The Beheading of the Precursor, for his feast on the twenty-ninth day of August — III classis, with commemoration of St. Sabina, Martyr
Loquebar de testimoniis tuis in conspectu regum, et non confundebar: et meditabar in mandatis tuis, quæ dilexi nimis. “I spoke of thy testimonies before kings, and I was not ashamed: I meditated also on thy commandments, which I loved exceedingly.” — Introit of the Mass, from Psalm 118:46-47
I. Why the Church keeps two feasts of one man
The Roman calendar is sparing with birthdays. It keeps three: the Nativity of Our Lord, the Nativity of His Mother, and — alone among all the saints — the Nativity of John the Baptist on the twenty-fourth of June. The reason the Fathers give is that John was sanctified in the womb, so that his birth was already the birth of a saint, and his leaping in Elizabeth’s body was the first act of his prophetic office. That feast belongs to summer light, to the lucerna ardens et lucens of whom Our Lord said that He was the burning and shining lamp.
Today’s feast is the other end of the same life, and the Church has kept it nearly as long. The Decollatio — the beheading — was observed at Sebaste in Samaria, where his body lay, from at least the fourth century; it is attested in Africa in the sermons of St. Augustine, who preached on the day; it stands in the Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentaries; and it is kept on the same twenty-ninth of August by the Greeks, the Syrians, and the Copts, so that it is one of the oldest feasts genuinely common to East and West. The Byzantine Church keeps it as a day of strict fast, and the instinct is sound: this is not a feast of birth but of a death, and of a death that was the price of a word.
In the Missal of 1962 it is a feast of the third class, in red, with the Gloria, the Mass Loquebar — the Common of a Martyr who stood before kings — and a commemoration of St. Sabina, a Roman matron and martyr whose basilica on the Aventine is one of the glories of the city and whose day this had been before the Precursor’s feast arrived to occupy it.
II. The event and its witnesses
The account is given in Scripture twice at length, by St. Mark (6:17-29), which is the Gospel of the Mass, and by St. Matthew (14:1-12), and once in summary by St. Luke (3:19-20, 9:7-9); and it is confirmed from outside the Church by a witness who had no interest in confirming it.
Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Peræa, son of the Herod who slew the Innocents, had put away his lawful wife, the daughter of the Nabatæan king Aretas, in order to take Herodias, who was at once his niece and the wife of his own brother. John, who had baptized at the Jordan on the very border of Antipas’s territory, said what the Law said: Non licet tibi habere uxorem fratris tui — “It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife.” For this he was arrested and bound in prison.
St. Mark is careful about the moral geography of the court. Herodias “laid snares for him and was desirous to put him to death, and could not.” Herod, by contrast, “feared John, knowing him to be a just and holy man, and kept him; and when he heard him, did many things, and he heard him willingly.” This is the portrait of a man who has not yet made up his mind, who keeps the prophet alive because the prophet’s voice is the last honest thing in his house — and who will lose him not by a decision but by a party.
The occasion was Herod’s birthday. He gave a supper to the great men of Galilee; the daughter of Herodias — the Gospels do not name her, Josephus does: Salome — came in and danced, and pleased Herod and his guests; and the tetrarch, in wine and before witnesses, swore to give her whatever she should ask, “though it be the half of my kingdom.” She went out to her mother. She came back and asked, at once, in disco, on a dish, the head of John the Baptist. The king “was struck sad”; but for the sake of his oath and of those who sat at table with him he would not refuse. He sent an executioner. The head was brought on the dish, given to the girl, and by the girl given to her mother. John’s disciples came, took up the body, and laid it in a tomb.
The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, writing some sixty years later and with no Christian sympathies, records the same execution in the eighteenth book of his Antiquities. He gives the place, which the Gospels do not: the fortress of Machærus on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, the frontier stronghold from which Antipas watched his former father-in-law. He gives Herod’s political motive, which the Gospels touch only indirectly: the crowds who followed John were so great that Herod feared a rising. And he records that when Aretas afterwards destroyed Antipas’s army in the field, the Jews of the country held it to be God’s vengeance for the killing of John, “who was a good man.” The two accounts do not compete. The Gospel tells what happened at the table; Josephus tells what the tetrarch was afraid of; and a prophet is generally killed for both reasons at once.
There is one point on which the sources are not easily reconciled, and it should be stated rather than smoothed over. St. Mark names Herodias’s first husband as Philip; Josephus calls him Herod, a son of Herod the Great by Mariamne the daughter of the high priest, and distinguishes him from Philip the tetrarch of Ituræa, to whom Salome was afterwards married. The usual solution is that the private man bore both names — Herod Philip — and that the Evangelist used the one and the historian the other. It is a reasonable solution and it is probably right; but the reader should know that it is a solution and not a datum.
The year is not certain. The death falls between the beginning of Our Lord’s Galilean ministry and the feeding of the five thousand, which St. Matthew sets immediately after the news of it reached Christ, and so most likely in the year 29 or 30 of the common reckoning, some months before the Passion. The Precursor went before Him in death as he had gone before Him in birth.
III. The theology of the mystery
The Precursor to the end. Everything about John is præ-: he goes before. The Fathers, from Origen forward, will not let his death be less than his life in this respect, and the oldest liturgical texts follow them. He preceded Christ in the womb, at the Jordan, in preaching, and now in dying; and the tradition adds — it is a traditio and not a dogma, but it is in Origen’s fourth homily on St. Luke and it is sung in the Byzantine troparion of the feast — that he preceded Him also into the place of the dead, and announced to the fathers there the coming of the One whose sandal-latchet he was not worthy to loose. The Collect of the day makes the same point in its own restraint: it calls him Præcursoris et Martyris tui, Precursor and Martyr, and places the two titles side by side as if they were one.
A martyr for the truth, before there was a Church. John did not die for the confession of the Trinity or of the Resurrection; the Passion had not yet happened. He died because he told a prince that the prince’s marriage was adultery. The Church has never regarded this as a lesser martyrdom. She has regarded it as the clarifying case: a martyr is one who dies for the truth of God, and the truth of God includes the moral law, and a prophet who will not be silent about the moral law before a king is ipso facto a witness to God — which is what martyr means. St. Bede, in a homily on this feast, draws the consequence exactly: there is no doubt that John died for Christ, for although he was not told to deny Christ but only to keep silent about the truth, yet Christ is the Truth, and therefore he shed his blood for Christ in shedding it for the truth. The Church’s feasts of the martyrs of marriage — Thomas More, John Fisher — stand under this one.
The oath and the banquet. The Fathers spend more of their eloquence on Herod than on John, because John needs no explaining and Herod is a warning. St. Ambrose treats the scene at length in the third book of his treatise on virgins, and his verdict on the oath is unsparing: an oath that binds one to a crime binds one to nothing; what was sworn rashly should be broken rather than kept; it is a worse thing to keep faith with an oath than with justice. Herod would rather be a murderer than a perjurer, and so became both. St. Thomas states the principle in its permanent form: an oath is an act of religion, and religion cannot oblige to what is contrary to God; a vow or oath to do evil is not a bond but a sin (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 89). St. John Chrysostom, in his forty-eighth homily on St. Matthew, fastens on the banquet itself — the wine, the dancing, the crowd of flatterers before whom a weak man will do anything rather than seem weak — and observes that the devil never gets the head of a prophet from a man who is alone and sober.
The head on the dish. St. Peter Chrysologus and after him the medieval preachers see the image whole: the head that had spoken the word of God set on a platter at a feast, the truth served up as a course. The horror of it is meant. It is the world’s opinion of prophecy, rendered exactly. St. Augustine, who preached on this Gospel more than once, presses the contrast between the two births kept that day — Herod’s birthday, on which a prophet died, and John’s dies natalis, his birth into heaven, on which the Church keeps feast — and asks the congregation which birthday they would rather have.
The voice and the Word. St. Augustine’s most famous sentence on the Baptist governs this feast as much as the other: John was the voice, Christ is the Word; the voice passes away when the Word has been uttered. Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui — “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). The Fathers saw a sign of it even in the calendar: John born as the days begin to shorten, Christ as they begin to lengthen. The Decollation is the last decrease. The voice is cut off at the throat, having said everything it was sent to say.
IV. Ratio cultus et propagatio
The tomb at Sebaste. John’s disciples buried his body; the tradition, constant from the fourth century, is that it lay at Sebaste, the Samaria of the Old Testament, between the prophets Eliseus and Abdias. Pilgrims venerated it there — Paula and Eustochium with St. Jerome among them — and a basilica was built over the place. In the year 362, under Julian the Apostate, the pagans of Sebaste broke open the tomb, burned the bones, and scattered the ashes; but monks who happened to be present rescued what they could and carried the relics to Jerusalem and thence to Alexandria, where St. Athanasius received them, and where Theophilus later enshrined them in a church raised on the ruins of the Serapeum. Rufinus and Theodoret both record the desecration; it is a Tier-2 fact, not a legend. This feast of the twenty-ninth of August is, in origin, most probably the dedication of the church at Sebaste and the commemoration of the martyr’s body there.
The head. The history of the Precursor’s head is the history of a relic that half of Christendom has claimed, and honesty requires saying that the claims cannot all be true. The old Roman Martyrology gives for this day “the second finding of his most venerable head,” and the Byzantine calendar keeps a First and Second Finding on the twenty-fourth of February and a Third on the twenty-fifth of May. The tradition runs that the head was buried apart from the body — hidden by Herodias, or by Joanna the wife of Chusa, in Herod’s palace; discovered by monks in the fourth century; carried to Emesa in Syria, where it was found again in 453; brought to Constantinople; and lost, or dispersed, at the sack of 1204. From that dispersal descend the rival claims: Amiens in France, which received a head from a Crusader canon in 1206 and has venerated it since; San Silvestro in Capite in Rome, whose very name records its claim to the caput; Damascus, where the Umayyad mosque has enclosed a shrine of the head since the seventh century, still honoured by Muslims as well as Christians; and others. What is certain is that the Church has from very early times venerated relics of the Baptist with a devotion second only to that given the Apostles, and that his cult was among the most widespread in the first millennium — the Lateran baptistery, the countless baptisteries named for him, and the oath per caput sancti Ioannis all witness to it.
East and West on one day. The Greek Church keeps the Apotomē, the cutting-off, on this same day, with a strict fast — no meat, no fish, no oil, and in popular custom no food served on a flat dish and nothing cut with a knife, in memory of the platter and the sword. The Latin Church has never imposed the fast, but the instinct is one and the same, and this is a point where the East preserves in discipline what the West preserves in text. The feast is, with the Nativity of the Baptist, one of the few sanctoral observances that the two lungs of the Church have kept on the same date without interruption since antiquity.
In the Roman Missal. The Mass Loquebar is drawn from the Common of a Martyr, with an Epistle proper to the feast: Jeremias 1:17-19, the Lord’s charge to the prophet to gird his loins and stand before kings and princes, “for I have made thee this day a fortified city, and a pillar of iron, and a wall of brass.” No text could be better chosen; the Epistle is the Old Testament face of the Gospel. The Preface of St. John the Baptist, granted pro aliquibus locis, may be used where it is permitted. The reformed calendar of 1969 retains the feast on the same day under the title Passio S. Ioannis Baptistæ, a rare instance of continuity across the reform; that title is noted for orientation only, and the operative name in this series remains the ancient one, the Decollatio.
V. Commemoratio Sanctæ Sabinæ, Martyris
The commemoration made in today’s Mass is of St. Sabina, a Roman matron of the second century, and it is fitting that a widow who suffered for the faith under a lawless power should be remembered on the day of the Precursor’s death.
Her Acta — Tier 3, traditio pia, and to be received as such — make her the widow of a certain Valentinus, converted by her Christian servant Serapia, whom she followed in martyrdom under the emperor Hadrian, about the year 126, and beside whom she was buried on the Aventine. The Roman Martyrology keeps Serapia on the third of September and Sabina on this day.
What is historically secure is the church. The titulus Sabinæ on the Aventine, one of the ancient Roman tituli, was rebuilt in its present form between 422 and 432 by the priest Peter of Illyria under Celestine I and Sixtus III, and is the most perfectly preserved of the great Roman basilicas of the fifth century: its dedicatory mosaic still stands over the door, and its cypress doors with the earliest surviving public image of the Crucifixion are still in place. The scholarly consensus is that the titulus takes its name from a Roman lady Sabina who gave her house to the Church, and that the Passion of the martyr Sabina grew up around the church rather than the church around the martyr; the two women — foundress and martyr — may be one, or may have been conflated. The Church, in her liturgy, honours the martyr; the historian may hold the question open; the reader may do both.
The basilica is the station for Ash Wednesday, where the Pope goes to begin the Lenten fast, and since 1222 it has been the mother house of the Order of Preachers; St. Dominic’s cell is there, and the orange tree he is said to have planted. That a widow’s house on the Aventine should have become the place where Rome begins her penance each year is a kind of vindication in stone.
VI. What the feast teaches
That the truth is owed to kings. The Introit is a boast — loquebar in conspectu regum, et non confundebar — and the Church puts it in the Baptist’s mouth without irony. There are truths a Christian owes to those in power, and the moral law is among them, and the fact that speaking them is dangerous does not alter the debt. John’s martyrdom is the Church’s standing refusal to treat adultery in high places as a private matter.
That a rash oath is not a bond. Herod’s tragedy is instructive precisely because he did not want to kill John. He killed him to keep face before his guests. Every man has a table of Galilean nobles before whom he would rather do wrong than seem weak; the feast asks each of us to name our own.
That the voice may be cut off and the Word go on. John died before Pentecost, before the Resurrection, before the Cross. He never saw the thing he announced. His death is the pattern of every servant of God who labours toward an end he will not live to see, and who must be content — as John was content — to have been the one who said Ecce Agnus Dei and then stepped aside.
Practice
Examine. Is there a truth you have stopped speaking because of the company you keep? Not a matter of opinion but of the law of God — and not out of charity, which sometimes counsels silence, but out of fear of the table?
Do. In the spirit of the Eastern fast, keep the day with some small abstinence: a meal foregone, or meat, or wine. Let the body remember what the calendar remembers.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Sancti Ioannis Baptistæ Præcursoris et Martyris tui, quæsumus, Domine, veneranda festivitas: salutaris auxilii nobis præstet effectum. Qui vivis et regnas.
“May the venerable festival of St. John the Baptist, Thy Precursor and Martyr, we beseech Thee, O Lord, obtain for us the effect of Thy saving help. Who livest and reignest.”
And for the commemoration:
Deus, qui inter cetera potentiæ tuæ miracula etiam in sexu fragili victoriam martyrii contulisti: concede propitius; ut, qui beatæ Sabinæ Martyris tuæ natalitia colimus, per eius ad te exempla gradiamur.
“O God, who among the other wonders of Thy power hast bestowed the victory of martyrdom even upon the weaker sex: mercifully grant that we who keep the heavenly birthday of blessed Sabina Thy Martyr may by her example advance towards Thee.”
Devote. The Fifth Joyful Mystery, or the Sorrowful Mysteries entire, with attention to the Crowning with Thorns — the mockery of a King by a court, which is the Passion’s answer to Herod’s banquet.
If you wish to go deeper: the Sacred Liturgy path treats the sanctoral feasts held in common by East and West, and what the Eastern fast on this day preserves that the Latin calendar has let fall silent. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the morality of oaths and vows under St. Thomas, and why a promise to do evil binds no one. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the martyrs for the sanctity of marriage — John Fisher and Thomas More — who stand in the direct line of the Precursor.
Sancte Ioannes Baptista, Præcursor et Martyr, ora pro nobis. Sancta Sabina, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Gospels according to Ss. Mark, Matthew, and Luke (Douay-Rheims); Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, book XVIII; the Roman Martyrology; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “St. John the Baptist,” “St. Sabina,” and “Relics”; the Liber Pontificalis for the basilica of St. Sabina; Rufinus and Theodoret on the desecration at Sebaste. Patristic references are given by work and locus and are rendered in paraphrase.