The bloody banquet of Herod's supper, a feast so funereal—then the earth, then heaven; today, together with me, your hearing shuddered and was aghast. 'Herod,' it says, 'made a supper on his birthday' (Mark 6). Fittingly a supper (cena), because this birthday was devoted not to light but to darkness, in which was born a son of night, not of day. 'On his birthday,' it says, 'he made a supper for his princes, tribunes, and chief men of Galilee' (Mark 6). What did impiety, ever incautious and blind, accomplish? It summons all the powers, that it might take on not so much many companions of its banquet as countless witnesses of its crime, and that it might have as many arbiters of its misdeed as it had presidents of discipline. 'And when the daughter of the same Herodias had come in and danced,' it says, 'and pleased Herod.'
She answered to her own base stock, while she pleased a father yet baser; for from adultery none but a base woman ought to be born: she who, with broken steps, with dissolute body, with the frame of her limbs disjointed, with her entrails flowing forth by art, was made more comely to her father by all her deformity. And truly Herod then believed her his own when he saw her such; for he would have thought her another's had he perceived her even a little modest. The serpent then lay hidden in the woman, who, crawling with sinuous steps, poured out lethal venom through her whole body, so that frenzy might wound the minds of those reclining, poison their bodies, and men be turned into beasts; and such men were now given to drink not wine but blood, and, made rabid, fed not on bread but on human flesh.
Such indeed she made them, to whom, with the blood yet steaming, she then brought in the head of John; so that that song of the Psalmist might be proved: 'They have given the dead bodies of Thy saints to be meat for the beasts of the earth, they have poured out their blood as water' (Ps. 79). Behold what banquets prolonged through whole nights bring forth; behold what that wine begets which is bought by measure and drunk without measure. Behold whither flesh is hurled headlong, when it is inflamed by the fires of pleasure unto the crime of luxury. I ask, why is it hemmed in by so many wedges? Unhappy flesh suffices of itself, by its own falls, for its ruin, as the prophet attests when he says: 'Why do ye rush upon a man? Ye all together slay him, as a leaning wall and a tottering fence' (Ps. 62).
In Herod lay flesh oppressed by surfeit, captive to drunkenness, which, at the tickling of luxury, and with a wantonness not so much sporting as mocking, promised that it would give whatever baseness might ask. 'Ask of me what thou wilt,' he says, 'and I will give it thee'; and he swore to her. The wretch swears, while he forswears whatever there is of honor and virtue. 'Ask of me what thou wilt.' What would luxury ask, but the destruction of chastity, the slaying of modesty, the death of sanctity ever contrary to itself? 'I will that thou give me in a dish the head of John.' If the head of man is, according to the Apostle (1 Cor. 11), Christ, then already, by a new mouth, the most ancient serpent was aiming at the death of Christ the Lord. 'I will that thou give me in a dish the head of John.'
Already then the greedy dragon was tasting in the servant's head the Lord's passion, thirsting for it. 'I will that thou give me in a dish.' Why in a dish? Why dost thou bear preciously him whom thou slayest so vilely, unless because 'precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints' (Ps. 116)? This very thing that thou willest, thou dost not accomplish in the way thou willest, because a higher purpose works thee otherwise than thou willest. In that funereal den indeed—not the king's hall—the wild madness then believed it had its own food when it saw the martyr's head; it felt its own washing when, thirsting, it beheld the liquor of the sacred blood; it strives and strains to swallow the whole dish of its cruelty with full mouth, with all its jaws. But John came, set on high, as a lamp upon a candlestick, that he might put darkness to flight, the Lord saying:
'He was a burning and a shining lamp' (John 5). John came, resplendent as a judge on the tribunal, that he who reproved adultery might also expose and condemn the murderer; and he who, living piously, had called incest to penitence and reserved it for pardon, might, even slain, condemn the murder. By what merit, I ask, does he obtain pardon who, in the death of John, so credulously slew penitence itself? You have run in vain, Herod and Herodias, names joined not by affection but by crime; who most foolishly believed that a voice could be intercepted. The voice cannot be slain, but rather cries out the more, freed from the straits of the body. Thus the voice of Abel, already poured out in its own blood, sounds the more, penetrates the more, reaches the more toward heaven (Gen. 4).
So now John cries out over all the world, tells your crime to all ages, and displays it among the nations. Behold, John glories in the head of Christ, he who was thought to be condemned to lose his own head. Behold, on the very day when you ended your life, he won for himself a birthday into heaven; for when your rising set toward its end, then his ending set into a birth. For the just man begins to live at the moment he is counted worthy to be slain for Christ; by such a death the martyr's life is transferred, not taken away: he shone the more by death, who died for this purpose, that he might live forever. Behold, you lie in death; John, though slain, lives. You have lost your purple dyed with the murex, while John, robed in the shining purple of his own blood, glories forever.
Your fellow guests are now made partakers in punishments, while John feeds at the heavenly table with the choirs of angels. He hears the heavenly symphony without ceasing; you hear forever the groaning and gnashing of hell. He, handed over as the price for your harlot, your dancing-girl, is now honored with a kingdom and with heavenly rewards; you, together with your daughter, have received in Tartarus the wages of your sentence. Joseph, when he fled the adulteress, left behind his garment (Gen. 39); John, lest he should look upon the adulteress, cast away his very body as well. Joseph, that he might not commit adultery, willingly submitted to prison; John, that he might rebuke adultery, exchanged the desert for a prison. Joseph, while he interpreted dreams, escaped from death; John, that he might reveal the Son of God, submitted even to death.
Joseph, while he prepared earthly bread, earned a gold collar and honor; John, that he might point out the heavenly bread to believers (Matt. 11), earned the collar of martyrdom by his blood. Rightly is this John greater than all born of women, he who not only rebuked adulteresses but trampled even the lawful society of women out of love for virginity. And if John, so great, John of such a kind, though separated in the desert so far from women, did not escape the dangers of women, who is he that, living among women, trusts himself to escape unharmed without the greatest toil, without the greatest caution, unless it be one who is nourished by the Holy Spirit? Who, together with the Father and the Son, orders all things throughout every span of the ages of time.