Please read the passage before reading the homily
Today we talk about the sandwich, the literary technique that is like a sandwich with similar incidences framing the middle.
An example is today’s reading. The story begins and ends with John’s beheading. In between, the story unfolds this way: first Herod, then his wife, then her daughter, then the execution, then back to the girl, then to Herod’s wife and lastly back to Herod.
Another example is the series of readings we have this week. Yesterday, Mark told how Jesus sent the disciples out to preach. How well they did that is the subject of tomorrow’s reading. The story of the death of John the Baptist is the meat between the two slices of bread that is the mission of the disciples.
Mark’s story of John’s death serves several purposes. One practical purpose is that it separates the sending and the return of the disciples so that we do not think that the return happened immediately after the sending. Another, a theological purpose, is to suggest that what happened to John would also happen to Jesus and would eventually happen to the disciples of Jesus.
The story of the preaching of the disciples forms a small sandwich with the story of John’s death in between. The story of John’s death in turn becomes the first layer of the Jesus and his disciples. The death of Jesus is the meat between the death of John and the death of Jesus’ disciples. Mark describes the death of John in ways that recall the death of Jesus. The death of John also portends to us the consequences of preaching as Jesus did. John dies for truth as Jesus did and as we have to do.
The small sandwich describes the mission of the disciples with a foreshadowing of their deaths wedged in between. The larger sandwich has the death of John and the future death of Jesus’ disciples bracketing the important death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus.
Did John have any inkling that his mission would end with a violent death? Did Jesus understand that the same fate awaited him eventually? Perhaps eventually they did, but probably not at the beginning. Should they have done things differently? No, their purpose was to proclaim truth, not easy living. If we proclaim the truth and not the lie, the same fate in some form or other awaits us. Our task remains the same as the tasks of John and Jesus.
The sandwich technique is often used in the Bible and in other literature. It marks the middle element as the central and most important element in the sandwiched items.