Start with the promise, because everything else today is measured against it. They shall fight against thee, and shall not prevail. God does not tell Jeremias that nobody will come for him. God tells him that when they come, they shall not prevail, which is a different sentence entirely and does a different job.

Look at what God actually offers in the verse before it. A fortified city. A pillar of iron. A wall of brass. Every one of those is a thing that gets hit, which is already a large hint about what shall not prevail is going to mean.

Nobody builds a wall of brass in a place where nothing is thrown. The images are defensive, and defensive images assume the attack. So when the Lord finishes by saying they shall not prevail, He has already conceded the siege and is telling Jeremias only what the siege will and will not accomplish.

And then the Church takes that sentence and reads it over the body of a man beheaded in a cell on somebody’s birthday. That is either a blunder or a claim, and the Church has been making it every August for a very long time, so let us assume it is a claim.

If you want to know whether a promise is any good, this is the test to put it to. Not the day it is made. The day it looks broken. John the Baptist died badly, alone, and by an order given at a party, and over his body the Church still says that his enemies shall not prevail.

So let us be exact about what happened at that party, because Mark is unusually detailed and most of the detail concerns Herod’s inner life. That matters for how we hear shall not prevail, because the Gospel is about to show us precisely what the fighting looked like.

Herod feared John. Herod knew him to be a just and holy man. Herod kept him, which in that sentence means protected him. And when he heard him, he did many things, and he heard him willingly.

That is four concessions in one verse, and Mark did not have to give us any of them. A simpler story would have Herod hating the prophet. This story has Herod liking him, listening to him, and doing things because of him. The man who had John killed was the man who most enjoyed his company, and that is the first thing shall not prevail has to survive.

Then: and the king was struck sad.

The Gospel records Herod’s grief. It puts his sorrow in writing, in the same sentence as the order to fetch an executioner. That is where most of the harm in this passage lives, so I want to stay on it a while. The text says he was sad, and then the text says exactly what his sadness produced, which was a dish.

Yet because of his oath, and because of them that were with him at table. There is the mechanism, stated flatly. Not conviction. Not hatred, which belonged to Herodias and not to him. What killed John the Baptist was a room, and a man who could not survive being seen in that room going back on something he had said.

So the sentence they shall not prevail is being read this morning over a death caused by embarrassment. Hold that, because a great deal of what gets done to people is not done by their enemies. It is done by people who like them, in front of other people.

Reluctance is not innocence, and shall not prevail is not a promise that reluctant people will change their minds. Herod’s sadness is real and it is worth nothing, and the Gospel is what tells us so, by reporting the sadness and the execution in one breath and letting us do the arithmetic. If you have ever been on the receiving end of somebody’s regretful harm, the Gospel agreed with you about it long before I did, this morning, in red vestments.

Which brings us to what John actually said to get himself arrested, because it is one sentence and worth reading slowly. It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother’s wife.

One man, to a king, about that king’s own household, at a distance of about three feet. That is the setting in which the words were first spoken, and it is the setting shall not prevail was addressed to.

Now watch where that sentence has travelled since. It is one of the standing proof texts for the claim that the Church must declare somebody’s marriage unlawful and take whatever comes of it. On that basis gay, lesbian and bisexual people have been told for a very long time that the household they built is not a household, by people quoting this verse. I want to put the fruit test to that use of the verse, and not to anybody’s identity.

The test turns entirely on direction, and once you have seen it you cannot unsee it. John spoke upward, to the one man in the room who could have him killed, about that man’s own conduct, and it cost him his head inside a year. The modern quotation runs downward, from a pulpit or a committee or a family kitchen, at people who hold no power at all over the speaker, and it costs the speaker an uncomfortable afternoon at the very most. That asymmetry is exactly what shall not prevail was written against.

Same words. Opposite direction. The fruit test does not ask which words you used; it asks what grew where you planted them. And it is the people on the receiving end of that planting who need to hear that the fighting shall not prevail.

What has grown is measurable, and I am not going to soften it. Households broken up, children moved away from parents, people who stopped eating, people who stopped calling home, and a great many adults who cannot enter a church building without their hands going cold. That is the harvest. It was gathered by people who were often sad about it, exactly as sad as Herod was, and their sadness changed nothing at all about the harvest.

We said something adjacent to this on the Sunday of the letter and the spirit, but the claim there was about law used as a weapon in general. Today’s claim is narrower and harder. Today the accusation is not that the words were misquoted; it is that they were quoted correctly and aimed the wrong way, at people who could not answer back, by speakers at no risk. John’s sentence and its modern use are grammatically identical and morally opposite, and shall not prevail belongs to the ones being aimed at.

And here is why today’s promise belongs to them. They shall fight against thee, and shall not prevail. Not: nobody will fight. Not: it will not cost you.

John’s head came off and the promise stands anyway, because the promise was never about the head. It is that the fighting does not get to settle the question. They shall not prevail is a ruling about jurisdiction and not about safety.

That distinction is worth saying plainly, because the cheerful version of this verse has done real damage. The cheerful version promises safety. It tells people that if they are faithful the opposition will melt, and when the opposition does not melt they conclude that the fault was theirs.

The true version is harder and steadier: they shall fight against thee, and shall not prevail. You may lose the argument in that room. You may lose the room. What you do not lose is the truth of the matter, which was never in that room’s gift to begin with.

There is a story sometimes told of a woman who transitioned in her fifties in a small town, and of the eleven months that came after. The version I have heard has no confrontation anywhere in it. Nobody threw her out and nobody said a word to her face. The rota she had run for nine years was quietly reassigned, the group chat stopped producing notifications, and when she asked, three separate people told her the same untrue thing about scheduling.

She kept turning up on Wednesday mornings anyway, because Wednesday morning was when the food bank ran and she knew where the tins went. Nobody in that building would have called what was happening a fight, which is exactly the sort of fight shall not prevail was written for.

I am not going to tell you the rota came back. It did not. Nobody apologised, and as far as I know nobody has. What she said much later, when somebody asked how she had stood it, was neither brave nor bitter. She said she had worked out early on that she was not going to let the question of whether she belonged there be decided by whoever had the most people at their table.

That is this verse, said by somebody who had probably never read it. They shall fight against thee, and shall not prevail. She did not win and she was not restored. What she refused to hand over was the question itself, and on that one point shall not prevail is a sentence with actual content.

Yesterday we said that standing is not established by a record, that no count of good days confers it and no count of bad days revokes it. This morning puts the same knife in from the other side. Standing is not established by a vote of the room either. Herod’s table could take John’s life; it could not take the fact that he had been right, and that is the exact boundary the Lord draws for Jeremias when He says they shall not prevail.

We named trans people three days ago, on a Church that fractured while trying to protect itself, and that argument was about sincerity ending in schism. This morning names different people on a different claim, and the claim is about audience. Herod did not stop believing John; he stopped being able to afford him publicly, and the two are not the same failure. What they share is the table, and what shall not prevail says to both is that the table was never the court.

Now the commemoration, briefly and honestly. Of St. Sabina almost nothing survives. The account of her martyrdom carries no historical value, and what is left is a name, a hill in Rome, a basilica on the Aventine standing there since her relics were brought to it in 430, and this date. The Church set her on the calendar of the day it remembers the loudest death in the Gospels, and that placement is its own small argument about who shall not prevail is for.

Because the promise cannot only cover people whose deaths get written down. If shall not prevail applies only where there is a full account, it is a promise for the famous, and it is worth very little. Sabina has almost no account and she keeps her feast anyway, which is the Church saying that the sentence reaches the people nobody wrote about.

Then look at where today’s Mass goes for its music. The just shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow up like the cedar of Libanus. You can read the whole of Psalm 91 at drbo.org, and it is worth doing, because the Church has answered a beheading with two of the slowest-growing trees it could name. A palm and a cedar are not quick, and neither is the vindication that shall not prevail is pointing at.

The Alleluia verse today is not the one that usually follows that Gradual. On the feast of a confessor last week the same two psalm verses were answered by St. James on the crown of life. Today the Missal answers them from the prophet Osee instead: the just shall blossom like the lily, and shall flourish for ever before the Lord. That substitution is where shall not prevail gets its venue.

The antiphon is worth a note of its own. If you go to Osee 14 at drbo.org you will find that verse six reads Israel shall spring as the lily, and the liturgy has put the just man where the nation stood and added for ever before the Lord, which is not in the chapter at all. The Missal’s own Latin says what the Missal’s English says, so this is not a loose rendering of the prophet. It is the Church reading Osee and applying him to one man.

And the added words carry today’s whole weight. For ever before the Lord. That is the venue change the promise depends on. The room at Machaerus reached its verdict and the verdict stood in that room for one evening; the other venue does not adjourn, and it is there that they shall not prevail.

One more time, because this is the sentence to carry out of the building. They shall fight against thee, and shall not prevail. If you are in something now where the fighting is real, notice that the verse does not promise you the fighting stops. Notice what it does promise, and notice how much smaller and how much more durable that promise is. The people opposite you may take a great deal from you, and there is one thing that is not theirs to take.

We ask a little of that this morning at the altar where the just are handed what they did not earn, and we ask it in the plainest form there is. Make us hard to move. Not loud, not certain, not vindicated. Hard to move, the way an iron pillar is hard to move, so that when they fight against us, as the Lord has already said they will, they shall not prevail.

↑ The order resumes below.