Herod's Guilty Conscience

The Twelve are out on the road doing what he sent them to do, and the name travels with them until it reaches a palace. King Herod hears about Jesus. Before Mark tells us what Herod made of that, he stops to collect what everybody else was making of it.

Three answers were going around. Some said that John the Baptist had been raised from the dead, and that this was where the power was coming from. Others said Elijah, which was not a wild guess, because the last book of the Old Testament had promised that God would send Elijah before the great day and people were still watching for him. The third answer was the mildest of the three.

He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old.

Every one of those is a compliment, and every one of them is wrong. Mark writes all three down and corrects none of them.

Then Herod hears the same three answers and picks the first one. He does not weigh them against each other or send anybody out for better information. Of the three explanations available to him, he reaches for the one that would frighten him most. John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.

Nobody asked him for that middle clause. What was going around the countryside was that John had come back, and Herod could have repeated it in those words and stopped there. He put himself in the sentence instead.

There is nothing in front of him that points that way. He has two other explanations sitting in the same breath of gossip, and neither one requires him to think about John, and he walks straight past both of them to the man he had killed.

Mark has not told us that story yet. He lets it out here in a single clause, out of order, and only afterwards backs up to explain how it happened.

So a man who governs a whole region hears about a teacher and is frightened by a dead man he cannot stop thinking about. Nothing has happened to him. Nothing is coming for him. He is the one who brought John into the room.