As I was working on a sermon about John the Baptist last week, I discovered that there's a word for what happened to him at the end of his story: He was decollated.
Matthew 14:10 and Mark 6:27 simply say beheaded, although Mark adds the gory detail that what Herodias actually asked Herod to do was to get her the head of John the Baptist on a platter. There is some rather ghastly classic art depicting that scene. Ghastly as it is, it is not very bloody, which surely the severed neck would have been.
Maybe that's why decollated is such a funny word to me. It sounds more like what happens when the pages of a document get out of order. If they're in the right order, they're collated. So if they're out of order, aren't they decollated?
When life feels crazy and out of control, we say we've lost our heads. Thankfully we don't mean it literally. But it does feel like life is out of order sometimes.
We use a similar word to describe a woman's cleavage: decolletage. It's French. It literally means to expose the neck in a dress without a collar. Wouldn't that also make beheading more convenient?
To decollate is to make a person out of order. Permanantly.
Fun with words aside, it's rather amazing to me that, in the story of John the Baptist, Herodias could ask for someone's head on a platter and actually get it. This shows how messed up patiarchal systems can be, and how corrupt power can become, that a person's life could be ended on a whim just because he said things she didn't like. Similar disregard for human life is sadly an ongoing issue throughout history and even today, as war, slavery, genocide, and hate crimes continue.
Maybe a bit of God's irony that the Feast Day on which John's beheading is remembered is September 11, the same day the Twin Towers were destroyed. Coincidence?
Let's remember that God made us all. No one is more or less valuable to God. Beloved, let us love one another!
Thanks, God.
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Read more about the decollation of John the Baptist and his feast days on Wikipedia
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