Acts 12:3

Acts 12:3. And because he saw it pleased the Jews. See note on Acts 12:1, in which the policy and character of King Herod are discussed at length.

Then were the days of unleavened bread. During seven days at the feast of Passover no leaven was allowed in the houses of the Jews. St. Jerome on Ezekiel 43, quoted by Wordsworth, appears to say that St. James was martyred on the second day of the Passover, i.e. on the 15th Nisan, the same day as the crucifixion of the Lord. The precise date (15th Nisan) is probably fanciful, as Jewish custom was opposed to judicial sentences being carried out during the feast. The martyrdom more likely took place just before the feast of Passover, some twenty-one years after the crucifixion of Jesus. The son of Zebedee and Salome, when he asked that he should drink of the Master's cup and be baptized with the Master's baptism (St. Matthew 20:21), then little dreamed that the prayer would so soon be granted.

This Passover was the gloomiest and saddest the Church had kept since the great Pentecost morning: one leading personage had been taken away from the little society by a bloody death, another was in prison and condemned. The absolute king of Israel united with the Sanhedrim, the relentless enemies of the Christian sect, in a determination to crush the followers of Jesus.

These days of gloom must have reminded some of that company of another Passover, eleven years before, when the Master they loved so well lay dead in His grave; but they must have remembered well, too, the joyous Easter which succeeded that awful Passover, when the Master, loving as ever, but robed with new robes of life and majesty, gathered His mourning friends together again; for we find them asking from Him, their risen Friend, not from King Herod, Peter's life, for ‘prayer without ceasing of the Church was made to God for Peter' (Acts 12:5).