It is Caravaggio’s greatest work: The Beheading of St. John the Baptist.
Dark and dimly lit is the space they occupy. It is not quite a proper room, but one of those little areas formed by the meeting of several halls and cells. An intersection born of necessity. The executioner’s arm ripples with handsome muscle as he presses the victim’s head to the stony floor and bleeds him like a winter hog.
He will wait for enough blood to run before he finishes the work of decapitation. This way the mess is contained. The bleeding can be staunched by the emptying work of death. He knows where to stand to avoid the staining and keep his hands clean. Look how clean his hands are! Here is a true professional.
The jailer, ever mindful of performing his errand with aplomb, hastens the task. He points to the platter, “There, put him there” he gestures. “Don’t forget, we have a schedule to keep.” This death is just one chore in a long list of duties. Any shew of humanity would slow the timetable down. He’s not especially cruel, he’s just too busy to concerned. Neglect is his mode of achievement.
The old woman holds her head and looks, not sad nor shocked, but tired —bone-weary. A headache perhaps falls now upon her yoked with a sickening despair. Perhaps she had begun, in her old age, to have hope once more. This was Elizabeth’s boy, after all. He was the son of a woman who had, in growing old, given up hoping. His birth, unexpected, had been a new light. He was a child of hope unlooked for. His words had burned like fire in the wilderness beyond the Jordan. And yet now he lays in the grim sparseness of this place, snuffed-out. This woman is Israel whom wicked kings have made barren, and she gazes on the Voice who will cry in the wild no longer. We played the dirge for you, dear woman, and you did not sing. Will you dance when we reed the pipes?
The eyes of the serving girl are fixed on the brightness of the platter she holds. Its glitter plays against her head and makes the edges of her auburn hair glow apricot and russet-gold. She wonders if she’s as beautiful as Salome and if it’s all just fine oils and clothes that make her mistress darling to kings and courtiers. She tries to draw her thoughts back to the project, but cannot, for vanity is an easy escape from the butcher knife sliding from the sheath, and from the strong sticky smell of iron that fills the room. “Just keep it together” she prays to herself and hopes the face isn’t set so that it looks like he’s looking at her, “…and also this plate costs more than my dowry.”
Craning through the bars of their cell two inmates watch with little emotion. The death of another is a welcome distraction from thoughts of our own. A divertissement. The eyes of the one lift from the gruesomeness on the floor to the jailer: to that cloak of peacock-green trussed with gold, his oiled beard, his authority to give orders. “Will my death be just another order he delivers one day?”
And then there is the most upsetting item in the room, the one which demands our attention: the royal cloak which covers the dead man. We see his camel’s hair lying scattered, and his belt undone by his feet. They had evidently striped him naked. That makes sense for reasons beyond humiliation. It is easier to tell a victim to remove their clothing than to strip a rigored cadaver. But whence came this robe? Surely the careful executioner did not drop it on the mess. It doesn’t belong to the jailer. And it’s too fine for either of the women.
It’s presence haunts us. It marks the victim as the most noble, ranking him above those in power over him; it names him the servant of a greater king than Herod. Uncanny garment, disclosing to us the truth. We have killed the royal servant, we have violated the locks of the Nazirite, we have laid hands on the servant of the Owner of the vineyard just as we will lay hands on the Son of the Owner.
It is a quiet scene. There is nothing that registers noise save for the jingle of the master’s keys and the chewing sounds of the knife-work.
Upstairs is a party where the mighty think they have triumphed over their foe, the priest’s boy, that damnable prophet. But they are wrong. For he will have the upper hand. Even now Herod has doomed himself to worry and fret, and long into the sleepless nights will he wonder if John has risen again to visit him. The words of the prophet will haunt him until even daylight cannot save Antipas from the dread terror of the prophet’s judgements. And that crimson color reminds us that that prophet’s Master, the One he made the way for, will come treading the wine-press of his wrath with garments stained, and that he will reckon unto us the blood of the martyrs from Abel to John.