The province of Galilee, the boyhood home of Jesus Christ, was submitted and dependent to King Herod’s authority. Pilate sent the accused to Herod, the Romans’ agent, testifying thereby that Jesus did not deserve death, but was belonging to the jurisdiction of Herod Antipas who was not entitled to condemn to death.
This adulterous king, who killed John the Baptist, and lived in ease and immorality, sought many times to employ Jesus and bind him to his attendants as a token of his divine merit. Now Jesus had an unequalled opportunity to free himself through this meeting, if he had only submitted to this fox. The king asked him many questions with great flattery in bland specious language. But Jesus kept silent, and did not answer the adulterous murderer. His silence signified condemnation. Woe to him who will not hear the word of God, for God’s silence is as expressive as his speech. Jesus condemned the superficial revelry with his glorious silence, revealing his divine glory. This was the wonderful miracle, which Jesus presented to the king, contrary to what the latter had expected.
Then Herod, enraged, and filled with extreme anger, treated Jesus with contempt and mocked him. He dressed him with some gaudy painted clothes, as a mock king, and sent him back in this dress on foot all around Jerusalem to the governor. Pilate immediately understood the joke. The strange thing is that that submissive acknowledgement of the Roman authority in sending the prisoner to Pilate brought the governor and the harmless king to a better understanding one of another that they became mutual friends. They both laughed at the professing, zealous Jews and at the weaponless, foolish King Christ. Even today, we may observe the same strangeness: how those contradictory parties, religions, and beliefs that quarrel with one another yet can unite against Christ, for he who is not with him is against him, led by the power of darkness.