Amos 7:7-15
Ephesians
1:3-14
Mark
6:14-29 The death of John the Baptist
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When
it comes to dancing I have two left feet: beware your toes. I would have no
future on Strictly!
Yet
dance is something features throughout scripture.
Take
Psalm 150:
Praise
God in the cymbals and dances (Psalm 150.4),
or
Ecclesiastes:
there is… a time to
weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a
time to dance (Ecclesiastes 3.4).
Even
the prophet Jeremiah, who is associated with doom and gloom, declares that when
God brings the exiles home:
…you shall adorn
yourself with tambourines,
and shall go forth in the dance of the
merrymakers…
Then shall the young
women rejoice in the dance,
and the young men and the old shall be
merry.
(Jeremiah 31.4b, 13)
It
echoes the moment the people of Israel had crossed the Red Sea from slavery in
Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land, where we read:
Then Miriam the prophetess,
the sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out
after her with tambourines and dancing. (Exodus 15.20)
So,
dance, in the Bible, is associated with joy and praise of God.
Yet
it’s something we don’t do in our tradition of worship.
In
the ancient Ethiopian Church, after the Liturgy, the whole congregation dances;
priests and people in robes and finery.
It
is dance as jubilation and praise.
Dance,
at its best, shows poise and strength, elegance and grace.
Dance
connects us to deep rhythms that our bodies, without words, want to express.
Dance
can be beautiful, graceful, elevating hearts and minds to a higher good.
And
of course, sometimes dance is just exuberant fun and enjoyable, associated with
a wedding, a party or perhaps even a football victory: will people be dancing
in the streets of London or Madrid tonight? We’ll see!
As
with all good embodied actions dance can be distorted and disfigured.
Dance
can be used for seduction or display and be extremely sordid; the dancer can
become an object of inappropriate desire, even if intended.
At
that leads us to our gospel reading this morning.
It
is a tale of three dances.
The
gospel passage only describes one, but that dance echoes to two other biblical
dances.
In
the first dance,
‘When Herodias’s
daughter came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests.’ (Mark 6.22)
This
girl’s dance, she’s traditionally known as Salome, is offered to a tyrant: a
violent, adulterous, brutal and lustful man.
And
there is something very creepy about a man like Herod, and his fellow – male –
guests finding the dance of a young girl pleasing.
It
is a dance that leads to the death of John the Baptist.
John,
though, is also recorded as a dancer: that’s our second dance.
When
Mary the Mother of the Lord, pregnant with Jesus in her womb, came to visit her
cousin Elizabeth (pregnant with John), St Luke tells us that the unborn John
leaped with joy - danced – in his mother’s womb (Luke 1.41).
This
echoes our third dance.
This
is when the Ark of God was brought back to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6). The whole
city rejoiced and, according to the second book of Samuel:
David danced before the
Lord with all his might; David was girded with a linen ephod. (2 Samuel 6.14)
David
wears the linen ephod of a priest, though he becomes a king; John was descended
from a priestly line, though he becomes a prophet.
David
danced when God’s presence carried in the Ark of wood came near; John danced
when God’s presence in the womb of Mary came near.
These
two dances are dances of praise to God.[1]
Salome’s
dance takes place during a debauched feast, and we can imagine her being pressurised
into it.
Herod’s
blithe and casual exercise of power - promising what is not his to promise - is
the mirror image of the sovereignty of the One whom John came to proclaim.
Herod’s
life is caught up in murder and infidelity.
He
killed rival relatives to become king; he bumped off his brother Philip that he
could take his wife, Herodias, referred to in the gospel – indeed that is why
John was in prison in the first place, because he condemned Herod for it.
Herod’s
feast is a parody of the feast of life that we celebrate now in the Eucharist;
it is a feast of death.
There
is a dance deep in the heart of what we do now.
I
don’t mean we’ll get out of our places and boogie on down, rather our bodies
respond to the deep rhythm of God’s life and love, because he comes as our
Sovereign and Saviour.
David
danced in his presence; John danced in his presence: we move our bodies to
respond to him.
***
The
TV dramatisations of Jane Austen novels generally have a scene during a dance
when the dashing young gent comes and asks the bashful, overlooked young lady
to dance.
They
dance, and he sweeps her off her feet on a journey of love eventually
consummated in marriage.
There
is a medieval carol, ‘Tomorrow shall be my dancing day’, that narrates the
story of salvation and draws on the biblical imagery of Christ, the bridegroom,
being joined to his bride, the Church.
The
carol depicts Christ as our dancing partner, the one who sweeps us off our feet
to be one with him.
The
Gospels portray Christ as Bridegroom, and John the Baptist describes himself as
‘the friend of the bridegroom’ (John 3.29).
The
Bridegroom says in the carol:
Then up to heaven I did
ascend,
Where now I dwell in
sure substance
On the right hand of
God, that man
May come unto the
general dance.
Christ
wants to dance with us, his bride, not into the danse macabre of Herod’s banquet but to draw us into the banquet of
his life and love, to be fruitful with him, the Author of Life Divine.
[1]
It’s worth noting that David’s dance also generated resentment – in the heart
of Michal, Saul’s wife, because she saw her husband’s rival as priest and king.
