One of the most moving things I’ve read in the last year was a GQ profile of the once-teenaged, now twenty-seven-year-old pop singer Justin Bieber, one of the best-selling musical artists of all time. If you’re not familiar with Bieber’s story, it’s almost a textbook case of childhood celebrity. He released his breakthrough album at the age of 15. By 16 he was the youngest man ever to top the Billboard 200, and he followed it up with hit record after hit record. And then with DUI after DUI; with arrests for assault, vandalism, and resisting arrest; and with a series of bizarre controversies including not only video of him singing one of his own songs with racial slurs swapped in for the lyrics, but also, most strangely and perhaps most famously, an extraordinarily narcissistic guestbook note at the Anne Frank House, in which he said she was a “great girl” and he hoped she would have been a “belieber.” All of it was enough to get him banned from performing in the People’s Republic of China. Which, to be fair, isn’t that hard.
“We as a society are all too familiar,” writes GQ’s Zach Baron in this profile of Bieber, “with what happens…to kids like Justin Bieber… But I will share a personal view: Being famous breaks something in your brain. Especially when your fame comes as a result of your talent, from the thing you’ve loved and nurtured and worked at since you were young. Bieber earned his success while he was still a child; then his gift turned into a snake and bit him.”
And then come the paragraphs that really got me: “‘There was a sense of still yearning for more,’ [Bieber] says now. ‘It was like I had all this success and it was still like: I’m still sad, and I’m still in pain. And I still have these unresolved issues. And I thought all the success was going to make everything good. And so for me, the drugs were a numbing agent to just continue to get through… You wake up one day and your relationships are [f—ed] up and you’re unhappy and you have all this success in the world, but you’re just like: Well, what is this worth if I’m still feeling empty inside?”[1]
I don’t mean to be glib, but if you’ve come to that realization by the time you’re twenty-seven years old—that’s a little better than average.
I don’t mean to jump too quickly from Justin Bieber to Herod Antipas, but—hear me out.
The Herod we encounter in this story of the death of John the Baptist shares only one thing with Justin Bieber as he describes his life at rock bottom, but it’s a pretty important thing. They are two men at the height of their powers with absolutely no sense of themselves. They are, without a doubt, the most powerful men in any room they walk into; and they are, without a doubt, the weakest.
This Herod, it’s worth saying, is not King Herod the Great, the Herod to whom the wise men come at Jesus’ birth; that’s his father. After Herod’s death, the Romans had divided his territory among his sons, so this Herod, Herod Antipas, is not quite so powerful. But he’s still the big cheese, the ruler of his own land and one of three brothers at the head of the complicated Herodian dynasty. And when I say “complicated,” I mean “complicated.” After initially marrying the daughter of a neighboring king, Herod fell in love with his niece Herodias, who was already married to Herod’s brother Philip, and he married her as well. So now, not only did Herod have two wives, one of whom was also both his niece and his sister-in-law; but Herodias his wife had two husbands, both of whom were also her brother-in-law. So the girl who dances (whom Mark also calls Herodias; other sources name her Salome) is not only his step-daughter but also both his niece and grand-niece.[2]
You can understand John the Baptist’s concern about the marriage.
But while it’s John’s criticism of Herod’s shady marriage that gets him arrested, that’s not actually Herod’s main problem. It’s not a complicated story, and the moral pretty simple: Don’t make open-ended promises that you may not want to keep, especially if your spouse has a grudge against someone who’s locked up in your basement. If it weren’t so horrifying, it would be funny: the girl who has everything in the world is offered anything she wants, and has no idea what to ask for; so she turns to her mother, who suggests the most grotesque gift imaginable. And “immediately she rushed back to the king,” strangely enthusiastic, and asks not just for the head of John the Baptist but for the head of John the Baptist at once and on a platter. (Mark 6:25) And then, as soon as they bring it, she immediately hands it off to mom.
What can you even say to that?
What’s really striking to me in this story is not its gruesome details. It’s the pathetic tragedy of it all. None of this needed to happen. Herod liked John. He “feared him,” Mark tells us, “knowing that he was a righteous and holy man,” so he didn’t want to execute him right away. (6:20) But more than that, he was intrigued. When he heard him speak, he was “greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.” (6:21) One wonders if this increased the urgency of Herodias’s plot. Herod Antipas’s mind seems to have been opening to John’s message in time.
But ultimately what’s in Herod’s mind means nothing. He has all the power in the world—or at least in his particular domain—and yet he bends completely to the things that other people want from him. The king knows in his heart that what he’s about to do is wrong—he’s “deeply grieved,” Mark says—“yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse” Herodias’s request. (6:26) This is Herod’s definition of good hospitality: for his priorities to be so distorted by the shame of looking bad in front of his guests for breaking an ill-advised promise that he’s willing to do anything to save face, even murder; which will, ironically, ruin his reputation for millennia to come.
“You wake up one day,” said Justin Bieber, “and your relationships are [f—ed] up and you’re unhappy and you have all this success in the world, but you’re just like: Well, what is this worth if I’m still feeling empty inside?”
And Herod is empty inside. Whatever should be in there, whatever soul or spirit or conscience whatever set of priorities and values that should lead him toward what’s right, is completely gone. His understanding of himself is so profoundly rooted in the esteem and respect of other people that he’s like a suit of armor, not a human being: strong on the outside, but empty inside.
Except, of course, that’s not quite true. There was that piece of him that liked to hear John speak. There was that spark, that tiny flame of inspiration. It wasn’t strong enough, in Herod’s case, to break through the armor. But it was there, working in him, all the same, and who knows what redeeming grace could have transformed his life through John the Baptist’s words if John’s own life had not been cut so short.
But we can see the rest of the process in Justin Bieber’s story. He, too, had a flame inside, even at his worst. Singing, he says in the interview, “was supposed to bring such joy. Like, this is what I feel called to do. And my purpose in my life. I know that when I open my mouth, people love to hear me sing. I literally started singing on the streets and crowds would form around me.” You can see already in what he’s saying how he was turned inside-out: from doing the thing he loves to loving the adulation he gets, from having a sense of who he was to only knowing what people thought of him. But when Bieber hit rock-bottom, the flame didn’t go out. It was the very thing he loved that brought him back.
He gives most of the credit, to be fair, to his wife and to Jesus, and I don’t want to minimize either of those; I am your pastor, after all, and it is my anniversary. But I think he needs to give the music more credit than he does, even if it’s just as an instrument of the Holy Spirit. He had started with a passion for singing and ended up with an ego totally dependent on the opinions of others. But when the reputation on which he’d staked his whole sense of self was shredded in the eyes of the world, the music was still there. And his wife was there, and yes, the love of Jesus was there, all rebuilding together his sense of who he was.
So, none of you have ever been bigamous petty dictators, totally corrupted by the shame of not honoring a promise you made to your step-daughter/niece/grand-niece. And none of you, to the best of my knowledge, were child celebrities. But all of us, at some point—maybe many times—face this question: Do we do what we know is right, or do we do what the people around us expect? Do we listen to the voices of the crowd who cheer us and boo us in turn, or do we listen to the quieter voice of the Holy Spirit speaking in our hearts? If you don’t think we human beings do this every day, just borrow a teenager and ask them to remind you.
And if you ever find yourself in that situation—if you ever find yourself, as I have more than once, feeling somewhat hollowed out inside—I pray that you will find the strength to look in there honestly, and to see whatever sparks are still alive: what person’s words you like to listen to, what music is alive, what passion or love the Holy Spirit is tending deep within you. I pray that you can see them and let them grow. And I pray for all of us, to paraphrase our collect for today, “that [we] may know and understand what things [we] ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord…” Amen.
[1] Zach Baron, “The Redemption of Justin Bieber,” GQ, April 13, 2021, https://www.gq.com/story/justin-bieber-cover-profile-may-2021.
[2] I feel obligated to cite this point from William C. Placher, Mark (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 93.