Herod and John the Baptist
a. The price a disciple may have to pay
Mark’s portrayal of discipleship has now reached its deepest point, not surpassed until the account of Jesus’ own death. The one who ‘prepared the way’ has not only not been set free by Jesus, he has met his death because of his faithfulness. We may begin to see now why Jesus does not encourage discipleship purely on the basis of hearing his teaching, observing his miracles and following with the crowd. The demands are too great for that. To be a disciple, as the second half of the Gospel will make clear, means following Jesus all the way to the cross and beyond. As R. P. Martin has argued cogently, John the Baptist is not just the forerunner of Jesus. As Mark presents him, he is the prototype too.
b. True faith is for dark days also
Mark may well have been sending this message to readers of his own time. There has always been a tendency in Christianity to lay too much stress on the miraculous, the exciting, the triumphal nature of Christian experience. The difficulty in practice is that while such a presentation is initially attractive and effective, especially for young people, it often proves inadequate to cope with the wide spectrum of life’s experiences and of human personality. The result is either that the particular body of Christians narrows down the life and expectations of its members, or that it loses them as their experiences broaden out, but replaces them with a steady supply of new members in at the other end. Successes are publicized: failures are not.
Mark’s picture is meant to correct such a one-sided view. John the Baptist’s discipleship was not like that. Nor, much more significantly, was the pattern of Jesus’ obedient sonship. With all his evident power and perception he went steadfastly to Jerusalem and to death, because the realities of evil and goodness, hate and love, required it. John the Baptist’s death shows that no shallow triumphalism will do. Nor will faithful witness always bring praise. There is a price to pay; for John the Baptist it was the ultimate price.
What does discipleship of Jesus offer, then? It offers a sense that one is living according to the truth, is walking with Jesus, is giving oneself in love to the service of God in the world. The reward is not success, or triumphalist patterns, but the knowledge that one is faithfully serving God’s purposes in the world.
