HOMILY WEEK 04 05 – Year II
David and John the Baptist: Models of Faith and Repentance
(Sirach 47:2-13; Ps 17; Mk 6:14-29)
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Repent, heal and realize our dignity is a message from the readings today.
Ben Sirach, in the first reading, extols and exalts David, in spite of the fact that he committed adultery and arranged a murder. How is that possible?
The last paragraph pretty well contains the answer. The Lord took away his sin and gave him a royal covenant, a glorious throne in Israel.
God’s relationship with God’s people has always been expressed through the idea of a covenant relationship – an intimate relationship that is like a marriage. However, until the time of David, those covenants were conditional covenants – keep the law and you will be rewarded, break it and you will be punished and suffer. From Adam and Eve, to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses – all those covenants had conditions attached.
There was a major, significant shift in that pattern with David. For reasons that only God knows, God told David that no matter what he did, God would continue to love him unconditionally. Well, we all know that familiar story of what David ended up doing – committing adultery out of lust for Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, and then arranging to have Uriah killed in battle to cover up his sin.
When found out by the prophet Nathan, however, David wholeheartedly repented and received God’s forgiveness for what seemed like an unforgiveable sin – deliberate murder. That experience of God’s unconditional love transformed David into the only true king that Israel ever had. He knew who he was and thus was able to tell the temple priests to give him the bread that only the priests can eat. In doing this he was saying that if God was here, that is what God would do, and that as king, he was simply living out his kingship.
That is the second lesson this teaches us: to claim our dignity. We are all made in the image and likeness of God, with kingly and queenly energy, and we must claim that energy and live as children of God, kings and queens in our own right. We have every reason to be confident, proud of who we are in a good sense, and grateful.
Our lives may not hold the radical contrast of light and shadow that David’s did, but we all have our bright and dark “faces.” Even so, we can all experience the mercy David experienced. That’s because God has made provision for our waywardness. God has given us the great gift of repentance in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
We often think of repentance and going to Confession as a burden, or at least an embarrassing inconvenience. But David’s story tells us that it is nothing less than a path back to the Lord and a protection against crippling guilt. Just as God forgave David, God is eager to forgive us. God wants nothing more than to shower us with God’s mercy and strengthen us.
According to late Fr. Al Hubenig OMI, the readings today show us two radically different ways of carrying out kingly duties. King David, once forgiven, lived his authority out with obedience and love for God. King Herod is just the opposite – not only in his paranoia at the birth of Jesus and ordering the slaughter of innocent children, but today in his false pride and to avoid embarrassment, ordering the death of an innocent John the Baptist, who had the courage to speak truth to power and confront the king on his immoral situation.
The banquet Herod had arranged on the occasion of his birthday became a banquet of death. Ironically, Mark follows this passage with a banquet of life as Jesus, in a deserted place with his disciples, feeds a multitude through the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves, knowing full well he would face the same fate as John the Baptist.
Bishop Robert Barron comments that martyrdom has always been an important chapter of the Christian story, from believers in the early Church who refused to sacrifice to Rome’s pagan gods, to great saints of the Middle Ages such as Thomas Becket and Thomas More who refused to compromise their beliefs for the sake of the state, to modern martyrs killed in what St. John Paul II called odium caritatis, “hatred of charity,” such as Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador.
In the early twenty-first century, martyrdom remains a stunningly common fact of Christian life. One high-end estimate for the number of Christian martyrs killed each year is one hundred thousand, while the low end is around eight thousand—ranging from one new martyr every five minutes to one every hour.
The example of the martyrs draws people to wonder what it is that would induce so many to make the ultimate sacrifice. The Church Father Tertullian said that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” and it’s a rare case of a theological maxim for which there’s actually empirical confirmation.
The Eucharist is itself an experience of that same unconditional love God showered on David, through forgiveness and healing. May our celebration strengthen our faith in that love of God, deepen its reality in our lives, and empower us to live out our faith through acts of love and mercy in turn.
