Catholic Commentary
The Word of God Prevails: A Summary and Transition
24But the word of God grew and multiplied.25Barnabas and Saul returned to Jerusalem when they had fulfilled their service, also taking with them John who was called Mark.
Acts 12:24–25 reports that following King Herod Agrippa I's death, God's word continued to grow and spread, while Barnabas and Saul completed their famine-relief mission to Jerusalem and returned with John Mark. The passage emphasizes the Word's unstoppable power despite persecution, contrasting the tyrant's demise with the church's organic expansion.
When Herod dies and the Word thrives, Luke is making a claim about power itself: what looks invincible and tyrannical is temporary, but what is invisible and spoken cannot be chained.
The phrase "having fulfilled their ministry" (plērōsantes tēn diakonian) is notable. Diakonia — service, ministry — is the same word applied to the apostles' ministry of the Word (Acts 6:4) and to the deacons' ministry of tables (6:1). Barnabas and Saul have carried material relief to the suffering Jerusalem church, and Luke dignifies this practical charity with the vocabulary of sacred ministry. Caritas and kerygma are not separated in Acts.
The quiet introduction of John Mark here is a narrative foreshadowing. He will accompany Paul and Barnabas on the First Missionary Journey (Acts 13:5), then abandon them at Perga (13:13), become the source of a sharp disagreement between Paul and Barnabas (15:36–39), and eventually be rehabilitated in Paul's own letters (2 Tim 4:11; Col 4:10). Luke plants this seed with a single line, trusting the alert reader to follow the thread. John Mark's presence also anchors the transition: the great Gentile mission of Acts 13 is about to begin, and it will launch from Antioch — the community where the disciples were first called "Christians" (11:26) — carried by these same two men.
Catholic tradition finds in Acts 12:24 a confirmation of the indefectibility of the Church, one of her essential marks. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "Christ, the Son of the living God, promised to build his Church on Peter," and that "the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it" (Mt 16:18; cf. CCC 552, 869). Acts 12:24 is a narrative demonstration of precisely this promise: the gates of Herod — earthly power, the sword, the prison — have not prevailed. Origen, commenting on the Word's fruitfulness, notes that the logos tou theou in Luke's usage carries the resonance of the eternal Logos: the growth of the preached Word in history participates in the creative and life-giving power of the Word who was with God in the beginning (In Gen. Hom. 1.1).
Pope Benedict XVI, in Verbum Domini (2010), draws on this Lukan refrain to articulate the Church's perennial confidence: "The word of God is not chained" (2 Tim 2:9). Benedict emphasizes that the spoken Word proclaimed in mission, the Word celebrated in liturgy, and the Word written in Scripture are all participations in the one divine Word — and that Word, as Acts repeatedly insists, cannot be imprisoned (§§ 7, 94).
St. John Chrysostom saw in the juxtaposition of Herod's death and the Word's growth a sermon against relying on human patronage or fearing human hostility: "See how, when the preacher fell, the preaching flourished; when the king was destroyed, the word grew" (Hom. in Act. 27). For the Church Fathers, the diakonia of Barnabas and Saul further illustrates the unity of the mystical and material dimensions of the Church's mission — a principle later articulated systematically in Gaudium et Spes §1 and Caritas in Veritate §4.
Acts 12:24 speaks with sharp relevance to Catholics living in contexts of institutional decline, cultural hostility, or personal discouragement about the Church's prospects. It is tempting, when bishops are disgraced, parishes are closed, or secular power seems overwhelmingly dismissive of Christian witness, to conclude that the Word of God is losing ground. Luke's refrain is a deliberate pastoral antidote to this despair: Herod looked invincible and is now a footnote; the Word looked fragile and is still multiplying.
Concretely, this passage invites the Catholic today to distinguish between the Church's institutional visibility and the Word's invisible fruitfulness. These are not the same thing. Fidelity to Scripture, to the Eucharist, to the Rosary, to catechizing one's children — these are participations in the growing of the Word that no cultural Herod can ultimately arrest.
Verse 25 offers a second application: the mission of Barnabas and Saul is completed through ordinary, behind-the-scenes charity — carrying relief funds, fulfilling a practical errand. Not every act of Christian mission is dramatic. Much of it looks like Barnabas quietly returning from Jerusalem with groceries. The Catholic is called to honor and embrace that unglamorous fidelity as genuine diakonia.
Commentary
Acts 12:24 — "But the word of God grew and multiplied."
The word "but" (Greek: de) is a small hinge of enormous theological weight. Everything in Acts 12:1–23 has built toward this contrast: Herod Agrippa I, arrayed in royal splendor and acclaimed as a god, was "eaten by worms and died" (12:23). Now the narrator pivots. The tyrant who executed James, imprisoned Peter, and sought to destroy the nascent Church is gone. The Word of God is not.
Luke uses the verb ηὔξανεν ("grew") — the same root used in Acts 6:7 ("the word of God continued to increase") and Acts 19:20 ("the word of the Lord continued to grow mightily and to prevail"). This is a deliberate, recurring refrain in Acts, functioning almost as a liturgical punctuation mark across the whole narrative. Luke employs it at strategic moments to signal that persecution, opposition, and even death have not merely failed to stop the Gospel — they have paradoxically accelerated it. "Grew and multiplied" is a pregnant phrase: ηὔξανεν carries the sense of organic, living growth, like a plant or a living body, while ἐπληθύνετο ("multiplied") echoes the language of Genesis 1:28 ("be fruitful and multiply") and Exodus 1:7 (Israel's population multiplying despite Pharaoh's oppression). Luke is drawing a deliberate typological line: just as Israel grew stronger the more Pharaoh tried to crush it, so the Church — the new Israel — grows stronger against every Herod.
The subject of the sentence is emphatically the word of God, not the apostles. Luke strips away any suggestion that the Church's growth is a human achievement. The Word is alive, active, and sovereign. This echoes Isaiah 55:11: "my word shall not return to me empty." The death of Herod is not incidental background color; it is structurally juxtaposed with the growth of the Word to make a theological claim — no earthly power can contain what God has spoken.
Acts 12:25 — "Barnabas and Saul returned to [Jerusalem], having fulfilled their mission, bringing with them John, whose other name was Mark."
(Note: Some manuscripts read "to Jerusalem," others "from Jerusalem" [eis vs. ex]; most modern Catholic scholarship, following the Nestle-Aland text and the context of Acts 11:27–30, understands this as a return from Jerusalem to Antioch, completing the famine-relief mission described in 11:30.) After the grand theological summary of v. 24, Luke returns to ground level with characteristic precision: two names, one mission completed, one new companion introduced.