LETTERS
TO MY BEHEADER – 2
One day we will meet and I’m not any better than many others
One day we will meet and I’m not any better than many others
2-
TWO DIFFERENT APPROACHES
My
brother,
It seems that we have
Two different approaches
Dealing with human heads
For while I’ve been
Trying all my life
To change the minds
Therein
With a painting brush
With a writing pen
You, with your sword,
Take off the whole head!
Yes,
I’m stubbornly determined
To take the longer way,
But yours is a very, very
Short CUT.
It seems that we have
Two different approaches
Dealing with human heads
For while I’ve been
Trying all my life
To change the minds
Therein
With a painting brush
With a writing pen
You, with your sword,
Take off the whole head!
Yes,
I’m stubbornly determined
To take the longer way,
But yours is a very, very
Short CUT.
The Beheading of St. John the Baptist -- Lucas Cranach the Elder
Yohanan (John the Baptist) received his name (“to quicken” or “to make alive”) because his mother Elišévaʿ was post-menopausal. According to “The Gospel of Luke” The archangel Gavri'el visited his father to tell him the news: “He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He is never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born.” In her 6th month of pregnancy Gavri'el informed her virgin relative Mariam and informed her that she would give birth to Yeshua (Jesus), the son of God; when Mariam told Elišévaʿ “the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed: ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!’” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that when he was 8 days old he was ordained "to overthrow the kingdom of the Jews" (and that 18 centuries later he reappeared and ordained the Mormons’ founder Joseph Smith into the Aaronic Priesthood). Yohanan became an influential holy man. The gnostic Mandaeans, who emerged in the 1st 3 centuries and still survive in Iraq, regard him as the actual messiah. According to the “Gospel of John,” when Yohanan saw Yeshua approach he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” and two of his followers became disciples of Yeshua; when one of them, Andreas, told his brother Shim’on that he had found the messiah, Yeshua told Shim’on that he would be called Cephas (from “kepha,”the Aramaic word for rock, which was translated into Greek as “petra” – St. Peter, the first pope). Yeshua later called Yohanan “a burning and shining lamp” and told Yohanan’s former folllowers that “you were willing to rejoice for a while in his light." Christians regard him as the precursor of Yeshua, “a voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’" The Gospels of Matthew and Mark both related that the daughter of Herod II (not named there Shlomit [Salome; her name was derived from “shalom,” Hebrew for “peace”] danced for her father so well that he promised to give her whatever she demanded; she insisted on being given Yohanan’s head on a platter. The beheading of Johanan has become a popular subject for Christian painters; in the 1515 depiction by Lucas Cranach the Elder, he painted his own likeness as the soldier on the left, bearing the halberd.
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