… and he said to his attendants, "This is John the Baptist; he has risen from the dead! That is why miraculous powers are at work in him." – Matthew 14:2

 Today's Scripture Reading (November 17, 2020): Matthew 14

In 1843, Edgar Allan Poe released his story "The Tell-Tale Heart." The story tells the tale of an unnamed man living with an older man who has a clouded, "vulture-eye." The unidentified man, who also acts as the first-person narrator of the story, is obsessed with the "vulture-eye," so much that he sneaks into the man's room every night to make sure that the eye is closed. And then one night, he discovers that the older man is awake, and the eye is open. It was on that night that the man decides to murder his housemate.

And so, he commits what is essentially the perfect murder. He kills the man and then cuts the man's body up into pieces and hides him under his room's floorboard. Then he meticulously cleans up the mess so that no one can tell that anything has happened.

Of course, during the murder, the older man with the vulture-eye screams, and a neighbor hears the cry and notifies the police. The police come to investigate the cry, but not until the house's clean-up has been completed. But the man is confident that no one will be able to discern what has happened. He tells the police that the scream is his own, a response to a nightmare that he had had earlier in the night. Then he sets up chairs in the older man's room, just above the now hidden pieces of the older man's dissected body, and invites the police officers to come and sit and proceed with the interview of the murderer.

During the interview, the narrator begins to hear a noise, a strange beating. He wonders what it is, but the police don't seem to notice. Yet, the beat gets louder and louder, and the narrator is convinced that it is the heart of the older man with the vulture-eye, reaching out to him from beneath the floorboards. Finally, the beating heart becomes too much for the man, and he confesses to his crime, inviting the police to tear up the floorboards and find the pieces of the older man. "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a story of the effects of guilt on a human's psyche. And in the end, it doesn't matter if others don't know the wrong that we have done. We know, and that is enough.

Herod is suffering from a severe case of guilt. Everywhere he looks, he sees the decapitated head of John the Baptist. The head is crying out against Herod. The king is haunted by the prophet that he killed. And Herod likely can't understand why those around him can't hear the damning testimony of the bodiless head of the prophet.

And it doesn't help that Origen, writing in the third century C.E., argues that John and Jesus looked very similar. If that is true, then he would look into the eyes of Jesus and see the condemning face of John staring back at him. It is no wonder that he was beginning to believe that John had risen from the dead, as his guilt continues to condemn him.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Luke 9