. It is made of acacia wood, and assuming a cubit is eighteen inches, it is three feet, 9 inches long by 2 feet, three inches wide and tall. That’s not so bad, except that it is also covered with lots of gold and cherubim and things, so it is an effort to move.
Still, they all seem to have a good time moving it. They build a new cart for it and set it on there, and the sons of Abinidab set out to bring the ark to the City of David.
Meanwhile, the city of David is getting ready to receive the ark. They are "celebrating before the Lord" with tambourines, cymbals, castanets, lyres and harps and a bunch of other instruments they don’t name, except to say that they are made out of fir wood.
When the ark shows up, David sacrifices an ox and a fatling, and "dances before the ark with all his might," wearing a linen ephod. This ephod thing needs some explaining. An ephod may have been sort of like a vest or an apron, and it was worn by the high priests of Israel, and inside the ephod they carried sacred lots. These may have been coins, or rods, or dice, or any number of other objects, but what matters is that they were used to help determine the will of God.
So the point here is that David is NOT wearing his royal robes, as a secular leader, but he is wearing an EPHOD, the garment of a high priest. He was acting as a RELIGIOUS leader, not a SECULAR leader. David wore an ephod to show the people that, no matter what happened, no matter what Israel faced as a nation, and no matter what David face as a king, God was going to be their true leader, and they were going to think and act as God led them.
Now let’s take a look at another gathering, another festival, the one that the tetrarch Herod gave for himself on his birthday. There may have been lots of exotic food and entertainment, but Herod and his guests had seen it all and done it all before, and they were all really pretty bored. It is only when Herod’s wife’s daughter (by a previous marriage), dances for the party that things began to pick up a little.
This dancer, of course, is Salomé. To put some flesh on the bones of Mark’s telling of this story, I read Oscar Wilde’s one-act tragedy called Salomé. If you read it, I think you will be struck by how world-weary everybody seems in it, and how everybody seems real lethargic and anemic, and everybody just sort of floats through the play like a bunch of ghosts, like nothing really matters.
But Herod does take ONE thing seriously, and he puts some real energy into it. In the play, Salomé is reluctant to dance, but Herod talks her into it by promising her anything she wants, up to half his kingdom.
It is only when he swears a solemn oath to do as he says he will do that she does indeed dance. The oath is important, because Salomé and her mother know that Herod is keeping John the Baptist in something like protective custody.
We are told, in fact, that Herod actually enjoys listening to the prophet, even if he doesn’t really understand what he is talking about. The problem is, Herod’s wife HATES John the Baptizer because he has been saying that it was not lawful for Herod to marry her, because she had been his BROTHER’S wife.
But now that the time has come for Herod to pay up, he is stuck. Herod’s wife sees her opportunity to get rid of a troublesome prophet, and tells her daughter to ask for the head of John the Baptist on a plate, and there is nothing Herod can do about it. A prophet of God dies because Herod has sworn an oath in front of his friends for no reason other than to get a cute girl to dance at his birthday party.
Let’s stop and compare all this to the images that we have in our Old Testament reading. Here David wears an ephod, representing his determination to be a Godly leader of his people, and, as the ark of his people’s covenant with God comes into his city, he leaps and dances before it and his God "with all his might." David burns offerings, blesses his people in the name of God, and then, after all that, he sends everybody home with a loaf each of raisin and nut bread.
Karl Marx said -- and a lot of people still agree with him -- that religion is the opiate of the people -- like morphine, he said, it kept them quiet and complacent. But for David and those around him, faith in God seems to be a vitamin, encouraging them and spurring them on. In fact, David seems so full of energy that he is practically out of control with joy before the Lord.
If anybody seems under the influence a sleep aid, it is the bunch assembled for Herod’s little do. They lie around waiting for something to happen, and when it finally does, it is a horror. Yet their host does not have the strength of character to admit that the oath he swore was a bad one with horrible consequences for an innocent man, so he just sort of lets it slide. He’s sorry, "exceedingly sorry," the reading says, but, well, that’s the way it goes.
We need to be reminded every now and then how quickly things can go terribly wrong when people forget to put God first in their lives. Or, as I have quoted before, "All that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing."
But how joyous life was for David and his people as they dedicated themselves to God’s service. And how joyous OUR lives can be when we realize that what really matters in life is indeed serving God in Christ, and living in the joy that service brings.
"In Christ we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace, which He lavished upon us. In all wisdom and insight He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the the fulness of time, to unite all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things upon the earth."
