Matthew 14:1-12

A few years ago, on the way to a conference, I spent several free hours alone at the Art Institute of Chicago, a place I had always wanted to visit. Free to absorb the experience at my own pace, I spent nearly an hour engrossed in a series of six panel paintings by the Renaissance artist Giovanni da Paolo. They had been part of an original series of twelve for a folding altarpiece depicting the life of St. John the Baptist.[1]

Da Paolo’s vision unfolds with the narrative flare of a graphic novelist or a cinematographer. The human figures are set within strange landscapes and fantastical buildings. There are inexplicable details scattered throughout that make the entire series feel like fragments in a dream sequence. One such detail became, for me, the interpretive key to the entire work.

In the scene of John speaking to his disciples through his prison window, there in the courtyard outside sits a tired, old leopard chained to a wall, gazing forlornly over his shoulder through an archway at a distant figure in blue walking toward us through the fields.

The animal looks utterly out of place – as out of place as John, both of them wild creatures of God held captive at the whim of a cruel tyrant, surrounded by lavish testimony to one man’s ego. The line between prison and zoo is blurred by the leopard’s presence. This exotic creature from a far off land, perhaps remembered and trotted out to impress visiting ambassadors, then just as quickly forgotten. A noble beast consigned to become a barely living plaything.

And yet … the creature’s eyes still gaze toward freedom, and that mysterious figure in blue.

It is tempting to completely dissociate ourselves from Herod and his almost archetypally messed up family. But I can’t quite manage to do that. Like the figures in a dream, each character in the gospels has been placed there for a very particular reason and has the potential to impart a word of gospel truth. However disturbing, there is a Herod, a Herodias, in each of us.

The chained leopard holds many possible meanings: the spirit of the prophets denied and suppressed by the world; the obsessive pursuit of novelty at the expense of creaturely dignity and life; the soul of John the Baptist himself in animal form. But from another angle, the chained leopard may be Herod’s own conscience.

Herod is in many ways the true prisoner in the story. He is a prisoner of his own fear: “He feared the crowd, because they regarded John as a prophet.” He is a captive to his own self-aggrandizement, epitomized by the lavish birthday banquet he throws himself, at which his own daughter is put on display. He is caught between his own politically expedient decision to imprison John and the persistent experience that John has something to say that is worth hearing, a detail brought out in Mark’s version: “When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.” He is bound by the foolishly grand and public promise he makes to his daughter. But he is not powerless. Herod is grieved, the sure sign that his conscience has up to this point remained intact, however repressed. Herod makes a choice. “Out of regard for his oaths and for the guests,” he acquiesces to the perverse demand of Herodias, and the life of an innocent man is lost.

The death of John the Baptist prefigures the death of another innocent prophet – but that is not the end of the story. In Da Paolo’s depiction of John’s execution, the leopard is gone – but the mysterious figure in blue can still be seen through the archway, roaming the fields.

The Son of Man still searches out the captive – the prisoner of conscience, or simply the conscience leashed to the wall by the chain of sin in which we are all complicit.

If today you hear his voice – harden not your heart.

[1] View online at https://www.artic.edu/collection?q=panel&categoryQuery=di+Paolo&artist_ids=Giovanni+di+Paolo