The High Cost of Pride and Getting Even

By

Reverend Litton J. Logan

July 16, 2006

Scriptures:

Mark 6:14 -- 29 (NRSV)

¹⁴ King Herod heard of it, for Jesus’ name had become known. Some were saying, “John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; and for this reason these powers are at work in him.” ¹⁵ But others said, “It is Elijah.” And others said, “It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.” ¹⁶ But when Herod heard of it, he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.”

¹⁷ For Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because Herod had married her. ¹⁸ For John had been telling Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” ¹⁹ And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not, ²⁰ for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him. ²¹ But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers and officers and for the leaders of Galilee. ²² When his daughter Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it.” ²³ And he solemnly swore to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.” ²⁴ She went out and said to her mother, “What should I ask for?” She replied, “The head of John the baptizer.” ²⁵ Immediately she rushed back to the king and requested, “I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.” ²⁶ The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her. ²⁷ Immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison, ²⁸ brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl. Then the girl gave it to her mother. ²⁹ When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.

Introduction and Comments

Fish cost a fortune

Two good-ole boys from my home state of Mississippi wanted to fish the San Juan River. They fly in to Albuquerque and rent all their equipment--the reels, the rods, the waders and wading boots, and a car.  Once they reach Navajo Dam community, they rent a cabin and a drift boat for floating the river. I mean they spend a fortune!

The first day they go fishing, but they don't catch anything. The same thing happens on the second day, and on the third day. It goes on like this until finally, on the last day of their vacation, one of the men catches a fish—a nice 18” rainbow trout.

As they're driving back to the airport, they're really depressed. One guy turns to the other and says, "Do you realize that the one lousy fish we caught cost us fifteen hundred bucks?"

The other guy says, "Wow! Then it's a good thing we didn't catch any more!"

          This morning’s scriptures are a bit like this story—a story about the deceptively expensive.

Sermon:

          This morning’s scriptures are about human pride being carried to its demonic limits.  It is the underlying dynamics of human pride in the story that I would like to look at this morning.  Human pride can be an awesome and demonic force.  Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography says this about pride:

There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive. Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.

          In our scriptures today, Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea--a Roman appointed administrative-governor--has heard of Jesus and inquired about him.  He gets some rather bizarre explanations for whom and what Jesus is.

Given the superstitions of the ancient world, many people jumped to the conclusion that John the Baptist’s spirit had become re-embodied in Jesus.  People who died violent, especially unjust deaths, were believed to be accorded some degree of power in the spirit world over this world.  Yet, other people said that Jesus was the Old Testament prophet Elijah, who in Jewish apocalyptic thought was slated to come back to earth in the end-times.  Given everyone’s heightened sense of the end times in Jesus’ day this would have made Jesus something of a force to be reckon with.  Others said Jesus was a new and great prophet in the model of the prophets of old. 

          As we read in Mark’s Gospel, Herod Antipas has imprisoned John the Baptist at his wife’s, Herodias, insistence.  Herodias engineered John’s imprisonment out of her injured pride.  A little clarity maybe needed here because Mark and or his sources may have gotten some things out of place. After some clarification about Herodias and Herod Antipas, you will ask yourself how in the world Herodias could have taken offense at anything anyone said about her and her family, much less some obscure, fanatical prophet like John.

Herodias’ first husband was the half-brother of her father Herod II (aka Herod Philip), her uncle.  She bore this husband a daughter named Salome of dancing fame in today’s scriptures. Although Salome is not mentioned by name in today’s text, we know from other sources that the person who danced for Herod Antipas was most likely not Herodias herself but her daughter.  Incidentally, Salome was married to a half-brother of Herod Antipas, who was her uncle and stepfather, thus making her mother, her sister-in-law.

Herod Antipas had ten wives but divorced one of his wives, a Nabatean princess, and the daughter of Aretas IV, to make room for Herodias, whom he wooed her away from his half-brother.

          Many of you knew As the World Turns was an old series; bet you didn’t know it was this old.

Herod Antipas’ and Herodias’ marriage may have been seen as an adulterous marriage, a violation of the levirate privilege, or as an incestuous marriage, since Herodias would have been a close cousin of Herod Antipas.  Whatever the discrepancy in the marriage John the Baptist outright condemned the marriage as immoral and unlawful. 

John’s condemnation greatly offended and angered Herodias. She was spiteful in the face of John’s moral reproof. Given all the violations of the spirit and intent of marriage and the incestuous connections, not to mention all the intrigues and murders in her family closets, how in the world could Herodias become offended?  The whole so-called Jewish royal family at the time was by most standards of morality and decency nothing more than regal trash.  Herodias’ taking offense at John’s condemnation would be like Madonna taking offence because someone said her hemline was too high.

However, this sort of thing has been around for a long time and is very common.  Look at some of the powerful people in our time who have become murderously vindictive when confronted about their sins and immoral life styles. 

Herodias was so angry with John that she wanted to have him killed.  However, Herod Antipas, as Mark indicates, was somewhat protective of John the Baptist, whether for political reasons or religious reason is not altogether clear.  The writer does tell us that Herod Antipas did like to listen to John preach.

            We know the story.  Herod is so impressed with Salome’s birthday dance that he promises her any gift she desired.  Salome confers with mommy dearest about what she should request and mommy dearest extracts her revenge on John the Baptist.  In the heat of the moment and in his prideful overconfidence, Herod Antipas again looses his focus as a leader and on his own moral compass, if he ever had one.  In his exalted sense of himself and how he might appear to his court officers and officials, Herod Antipas looses it. Saving face among his peers and subjects and keeping up the unquestionable imperatives of his class drove him to make a horrible decision and John the Baptist dies. Can you imagine the arrogance of such people?  Just because they are the so-called aristocracy, the elite, the rulers, they think they can kill people on trumped up charges, whims, or for some perceived offense against their overrated, prideful sense of themselves.  It seems inconceivable that superstition and pride would lead someone to commit such a heinous crime as Herodias and Herod Antipas. Yet it happened and it happens.  It happens not just among the so-called rich and famous, the powerful, educated and wealthy, but even among those of lesser power, wealth, and education.

          Let me share with you my first encounter with such horrible arrogance, ignorance, and pride.  I was 13 my grandmother Lottie and I were in a restaurant in Jackson, MS listening to J. W. Kellum, one of the layers who defended the two men accused of killing Emmett Till in 1955, as he describe his position and part in the case to my grandmother and me.  Grandmother Lottie had hired Kellum to do some legal work for her on her father’s estate.  It was a conversation that would alter my life.

Let me refresh your memories.  On August 24, 1955, a 14 year-old black kid named Emmett Till from Chicago, who was visiting relatives in Mississippi, supposedly on a dare, allegedly made improper advances and comments to a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, the wife of Roy Bryant, the owner of a small grocery store in Money, MS.  Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy, was not in Money at the time of the alleged incident.  Carolyn would later testify that Emmett physically touched her and made crude, suggestive comments to her, and gave her a wolf-whistle as he left the store.  Carolyn, after telling her sister-in-law, the wife of J. W. Milam, Roy Bryant’s half-brother, about the incident decided she would keep it to her self and not tell her husband.  However, a young black man, who resented Emmett Till for his cockiness and brashness, told Roy Bryant about the inappropriate advances and comments made by young Till, who had bragged about the incident as well as other exploits of his concerning white women back in Chicago.

Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped Emmett Till from Till’s great uncle’s and aunt’s house in the dead of night amid their protests and pleas and drove off with him.  Three days later Emmett Till was found dead in the Tallahatchie River near Glendora, MS.  He had been beaten and shot.

Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were indicted for Till’s murder; however, the defense team for Bryant and Milam, which was composed of five lawyers, who incidentally represented these men for free, maintained that the remains of Emmett Till were so badly abused from the beating he sustained and from having been in the water for three days that the prosecution could not say with a certainty that it was Emmett Till in spite of Emmett’s mother’s identification.  Bryant’s and Milam’s defense maintained that Till was still alive and living in Chicago and this whole episode was a concoction of the N.A.A.C.P. in collusion with communist influences to foment unrest in the South.

I remember thinking even as a 13-year-old kid how evil these men were and how evil my grandmother’s lawyer was for defending such people. Emmett Till was year older than I was when he was killed.  By all accounts, a good kid; brash and precocious as only boys that age can be, as I well knew. The kid probably needed his backside dusted by his mom and made to apologize if the allegations were true; but he definitely didn’t deserve death for his breach of cultural propriety and tradition.

I remember thinking how incongruent it was for a saintly woman like my grandmother to be hooked up with someone like J. W. Kellum. In all fairness to Kellum, he was held in high esteem as a good man, who was just doing his job and insuring a vigorous defense for his clients.  There was no indication that he was an innately bad or evil person; simply a product of his time and culture.  I guess one could say that as such a product he was unintentionally evil.

            J. W. Kellum was one of two lawyers who made the closing arguments for the defense and appealed to God and the arrogance of cultural traditions of white privilege in his summation.  "I want you to tell me where," he said, "under God's shining sun, is the land of the free and the home of the brave if you don't turn these boys loose; your forefathers will absolutely turn over in their graves." J. W. Whitten, the other lawyer on closing, added, ‘‘Every last Anglo-Saxon one of you men in this jury has the courage to set these men free.’’  The jury listens to Kellum and Whitten and it acquitted Bryant and his brother.

Shortly after these two men were acquitted and under the protection of double jeopardy they sold their story to a journalist for $4,000 giving all the gory details of how they murdered young Till.  Their story was published in Look magazine on January 24, 1956. Such demonic arrogance and pride, one cannot imagine, but it happened that way.

My encounter with J.W. Kellum, if my memory serves me right, was between the time of the acquittal and the publishing of the article in Look magazine.

It is interesting to note that Bryant’s and Milam’s lawyer, J. W. Whitten, learned the truth about his client’s crime during the interview with the journalist. J. W. Kellum learned about their guilt later but before the Look article was published.

This encounter with Kellum, as you can tell, stuck with me.  It was my first real encounter with the face of systematic injustice and evil as a young person coming of age in the Deep South and learning to think for myself.  This conversation and its subject taught me my first lesson about the level to which human pride, arrogance, and ignorance, regardless of social-economic status, would go in service of a person’s sense of themselves as well as the lengths people would go to protect their perceptions of power, privilege, and their distorted senses of honor.

Through out this story of Emmett Till and John the Baptist, although the stories are not analogous in content they have in common one critical factor--the underlying dynamics of demonic pride--one picks up on the pervasive and wicked justifications by those in power, the privileged, and the so-called elite classes for not being held accountable for crimes or sins committed against persons of perceived inferior standing.  Racial privilege and superiority in rank along with ignorance, a distorted sense of honor, and justice meted out through the evil of human pride is an old, old scenario.

I’ve seen this demonic pride and arrogance in people of all races.  I’ve even seen the glorified victim-hood of the abused used as justification and as privilege to victimize others.  I’ve seen the heretofore powerless and oppressed people slaughter and kill supposed justification their previous oppressors. Demonic pride, demonic pride!

            My friends as horrible as such stories are people to some lesser or greater degree commit the sins of Herodias and Herod, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam every day. Every day people use the power of political, economic, or racial positions to perpetrate some very awful things on others.

How often have we locked ourselves into positions where our sense of self and being right as well as how we appear to others has caused us to betray our values? We are all guilty of the sin of pride and its spiteful results to some lesser or greater degree.

We’ve all heard what the writer of Proverbs said—“Pride goeth before a fall.”  Well it does.

War broke out in 36 C.E. between Herod Antipas and Aretas IV, the father of the wife Herod Antipas divorced to marry Herodias.  Herod Antipas' army was destroyed for his arrogant and prideful disregard for the marriage contract and the humiliation he caused Aretas IV and his daughter.   As an ex-military person, I think of all those soldiers who died or were maimed for Aretas IV and his daughter’s injured pride and Herod’s and Herodias’ arrogance and pride. Josephus the Jewish historian claims that many viewed Herod’s humiliation in the war as divine judgment for his executing John the Baptist. I see it another way.  I personally think others reaped what Herod and his ilk have sowed all across history—the consequences of demonic pride.

Tiberius, ruler of the Roman Empire died, and Caligula became emperor.  Caligula gave to Agrippa, the brother of Herodias, the territory previously held by the tetrarch Philip, who had died in 34 C.E., but Agrippa received the title of king. After Agrippa had come to Palestine (38-39 C.E.), Herodias persuaded Antipas that they should go to Rome so that Antipas might also gain a more royal title. Agrippa, however, had in readiness some damning charges against Antipas, with the result that Antipas was banished to Lyons in Gaul (France).Herodias accompanied him there.  Herod Antipas' tetrarchy was given to Agrippa.  (The accounts in Antiq. XVIII.vii and War II are often in minor contradiction.

Herodias’ arrogance and pride set into motion the dynamics of not only her husband’s downfall but also her own exile in humiliation.  Herod Antipas’ greed, arrogance, immorality, and pride made him an active and willing participant in his downfall.

Roy Bryant and his wife returned to their grocery store and tried to resume a normal life. However, they found that their African-American customers refused to do business with them any longer.  The store was forced to close.  Bryant also discovered that his white friends were very reluctant to give him any assistance whatsoever. Ostracized by his own community and with no job prospects, the Bryants moved to Texas. They were divorced in 1979.   Roy Bryant remarried and eventually returned to Mississippi plagued with health problems until he died of cancer in 1994. Recently, there has been pressure brought to bare on the Justice Department to reopen the Till case and to look for more participants and conspirators in his murder, including Carolyn Bryant, now Carolyn Donham.

 Half-brother J.W. Milam turned to farming after the Till murder. However, local blacks refused to work for him, only one bank with J. W. Whitten, his ex-lawyer on its board of directors, would even loan him a little money to put in his crops.  Eventually he and his crops failed. Milam also moved to Texas for a time and labored in construction until he died from cancer in December 1981.

There is a story told in Alaska that the only creature the Alaskan Brown Bear will allow to eat with it is the skunk.  Why?  The bear knows the high cost of getting even. 

Our two good-ole-boys wanted to go to Alaska and go bear hunting.  One morning in their wilderness cabin one said to the other, “Let’s get up and go hunting.”  The other guy said, “No, I’m tired you go; I’m going to rest.”

The one fellow goes out hunting.  Soon he locates an Alaskan Brown Bear, he shoots the creature, but only wounds him.  The bear charges our hunter, he throws down his weapon, and he takes off running back toward the cabin yelling, “Open the door! Open the door!”  His buddy hears the commotion, jumps up from bed, and rushes to open the door.  Just as the door opens, the terrified hunter trips on the top step leading up to the porch of the cabin and the bear runs over him and into the cabin.  The downed hunter jumps us, tells his friend, who is now racing around the cabin trying to escape the bear, “Here you skin this one, I’ll go get another, “and promptly slams the door.

With all this having been said about pride, arrogance, ignorance, superstition, downfalls, and destruction, let us hear the Apostle Paul’s worlds as he tells us as Christians and as citizens of the world how to handle the all too common human proclivities toward malevolent pride.

Ephesians 4:31--32 (NRSV)
³¹ Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, ³² and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

In addition, from Galatians we hear Paul say…

Galatians 6:7--10 (NRSV)⁷ Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. ⁸ If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit. ⁹ So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up.  ¹⁰ So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.

            Too bad the little Baptist church that the Bryants and the Milams attended did not do a better job of teaching this. Too bad Herod and Herodias didn’t take to heart their Old Testament teachings concerning loving God and their neighbors.

District Attorney Robert Smith, the prosecutor at the Bryant-Milam trial in his closing remarks said, "Only so long as we preserve the rights of everyone, black and white, can we keep our way of life."

          Moreover, I say, “Only so long as we Christians ensure that all people are made a part of the kingdom of God can we expect to see its fulfillment on earth or ever hope to obtain or enjoy its citizenship.”

          I would say that the biggest battle of temptation most of us fight is our internal struggles with pride.  We are not without hope in this battle. In such situations of temptation, we find the essence of what John meant when he wrote; ¹³I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. John 14:13 (NRSVA)

          God is faithful and just and will hear our prayers and give us strength and forgiveness. If we ask God for help in the name of Jesus Christ, we will find the strength and the help to defeat the temptations of demonic pride—oh, my, do I know, do I know.