Listening this year to the Gospel for the Passion of John the Baptist, what struck me was Herodias’s daughter’s narrow-mindedness: offered literally anything her heart desired, she requested the execution of one man whose moralizing discomfited her mother (and perhaps her) and whose murder likely brought peace to neither.
This small-mindedness is characteristic of sin; drawing on Augustine, the Christian tradition vividly depicts a person enmeshed in sin as incurvatus in se, curved in on himself. The most tragic aspect is what we miss when we are fixated on what is beneath our dignity: we miss the grand horizons God wants to open to us and the treasures He wants to lavish upon us. To what power, fame, wealth Herodias’s daughter could have laid claim! — yet more, were she a truly generous person, what could her newfound wealth and power have done for the inhabitants of Israel, indeed, for the world? Limitless possibilities opened to her in this moment, and she let them slip by. She asked instead for one man’s head.
This nameless daughter’s unfortunate choice called to my mind Francisco Bocel, whose heartrending testimony is featured in the Stanley Rother documentary released last week. Just nineteen years old, Bocel awoke in the night with a gun to his head, three masked men demanding to know where Fr. Rother was. They forced Bocel downstairs, where he knocked on the priest’s door with the words, “Padre, they’ve come for you,” and slipped away. Hiding, he heard a fierce struggle, two gunshots, then silence. To this day, Bocel regrets and grieves those moments.
Bocel’s situation and Herodias’s daughter’s are not the same: Bocel was in mortal danger; he loved Fr. Rother; and he acted unwillingly in a situation that would have led to Fr. Rother’s death regardless of his own involvement. We should pray that Bocel, like St. Peter, who denied the one he loved, experiences profoundly the depths of God’s mercy and becomes for others a testament to that mercy.
One also wonders what would have happened if Bocel had made a different choice, if he had refused totally to cooperate. It is likely that he, alongside Rother, would have been killed, and he would have won, then and there, the pearl of great price, eternal life; he would have laid down his life for his friend. Perhaps we would be celebrating Rother and Bocel together as martyrs on the same day of the liturgical year.
Magnanimity is the virtue of large-hearted hope that God will do great things in us and that we will do great things for Him. It opens out to the infinite majesty, glory, and freedom of God, which He wants to share with us. This month, let us practice some acts of magnanimity. For one, we can “pray big,” asking God for the deepest and perhaps seemingly most impossible desires of our hearts. Nothing is impossible for Him! Second, let us do something generous for another. And third, maybe magnanimity for us will resemble Bocel’s heroism now in daily taking up his cross and believing that God’s mercy triumphs over our weakness. Then we will live like John the Baptist, who tirelessly preached that the Lamb of God takes away our sins.
