Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.
The Death of John the Baptist. What a lovely story we’ve been provided by the Gospels! Did you catch the Hallmark Channel movie about it? How about the children’s books? No, because neither exist! Yet this account is actually helpful to us in many ways – at least it is for me. Here are a few of my thoughts:
Bad things happen. We can do everything right, in lockstep with God, and still experience the worst of life, the worst from others, etc. This flies in the face of popular, shallow, poorly founded renderings of the faith expressed by Prosperity Gospel voices that proclaim that if you just have enough faith, you will be healed, you’ll get that job, and you can become financially secure. Jolly Ovalteen is perhaps the most popular mouthpiece for this perspective in the United States. One thing is certain: he has certainly grown incredibly rich from this perspective – from the poor suckers who give him their money, assured that God’s tenfold blessing will follow. Unfortunately, pain and suffering come anyway. The bad experience usually isn’t God’s will, unless, of course, the bad stuff is us rightfully losing some things that we were stingy with or inappropriate with: the consequences of greed, lust, cheating, etc.
The Uncontrolling Love of God versus Omnipotent God. Research regarding religious practices in the United States makes a strong case that most people – even those who claim to be devout adherents of their faith – haven’t really plunged the depths of their beliefs through simply reading the Bible, let alone reading what scholars have to say about it. Most folks practice a faith with conflicting ideas that cannot really live together, creating some serious dissonance in their faith experience. Thomas Jay Oord has written several books detailing this tension. He rightly notes that we have to decide which characteristic of God is primary: that God is all loving, or that God is all powerful. It makes a massive difference. If God is truly all powerful, John the Baptist would not have been executed. Neither would millions of Jews have been executed by Nazism’s holocaust. For more information, read Oord’s latest book, Open and Relational Theology, a very accessible book for general readers – the academics are sound, but it doesn’t read like a textbook.
Why Bother with Faith? If faith doesn’t somehow guarantee some protections – or worse, execution(!) – then I think some folks may simply walk away from the whole thing. Especially if you have a transactional theology operating under your hood whereby you do your part so God must do God’s part, John’s death story may be extremely unsettling. I encourage you to take away whatever “benefits” we might expect from faith, including the promise of heaven. With all of that off the table, we are left with some essential questions: who do we really want to be? What do we really want for our lives? What do we want for our loved one’s lives? What do we want for humanity? For the created world? For our country and other countries? When we start asking questions like these, we start getting at core issues that really matter, and we also recognize a variety of life paths available. I believe that Jesus proclaimed the highest hopes for the world and the path to get there. The hopes/ends and means are both rooted in the Spirit, the essence of God. These dreamy ideals are worth living into and dying for. I have experienced pain and suffering because I have leaned into them, and I am so glad I did! I am confident that there is more beyond the grave, that I will be welcomed, and that it will be more wonderfully mind-blowing than we can possibly imagine. Yet my heavenly hope is not what keeps me on the straight and narrow. I choose the less traveled path because, in my experience, Jesus was absolutely correct when he said the Way he was teaching and modeling leads to life in abundance. Not wealth or health necessarily, but true, deep, enduring abundance. I hope you and all people discover this, too, for it is the hope of the world.
Jim Elliott. Jim Elliott wanted to be a missionary, went through all the proper training, and made his way to Ecuador to try and reach some indigenous people there with the message of Jesus. After a few years on the ground trying to figure out how to make contact, he and three other missionaries (plus an airplane pilot) began dropping gifts for the local tribe and using a loudspeaker to communicate words of welcome and kindness. The five eventually created a small basecamp from which they hoped to begin reaching out directly to the tribe. Some tribe members came to visit them and, judging by the positive exchange, it seemed like the outlook was good. On January 8, 1956, the missionaries were getting ready to leave their camp to seek out the tribe when a group of 10 tribal warriors met them at the camp first. Jim Elliott went to greet them and was immediately killed with a warrior’s spear. All five men were killed and thrown into a river. They were found downstream sometime later. Think what you want about such missionary approaches, but also think about the level of conviction Elliott and his comrades had as well regarding the faith they embraced. In his journal, he noted: "he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose."
Bonus: Nerd Notes. When we read this story, it feels like lore (as it should). The ancient historian Josephus recorded John’s execution after imprisonment in a much less dramatic retelling: he was executed in a prison quite a distance away from Herod Antipas’ palace, with no mention of any surrounding drama. From a Roman history perspective, this adds up. John was another upstart causing problems. The solution was very often imprisonment and death. Why do the Gospels give us such a detailed tale? Because they want to connect some dots for the readers who will remember Jewish stories with similarities: Ahab, Jezebel, and Naaman; Elijah and Jezebel; and Esther’s winning a favor from her husband-king. Whether or not the story happened as the Gospels portray is irrelevant by ancient standards. Our focus should rather be on John’s execution, the reason behind it, and the implications for how we think about faith.