NOTES for Mar 6:14-29

Today’s passage is one of the places in the Bible that speaks of an evident lack of human freedom. For the sake of an oath made before his nobles, the drunken king is ready to override both his fears and the remnants of his conscience. The evangelists’ attitude toward the person of Herod Antipas is interesting. They seem prepared not to condemn him and regard him with a certain indulgence. And indeed, the king appears before us as a profoundly unfree man: he arrests John not on his own initiative, but because John denounced his unlawful marriage; he listens to John in prison while trying to resist the queen’s intrigues aimed at having the prophet executed. And now he “has to” behead him—again, against his own will. Need it be said that a person commits the chief evil while unfree, under the power of suggestion, pressure, and circumstances that they are unable—or unwilling—to resist and that drag them into sin and death? When we understand this, we begin to value in a new way the freedom that Christ gives: the freedom to resist circumstances and human and demonic pressure; as one priest put it, the freedom “not to obey evil.”