Light dawns in the darkness

Read Matthew 4:12-16

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All was now ready. John had prepared the way and Jesus had been baptised and then tested. There was a short period in which John and Jesus were active in Judea simultaneously (John 3:22-26). That ended when John was arrested. His arrest was both a prompt for Jesus to withdraw to the safer region of Galilee in the north and the signal to him that the time had come for his public ministry to begin.

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Jesus now made his base at the busy lakeside town of Capernaum (13; “his own town” Mt.9:1). Matthew sees in this a fulfilment of prophecy (Is.9:1-2). He is writing for Jewish readers and he has already pointed out various ways in which the coming of Jesus fulfils what the Old Testament has said (e.g. 1:22-23; 2:6; 2:17-18; 3:3). Jesus did “not come to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfil them” (Mt.5:17).

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The Jews of Judea in the south did not expect the Messiah to come from Galilee in the north, for Galilee had a mixed population with many non-Jews (“Galilee of the Gentiles” 15). But it was there that the great light of God’s good news first shone. Jesus came to bring light to all people (Lk.2:30-32; Acts 13:47-48), including unlikely and out-of-the- way people like us.