Sermon: G. K. Chesterton and St John the Baptist

            May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be now and

            always acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.

The hymn that we shall sing at the end of Matins is no. 492 in New English Hymnal, O God of earth and altar by G. K. Chesterton and set to an English folk tune by Ralph Vaughan Williams.  The hymn, so Professor Dick Watson's Annotated Anthology tells me, first appeared around 1905 in the periodical The Commonwealth, Henry Scott Holland's journal of the Christian Socialist Union.

Never such innocence again, wrote Philip Larkin in his famous poem MCMXIV, a shrewd reading of the veneer of progress, settlement and optimism of the Edwardian period before it was shattered by the bloodbath of the Somme.  But Chesterton, with true prophetic insight, a decade before the beginning of the Great War, saw a more accurate and chilling picture.  And it is remarkable how this early twentieth century text has not aged a century on:

            O God of earth and altar,

            Bow down and hear our cry,

Our earthly rulers falter,

Our people drift and die.

The walls of gold entomb us,

The swords of scorn divide,

Take not thy thunder from us,

But take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches,

From lies of tongue and pen,

From all the easy speeches

That comfort cruel men.

From sale and profanation

Of honour and the sword,

From sleep and from damnation,

Deliver us, good Lord!

Tie in a living tether

The prince and priest and thrall,

Bind all our lives together,

Smite us and save us all;

In ire and exultation

Aflame with faith, and free,

Lift up a living nation,

A single sword to thee.

Indeed stanza two, with its words ‘terror' and ‘cruel men' could have been written for 2007, as terror indeed returns to the streets of London, to the airport in Glasgow, and with the endless, weary, daily, desperate narrative of fanatical attacks in Baghdad and other cities in the tragedy that is Iraq, or in the utterly polarised land that we dare to call ‘holy'.  Moreover, as we live in an age of unparalleled material affluence, the line the walls of gold entomb us could have been written for this generation, for despite our spending power, there is the feeling, shared by many, religious and secular, that somehow we have lost our way, lost our soul as a nation, and as the rich get richer, and build bigger and bigger barns, naked poverty - material, spiritual, imaginative, sits like a demon crouching at the door.

And while today we might retract from the imagery: prince, and priest and thrall - by which I think Chesterton meant ordinary workers rather than slaves, it is nevertheless, a clarion call to leave a narrow, selfish and proud individualism, for a more corporate vision of a single society - indeed, the very things that our political leaders, Gordon Brown in his adapted socialism, and David Cameron in his more collegiate conservatism are instinctively feeling after.  Chesterton brings his own Christian understanding - only through the purifying judgment of God can death be transformed into life.

Today's second lesson resonates with these thoughts - the tragic death of ‘the great forerunner of the morn', St John the Baptist.  I don't know whether Chesterton had the Baptist in mind when he wrote his hymn - but if there is one hymn in the book that I could imaging the Baptist singing, it is this one.  John's preaching was not afraid of the concept of God's judgment.  He was not afraid to expose wickedness and vice - even to very face of the King.  His preaching was a clarion call to awake out of sleep, to flee from damnation, to allow God's thunder and ire, thus smiting us, to purge our sinful ways.

But I'm fascinated by Mark's crafting of this narrative of John's death.  In the first place, its quite a lengthy narrative by Mark's standards - apart from Jesus' passion narrative, most of what we would call Mark's paragraphs are short, pithy, to the point - but we have a full, unhurried account of John's death. And it interrupts the flow of Mark's narrative, which is about the sending out of the Twelve to preach and heal - but suddenly, Mark leaves this narrative for a substantial digression.

And I detect that there may be two things motivating this.  The first is that John the Baptist in his life-time could certainly pull a crowd, but it seems he could also keep a crowd, even after his death.  There are good scholarly reasons to think that at the time Mark wrote his Gospel, there were still significant groups of John's disciples: that is, people who had received his baptism, who had become his disciples, but who had never transferred their allegiance, unlike the Apostles, to his cousin Jesus. Part of Mark's concern, therefore, is that that all people should come to Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God, including the remaining bands of John's disciples.

And the second is that reading between the lines, it seems that there was a confusion between John and Jesus: so in Mark's account, we are told that when people heard about this wonder-worked called Jesus, there then spread a rumour: John the Baptizer has been raised from the dead, placed on the lips of that derelict King Herod Antipas.  So, we have two groups of disciples: the disciples of Jesus and the disciples of John and a degree of confusion: was Jesus really the Baptist raised from the dead?

And so Mark gives us this skilful narrative to dispel the confusion.  We hear the story of John's passion narrative. He is unjustly arrested for speaking the truth: he rebukes Herod for an illegal marriage. John is imprisoned and unjustly executed because of Herod's foolishness - a silly, drink-induced promise to a dancing girl, whose mother hated John and saw her chance to destroy him.  So, we have a narrative in which John, initially successful in his ministry, bears the cost of his vocation as the reality of human sin and folly is writ large.

But then, notice how the narrative ends: John is beheaded; mockingly and perversely, his head is presented to the dancing girl on a platter, who then gives it to her mother. And then John's disciples heard about it - and Mark concludes: ‘they came and took hid body, and laid it in a tomb.'

‘They came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb'.

 It's interesting how parallel the story of Jesus is. Of course, we might say that John was Jesus' forerunner in a more profound sense; not only preparing the way for his public ministry, but also for his death. John has set the course. This is what people in their sin do to the true servants of God.

So Jesus, while like John being initially successful in his ministry, now like John, suffers rejection and the consequences of human foolishness and sin. Like John, Jesus speaks the truth, not in his case to political leaders but to the religious leaders, the Pharisees, the chief priests, and is rejected. Like John, Jesus is unjustly arrested; like John, he is confined, and like John, he is executed.  And like John, Jesus' disciples, Joseph of Arimathea and those most persistent of followers, the deeply grieving Mary Magdalene, Mary and Salome, came and took his crucified corpse, and laid it in Joseph's rock hewn tomb.  He was crucified, dead and buried.

But as the Marys and Salome retuned to this place of death after the Sabbath rest to anoint him, and before sunrise on the first day of the week, they discovered with alarm that the stone had been rolled away; they saw, in terror, the young man in white, and they heard the mysterious, shocking, ineffable words:

            You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.

            He has been raised; he is not here;

            Look, there is the place where they laid him.

The message could not be clearer.  John is dead, but Jesus lives.  And that was the message proclaimed by Mark to the world, and to those who still hoped in the Baptist or who confused Jesus with the Baptist.

John is dead. But Jesus lives.  And yet, for all the clarity that Mark brings, we also note the similarities: Jesus and John are victims of abuse of power, of lies, of cruelty, of a pride that could not recognise God's decisive intervention in history, or the mercy and love that motivated it.  In that sense, as in Chesterton's hymn, Jesus and John stand in judgment over sinful humanity.

And so we return to Chesterton. His hymn is a plea, a strong prayer. The plea is that God may remake the soul of this nation, by a divine purging of our pride, by a deliverance from all those things that mar and stain our common life, and by an act of gracious uniting: Tie in a living tether The prince and priest and thrall...Lift up a living nation.

If the Biblical testimony were simply that John is dead, that Jesus is dead, we might be cynical that there can be any hope for humanity. And yes, John is dead, the victim of human injustice and cruelty, but Jesus lives, overcoming the most profound evil. That is our hope; that enlivens our prayers, and amidst the idols of materialism and fanaticism, teaches to sing our strong hymns, to the God of earth and altar, that God's kingdom on earth may come.