This sermon was preached on the 14th of July 2024, the Feast of Saint Swithun, in the Anglican Parish of Kalamunda-Lesmurdie
Texts:
Bitter envy is absent where peace is present, for ever and ever: where the peace of Christ is present, bitter envy is absent.
Those words form the last verse of an ancient hymn, which tells of the life of Saint Swithun. It’s at least a thousand years old.
They are deep words: they speak of the peace of Christ, and how we might tell that it has emerged… and I came across them a few days ago, while reading from a book about Saint Swithun. I was immediately stunned by the way they open up today’s reading.
Listen to them again.
Bitter envy is absent where peace is present, for ever and ever: where the peace of Christ is present, bitter envy is absent.
We’ve just heard from the Gospel of Saint Mark about events in a royal court, the court of Herod, Rome’s puppet ruler. This is palace drama, full of intrigue, full of flourish, full of envy: bitter, and awful. And the worst of what happens, the grotesque killing of John the Baptist, the serving up of his severed head on a platter, is seemingly blamed on the women of the story.
It’s blamed on Herodias, Herod’s wife, and her young daughter. Herodias and her daughter become sinful figures, illicit, seductive, dangerous. And somehow Herod, the one who actually gives the order for John’s death, is seemingly able to chalk his actions up to mere social embarrassment.
His wife’s daughter, having earned a wish, puts him in the awkward position of having to kill a prisoner… as if a tetrarch, a king, couldn’t have chosen to deny a young girl, and laugh off her request. So let’s take a moment to centre the experience of Herodias, Herod’s wife.
Josephus, the great Jewish historian of this time, tells us that Herodias had married her first husband’s half-brother. The couple to be met in Rome when Herod visited that place. It seems that Herodias managed to divorce her first husband, and at the same time Herod divorced his first wife.
This brought a major scandal. John the Baptist was not, by any means, the first person to complain. The father of Herod’s first wife declared war, and then eventually the Romans got involved.
I share all of this because it establishes for us that Herodias lived a life and place steeped in intrigue, steeped in bitterness, and envy. Rulers from her family had, on multiple occasions, had ordered the execution of their own children.
Simply surviving, with her daughter, seemingly required political skill and deviousness. Herodias was left to play a horrible game of palace intrigue.
Bitter envy is absent where peace is present
Herodias shows us that the converse is true: when peace is absent, profoundly absent, then violence and horror will almost inevitably follow.
The court of Herod was an evil place: a place where it was a struggle to survive. And in such circumstances, people, all too often, will do awful things simply to see the next day.
John the Baptist had publicly challenged the new marriage of Herodias. Had he succeeded in shaming her husband into abandoning her, she would have had no future, and her daughter would have had no future either. And so, the Gospel tells us, Herodias made sure that John was killed.
I don’t mean to suggest that we blithely excuse Herodias for her actions: but I think we do learn something if we understand her actions as being shaped by the situation in which she lived.
John the Baptist lived a life of costly witness: he went to the margins of his society, quite literally, heading out into the desert and proclaiming the one who would follow him. John was killed for speaking against wrong behaviour, for daring to involve himself in the palace intrigues of Herod and his kin. With his voice, John proclaimed the coming of the Lord; with his death, John foreshadowed the type of Messiah that Jesus would be, a Messiah righteous even unto death.
None of us, I hope, lives the sort of life that Herodias lived. Yet we do live in a society where there are structural issues of injustice: a society where it can be difficult to keep a roof over your head, where it is getting increasingly difficult to put food on the table, where simply living a stable life can be very hard.
There’s a reality that this reduces our capacity for peace. It is getting harder to live without envy, and without bitterness. Fortunately, as Christians, when things get hard, the examples of the saints, those faithful disciples who lives have been proclaimed by the Church as worthy examples of the Christian life, can help us and encourage us.
If we look to the stories long told of the life of Saint Swithun, we find that they proclaim a kind-hearted and gentle leader, a wonderful example of a bishop, an overseer of God’s church.
The famous story of Swithun rushing to the aid of a poor woman whose eggs had been maliciously broken by workers, tells of a great person, a lord of the land, a bishop… who was willing to forgo all of that, and rush out into the street to help someone who was being attacked.
The woman whose eggs were broken was being robbed of food: the food she needed, and her family needed. More than that, she was being robbed of dignity, left to stand alone, distressed, by the road. Running to her, Swithun looked not to himself, not to his own temporal power, but to God. He brought the matter to God in prayer, and restoration followed.
We know from history that Swithun cared especially for ordinary folk, and for the poor, and did much to provide for them, building bridges, houses, and churches.
And yet, we know as well that Swithun lived in a time of palace intrigues, of the various Anglo-Saxon kings. He shared something of the situation of Herodias. And yet he found a way to be a kind and generous man… because he followed Jesus Christ, because he was Christ’s faithful servant.
So let us attend one final time to that verse from the ancient hymn of Swithun:
Bitter envy is absent where peace is present, for ever and ever: where the peace of Christ is present, bitter envy is absent.
Jesus Christ has won the victory.
The one who drank of bitter wine as he died upon the Cross, has triumphed over the bitterness of envy, of sin, of death.
Jesus calls us, calls each of us, to be the bearers of his peace, the peace so profoundly proclaimed by his death and resurrection. We are called to forgo palace intrigues in their modern form, to forgo gossip, envy, to forgo the allure of wealth and self-importance. We are called to challenge injustice wherever we see it: to name and confront it, as John the Baptist did, as Jesus did, and Swithun did.
And we must recognise that injustice infringes upon Christ’s peace. And so, we are called to help, practically. We must work to liberate the oppressed. I was moved to see just how much the people of this parish, and the parish of Forrestfield, gave to the Salvation Army at the soup & sandwich gathering of the Mother’s Union on Tuesday.
That is a true witness to Christ’s peace. A peace that will end bitterness and envy, forevermore.
The Lord be with you.
Hymn quoted from Michael Lapidge et al., The Cult of St. Swithun, Winchester Studies, 4. The Anglo-Saxon minsters of Winchester; pt. 2 (Oxford : Oxford ; New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 2003), 786.