Why?
Herod wondered about the never ending story of the prophets, of those free, exalted voices which healed the sick, cast out demons and inspired the people to reappropriate their freedom, dignity, and beauty. Herod wondered how, although he held all power over education, armies, economics, mass communication, banks, politics, religions, schools, science, medicine, criminal organizations, all forms of espionage, the law, and the courts, prophets were still be born to that generation. Herod wondered what was wrong with his system of control and persuasion if those uncontrollable, destabilizing voices still cried out around the world and throughout history with people sometimes listening to them.
After all his efforts to persuade people to believe that it was God who divided the world and humanity into castes, thus establishing that the poor must remain poor and the rich have a divine mandate to become richer, Herod wondered why there were still so many people who did not accept poverty, misery, hunger, thirst, and disease.
Herod wondered why people wanted to live good, healthy, peaceful, happy lives even on this earth before they went to heaven. Herod was very disappointed by the fact that people wanted to live comfortably right here on earth without waiting for paradise or rather the idea of paradise that he had invented and diffused through religions in order to empty from their hearts the true faith which enables man to become wise and powerful, free and independent, to fill them with fear and terror. The paradise invented by Herod has nothing to do with God's paradise or the paradise Jesus revealed and made known to us. It is an ideological paradise, a cerebral invention, a fictitious, inexistent place serving only to strip away from man's soul all his dreams and desires, aspirations, divine gifts and abilities and to sow the satanic belief that all happiness and dreams can be realized only, and uniquely there. That paradise allowed Herod - who established and organized everything to keep people enslaved and oppressed so that none of the poor could achieve happiness, peace, health or well-being - and to fill their hearts and the minds with the perverse belief that building a better world meant undergoing ceaseless, degrading mental, physical and spiritual mutilations. Herod wondered why the hungry people should want to eat without having spent a lifetime working as slaves; why the people, who are continuously drawn into fratricidal wars - as any war is fratricidal -, want to live in peace, when peace does not facilitate empires built on weapons. Herod found it strange that sick people wanted to be healed after religions had tried for centuries to convince man that illness and suffering, when they are not the outcome of genetic makeup, bad luck or fate, are a gift from God to pay the bill of previous sins, a gift of his divine providence and predilection to save man's soul. Herod wondered why sick people wanted to be healed in a natural way, free of charge in accordance with the power of the inner dialogue of the spirit instead of through pharmaceutical companies. Herod wondered if it was a sign of true intelligence that people wanted to be free to organize their lives as that kind of liberty demolished the global power system. Herod was even amazed by the rebelliousness of those people who did not want to submit to any sign of benevolence of power, law, banking systems, as those people fed a dangerous and illegal dissident populism that delayed the omologation process and made it more difficult for the powerful to act ay the detriment of the weak.
Herod heard about Jesus and the power linked to his words and to his hands, a power that heals and resurrects, and he was amazed, surprised; he did not understand how another prophet could have apeared out of nowhere, another one of those intriguing prophets of God who ruins people's lives, because they inspire human being to change, they inspire "the metànoia" - the change towards happiness. Herod even wanted to see Jesus' face and to know how he had slipped through the net of his control and terror system. Herod was evil but he was not stupid and he realized that this new prophet, who arrived in that dark stony land had something which would not be easy to harness or suppress, he had something which had the power to awaken in people the desire for change. Herod was not stupid and knew that there is nothing so irresistible and which cannot be stopped as change; the voice of that prophet announced, revealed, offered, inspired metànoia, which means change, the change. Herod knew that his time is over, the time in which he was able to persuade the people that any change is illegal, immoral, dangerous, sinful, against God's will and man's welfare. Herod tried to eliminate even that voice, but Jesus' voice is not that of a man, his voice is God's voice, and in order to erase God's voice from earth, he would have had to eliminate all of humanity, because God's voice is in the heart of every man.