NOTES for Mat 14:1-12

Today's passage is one of the places in the Bible that speaks of an obvious lack of human freedom. For the sake of an oath made before his nobles, a drunken king is ready to override both his fears and the remnants of his conscience.

The evangelists' attitude toward Herod Antipas is interesting. They seem reluctant to condemn him and regard him with a certain indulgence. Indeed, the king appears before us as a man with very little freedom: he arrests John not on his own initiative, but because John denounces his unlawful marriage; he listens to John in prison while trying to resist the intrigues of the queen, who is seeking the prophet's execution. And now he “has to” behead him, once again against his own will.

Need we say that a person commits the greatest evil when deprived of freedom, under the power of suggestion, pressure, and circumstances that they cannot, or do not want to, resist and that draw them into sin and death? Once we understand this, we begin to value anew the freedom Christ gives: the freedom to resist circumstances and human and demonic pressure; as one priest put it, the freedom “to disobey evil.”

Herod's reaction to John's rebukes is banal. He so does not want some preacher spoiling his mood and sticking his nose into his personal life. It would be good if he did not exist at all.

And yet even Herod, who allowed himself much and paid little regard to anyone, did not dare kill John, because he feared the people. This is not surprising, since many of those who try to appear "tough" and show off their ruthlessness are in fact inwardly weak, saturated with hidden fears and complexes. Inner instability, the desire to show off before the guests, and at the same time dependence on the "public opinion" of those gathered at the feast forced Herod first to make a rash oath and then to agree to murder. Having rejected the preaching of John the Baptist, Herod rejected the possibility of repenting of his sins, and then multiplied them. And now he would have to spend the rest of his life in fear.

Fear is Herod's first reaction when he receives the news of Christ's preaching. Thinking that John has risen, Herod is mistaken, but there is a grain of truth in his mistaken fears. For the One whom he took for the risen John truly does bring Resurrection. Even saturated with evil, Herod sensed the invincibility of good.

When you prayerfully reflect on the image of John the Baptist, as though focusing your gaze on his icon, you understand that he is some entirely special person. After all, the Gospel contains many remarkable people, kind and sincerely loving the Lord... But in John there is something that seems to separate him from everyone, to set him a little aside. “Among those born of women there has not arisen anyone greater than John the Baptist...” (Matt. 11:11) — perhaps precisely here lies the reason for this feeling of inaccessibility, of remoteness.

And yet he was only a human being. There is one other human being before whom we have a similar feeling of inaccessibility: Mary. She is simply a woman, and at the same time She is far greater than any woman, for She carried in Her womb the Son of God Himself. This is what unites these two people, apart from blood kinship. But not only this: both became those through whom the birth of Christ was accomplished, in the flesh through Mary, and in the Spirit through John. And both at the same time felt themselves to be humble, unworthy witnesses of the miracle taking place before their eyes.

This is probably why these three icons stand at the center of the Deesis row: Mary, the Savior, and John. And the words of the prayer become somehow especially understandable: “As by natural kinship and by prayerful concord you are one, Mother of the King of all and divine Forerunner, offer together a supplication for the servant who has greatly angered the All-merciful One, that He may show mercy and save, bowing to your intercessions, and change me from my fiery kinship.”

The ancient Persians thought that two equal powers, good and evil, act in the world. Pagans believed that among the various deities some are friendly to human beings and others hostile to them. But in reality there is only one God, and He is merciful. This Revelation is not as simple as it appears. We like to imagine scenes of an apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil; it looks more honorable to us to take part in a grand battle against a corresponding opponent. Therefore we take an allegorical description of the essence for a literal description of events.

Perhaps we have become so accustomed to life in hell that we do not see how monstrous the ordinary is. What small, empty things, in essence, led to the death of the greatest of those born of women, John the Forerunner! Well, this girl danced a provocative dance... Well, her mother wanted to maintain an appearance of respectability so that she would not be reproached for her marriage... The satanic snarl that suddenly appeared surprises us: "Give me John's head on a platter." But we, too, dispose of people's lives in exactly the same way over the most complete trifles. John was the Forerunner of Christ not only because he announced His coming and proclaimed Him. By his death he also foretold how petty envy and momentary political calculation would lead to the death of the Son of God.

When reading today's Gospel word, it is important to keep in mind that in our daily life we are the same Herodias, and our actions, dictated by petty and essentially pitiful interests, lead to catastrophic consequences.

The course of John the Baptist's life is, if not the best, then one of the best examples of what Jesus means when he says, ‘Blessed are those persecuted for righteousness (“for truth”), for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.’ His principal task was to bear witness to the Messiah coming into the world, but, like every righteous person, he could not fail also to bear witness against the violations of the Torah, the commandments given by God, that took place before his eyes.

Of course, one could say that John was not unique in this respect, that other prophets before him had done the same. Yet it seems that none of Israel's great prophets was executed for bearing witness. Jeremiah came closest, but the authorities still did not dare kill the prophet: such a murder was considered a terrible crime not only against human beings, but also against God. Herod dared to do what the rulers of pre-exilic Judah had not. Yet he too apparently took no joy in what he had done. It is no accident that the executed prophet became a source of lasting terror for him: when he heard of Jesus, it was no accident that he concluded that this was John, whom he had executed, risen from the dead.

Herod was probably not so much a believer as superstitious in everything concerning God and spiritual life. God played no part in his life; judging by all we know of him, he was by no means a believer. Yet everything associated with figures as mysterious and enigmatic to him as prophets, for example, aroused precisely a superstitious fear in him. He probably sensed that some special power stood behind them, a power whose nature he did not understand, and he feared it. But there was something in his life that made him overcome his fear of this unknown power: pride. He had given his word, perhaps while drunk, but in the presence of all his guests, that he would grant any wish of the girl who had danced for him and pleased him. Fulfilling that promise now became a matter of honour for Herod, in his very peculiar understanding of the word. And he resolves upon murder. Afterwards, nightmares begin to torment him: he imagines that the power whose presence he sensed when speaking with John, and which he so feared, will come crashing down upon him. That is why, on hearing of a new Prophet, he thought first of John's resurrection: here was the punishment falling upon him for John's death!

There was, of course, nothing in all this of the Kingdom or of spiritual life as such. There was only hell: hell on earth, which Herod had made for himself with his own hands. What the fallen world inevitably becomes when it is finally cut off from God, from Christ and from the Kingdom.

Christ gathers enormous crowds of people and feeds them with bread. There is enough bread for everyone, and each of the apostles even manages to gather a whole basket of leftovers. And this is the same Christ who said that a person lives "not by bread alone" and refused to engage in social reforms!

To understand this event, it is necessary to turn to the biblical parallels for such a mass feeding of people: the manna that God gave Israel in the wilderness. And also to the prophecies that in the triumph of God's Kingdom people will be filled with bread. For the first readers and hearers of the Gospel, the allusion to these sacred texts meant that God's Kingdom was already being realized in Jesus; in Him God had already come to people.

This story was undoubtedly associated for them with their own experience of divine life, into which they entered through the breaking of the bread: thanksgiving, blessing, breaking, distribution of bread, and gathering of leftovers were all actions involved in the celebration of the Eucharistic meal. In that meal, as in this story, the basic human concepts - bread, life, God - are forever connected with the person of Jesus.