I’m sure we’ve all made promises which we’ve regretted and have come back to haunt us. You know the sort of thing I mean: there’s that boring couple you met on holiday and rashly invited for lunch “if they’re happen to be in the area”; there’s the offer of a car and driving lessons dangled before your son or daughter if they do well in their A-levels; there’s even the threat that “we won’t go to the pantomime if you’re naughty” which we might make to a small child, even though we’ve already bought the tickets. What do we do if that couple does show up, or our teenager excels in their exams, or if that toddler keeps on having its tantrums? We may feel we want to break our promise – but we’ve given our word. To go back on it may seem to be sensible, but we don’t want people to think that we’re weak or can’t be trusted. So we take a deep breath, put on a brave smile, and keep the promise we’ve made.

Politicians often seem to get themselves stuck in this kind of situation, especially if they want to be popular: we only have to think of the rash promises that the UK Government has made about “irreversible” changes to the Covid restrictions made despite over 100 global experts writing in “The Lancet” to say that these are “dangerous and premature”. And, at election times, all the parties will promise to cut hospital waiting lists or raise education standards or slash greenhouse gas emissions or “tackle the homelessness crisis” or give every household a speedy internet connection. When they later find that these promises can’t be ‘delivered’ because they’re too costly (how I hate that word, to me it’s parcels or babies that get delivered!) they start looking for ways of saying that their words didn’t, in fact, quite mean what we’d thought they meant – not that they convince us in the slightest! It’s no wonder that we tend not to trust them, which is a shame.

There are two outstanding examples in the Bible of men getting caught out by promises they wish they’d never made. The first is King Darius in the Old Testament, who is persuaded by some of his officials to make a law forbidding anyone to pray to anyone except himself, on pain of being thrown into the royal lion pit. The officials aren’t, of course, interested in worship or theology; their sole aim is to get rid of Daniel whose virtuous behaviour is showing them in a bad light. As they know he won’t obey the law, they think they’ve managed to trap him; this, indeed, proves to be the case. Daniel is dragged before the king who looks for some “wiggle-room” because he likes Daniel and doesn’t want him killed: the officials remind him that the law he’s enacted is unbreakable. Reluctantly, the king orders Daniel to be thrown to the lions with the comment, “May your God, whom you serve so loyally, rescue you”. And, as we all know, he does: in fact it’s the corrupt officials who come to a sticky end.

The second story of this kind is the one we read earlier; and of course this doesn’t have a happy outcome as it ends with the severed head of John the Baptist being brought to Herod as a gruesome birthday present from his wife. (In passing, I must say that I’ve only preached on this passage once before and I’ve never heard anyone else preaching on it. There aren’t many resources about it available on the Internet either, so I think that most Ministers steer clear of it even though it’s in the list of prescribed readings for this week!). I’m not going to repeat the story to you as hearing it once was quite enough: it has attracted the attention of playwrights and composers and I remember seeing Richard Strauss’ “Salome” at the Lisbon opera house not long after Moira and I were married. These works do “embroider” the basic Bible story, though!

We do need to know a bit of history and culture in order to understand what’s going on here. And first I must introduce you to the principal characters. First we have Herod Antipas: he is the son of King Herod the (so-called) Great, the shrewd and ruthless political operator who we meet in the Christmas story. He died shortly after Jesus was born and his kingdom was divided between his three sons. Antipas got two regions: Galilee on the west side of the Sea of Galilee and Peraea which bordered the Jordan River in the region near the Dead Sea; they didn’t form one contiguous whole. So, although Mark calls Antipas “king”, technically he was merely a “tetrarch” or “ruler of a quarter”. Nevertheless he was a member of the Jewish elite, kept in power by Rome.

Next we must meet Herodias, Antipas’ wife – who seems to have been a thoroughly nasty piece of work! What’s important to know is that both Antipas and Herodias had already been married to other people and had an affair; in fact Herodias’ first husband had been Antipas’ half-brother (this is getting complicated, are you still managing to follow me?). In truth, all these marriages were probably motivated as much by politics as by love; nevertheless, Herod and Herodias had defied Jewish law which forbade a man marrying his brother’s wife. Jewish society was scandalised and John the Baptist had openly criticised the couple. When she heard about it, Herodias was determined to get her revenge: her first step was getting him imprisoned, but she wanted more.

This takes us to John the Baptist himself, who we know as a prophet who was clearly unafraid of preaching unpalatable truths to people in high places, whatever the cost. It brings us to the girl who danced so seductively, unnamed in this account but, possibly wrongly, called Salome by the historian Josephus: she would have been in her mid-teens and was Herodias’ daughter by her first marriage. She seems to have been a fairly innocent participant in the whole sordid affair but was clearly under her mother’s thumb. And finally we need to think of the story’s setting: as I’ve said, this is Herod’s birthday party and he’s invited a motley group of people who certainly aren’t going to be playing “Pass the parcel” or “Pin the tail on the donkey”: they are courtiers, high-ranking Jewish officials and Roman military commanders who are probably getting more and more drunk and lewd as the evening wears on – think Bullingdon Club rather than Lord Mayor’s Banquet! We can surely imagine the cat-calls and gestures as Salome comes out to dance.

And we know what happens next: how Herod, delighted by the performance, extravagantly promises his step-daughter that she can have “anything she asks for” (perhaps he is making a bid for her affections) but is dumbfounded when he hears the appalling request that her mother has devised. Herod has been painted into a corner: he knows that his wife’s eyes are boring into the back of his head and, more important, that his guards and courtiers are perfectly aware of the power-play that is going on. There is no way for him to retreat without losing “face” and respect; there are political consequences too as he’s already in a weak position and news of his “U-turn” is bound to get out.

So Herod has a choice to make. We’re told that he respects John the Baptist as a man of integrity and is even a bit frightened of him: so will he do the right thing and save him? His difficulty is that doing so would probably mean him losing everything, and that’s a step too far for him. So, just like King Darius five centuries earlier, forced by his courtiers to throw Daniel into the lions’ den, Herod bows to the inevitable with a heavy heart. Perhaps he was hoping for an angelic intervention in the manner of the Old Testament story, a divine resolution to his dilemma. But, this time, there isn’t one; all too soon, John’s head is brought into the room and (one imagines) Herodias does a war-dance of joy. John’s disciples hear of his death, request his body and lay it in a tomb – Mark is clearly referring here to what Jesus’ followers would do after his own death, again after the weak decision of a powerful man.

One theme which runs through the stories of both Daniel and John is that people who boldly speak critical words against people of authority or powerful organisations can end up paying a heavy price: we might think of whistle-blowers in a company or institutions such as the Police or the NHS; or of people who openly criticise corrupt leaders in nations such as Belarus. Even today there may be a cost involved in being a true prophet. But this isn’t where I want to leave this story. Rather, I’d like us to think how easy it is for all of us to get locked, just as Herod was, into the consequences of rash promises and wrong decisions.

Now I doubt if many of us have been outwitted by corrupt and evil criminals or gangsters – we don’t tend to move in that world, although many people sadly do. But it’s very easy to make promises to our friends and relations on the spur of a moment, only for them to come back and imprison us as circumstances change. Equally we can make financial commitments when the times are good, only to become enmeshed in a cycle of debt, loan sharks and even violence when the work dries up: I hope none of us is in that kind of situation today. Obviously there are times when we have to swallow our pride and say, “Sorry, I was stupid to make that commitment” (although I hope we do it rarely and never lightly); obviously too we will try and engage with the credit agency or finance company to see if we negotiate new terms (although our credit rating may have fallen through the floor). But there will also be times – and I can’t promise miracles! – when the only thing we can do is ask for God’s wisdom, either to make the right choices in the first place, or to cut our way through the web in which we’ve trapped ourselves.

Our Christian faith promises freedom: Jesus himself said that, if the Son sets us free, we shall be free indeed. We have often understood this in spiritual terms, of being released from the curses of sin, guilt, hope-lessness and death; and of course I accept that. We also know that, for Jesus, freedom sometimes meant liberating people from the limitations of disease or the restrictions imposed on them by supposedly respectable society. And many of his followers over the centuries have courageously spoken out for emancipation from slavery, racism, poverty and unjust political or economic systems; they have felt that to be their divine duty, and they may well have been right.

But it could be that, ultimately, our faith is one which sets us free from ourselves: free from having to prove ourselves worthy of other peoples’ appreciation, free from any crushing need to try and live up to our own standards, free (if we believe what God has said) from our past history and misdemeanours – although some of their consequences may still affect us. For in this story of intrigue and execution, I think that there is only one person who comes over as truly free: not Herod or any other member of the royal court, but John the Baptist. Yes, he was imprisoned and beheaded, but he was an unfettered spirit who delivered God’s message without fear. For John had discovered the paradox which Jesus himself lived out: by completely submitting ourselves to God (who always keeps his promises) and by seeking to do his will (which is always perfect), humans become as free as they possibly can be.