'Now when Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison, He
departed into Galilee; 13. And leaving Nazareth, He came and dwelt
in Capernaum, which is upon the sea coast, in the borders of
Zabulon and Nephthalim: 14. That it might be fulfilled which was
spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, 15. The land of Zabulon, and
the land of Nephthalim, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles; 16. The people which sat in darkness saw
great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of
death light is sprung up.'--MATT. iv. 12-16.
Though the narrative of the Temptation is immediately followed by the
notice of Jesus' return to Galilee, there was a space between wide
enough to hold all that John's Gospel tells of the gathering of the
first disciples, the brief stay in Galilee, the Jerusalem ministry, and
the journey through Samaria. John i. 43 refers to the same point of time
as verses 12-16 of this chapter. It is rash to conclude Matthew's
ignorance from his silence, and it is plain, from his own words, that he
did not suppose that the return to Galilee followed the Temptation as
closely in time as it does in his narrative. For he does link the
Temptation to the Baptism immediately, by '_Then_ was Jesus led up of
the Spirit' (verse 1), and so some interval of time must be allowed,
during which Jesus left the wilderness, and went to some place where He
could hear of John's imprisonment. A gap is necessary. Its extent is not
indicated, nor are the reasons for silence as to its contents. But we
may as reasonably conjecture that Matthew's eagerness to get to his main
subject, the Galilean ministry, led him to regard the short visit to
Jerusalem as an episode from which little came, as put his silence down
to a very improbable ignorance. The same explanation may account for the
slight mention made of His 'leaving Nazareth,' of which Luke has given
the memorable story.
John was silenced, and that moved Jesus to go back to Galilee and take
up His ministry there. His reason has been thought to have been the wish
to avoid a similar fate, but He was safer from Herod in Jerusalem than
in Capernaum, within reach of the tyrant's arm, stretched out from
Tiberias close by, and the supposition is more probable, as well as more
worthy, that a directly opposite motive impelled Him. The voice that had
cried, 'After me cometh a greater than I,' was stifled in a dungeon. It
was fitting that He, of whom John had spoken, should at once stand
forth. There must be no interval between the ringing proclamation by the
herald and the appearance of the king, lest men should say that one more
hope had been dashed, and one more prophet proved a dreamer. And is
there not a lesson for all times in the fact that when John is silenced,
Jesus begins to speak? Is not the quenching of a light kindled to bear
witness to the true Light, ever the occasion for that unkindled and
unquenchable Light to burn the more brightly, though tear-dimmed eyes
often fail to see it?
The choice of Capernaum as a residence suggested to Matthew Isaiah's
prophecy, which he quotes freely, fusing into one sentence the
geographical terms, in verse 15, which, in the Hebrew, are the close of
one paragraph, and the prophecy in verse 16 which, in the Hebrew, begins
another. The territory of Zabulon lay in what is now called Lower
Galilee, stretching right across from the northern end of the Sea of
Gennesaret to the coast of the Mediterranean, while that of Naphtali lay
further north. 'The way of the sea' is here not the designation of
another district, but a specification of those named in the preceding
clauses, and may be rendered 'towards the sea,' while 'beyond Jordan' is
the almost heathen territory on the east bank of the river, and 'Galilee
of the Gentiles' is the general name for all three, the two tribal
territories and the trans-Jordanic district. These are all smelted into
one designation, 'the people which sat in darkness,' and thus the whole
of verse 15 and the first clause of verse 16 make the nominative of the
verb 'saw.' There is something very impressive in that long-drawn-out
accumulation of geographical names, and in their being all massed in the
one sad description of their inert darkness, and then equally massed as
seeing the great light that springs up. The intense pathos of that
description and its sad truth to experience should not be unnoticed.
They sit in the dark--the attitude of listless languor and constrained
inaction, too true an emblem of the paralysis which falls on all the
highest activities of the spirit, if the light from God has been
quenched. It is only wild beasts that are active in the night. The lower
parts of man's nature may work energetically in that darkness, but all
that makes his glory is torpid in it. Christ's light has been the great
impulse to progress. Races without it sit and do not march. But that is
not all, for the sad picture is sketched again with blacker shadows in
the next clause, which substitutes for 'darkness' the still more tragic
words, 'the region and shadow of death.' The realm of darkness is the
region of death. That dread figure is the lord of it, and, grimly
enough, its very intensity of blackness has power to throw a shadow even
there where there is no light, and to deepen the gloom. The second
clause advances on the first in another respect, for while the former
spoke only of 'seeing' the light, the latter tells of the blessed
suddenness with which it 'sprung up.' The one clause speaks of the human
perception, the other of the divine revelation which precedes it and
makes it possible.
But had Matthew any right to see in Jesus' Galilean ministry the
fulfilment of a prophecy which, as spoken, was simply a promise that the
northern parts of Israel which, by geographical position, had to bear
the first and worst brunt of Assyrian invasion, should have deliverance
from the oppressor? Yes; for Isaiah's vision of the light rising on
Israel, crushed beneath foreign oppression, was based on a distinctly
Messianic prediction. It was because Messiah should come that he
expected Assyria to be flung off and Israel to be set free, and he was
right in the expectation, for though the Messiah did not come visibly
then, His coming was the guarantee, and in some sense the cause, of
Israel's deliverance. Nor was Matthew less right in seeing in that
earlier deliverance but a germinant accomplishment of the prophecy,
which, by its very transiency, outwardness, and incompleteness, pointed
onwards to a better spring of the Light, and a fuller deliverance from
a murkier darkness and a more mortal death. 'The life was the light of
men,' the teacher of all knowledge of God, the source of all light of
true joy, the giver of all light of white purity, and He has risen on a
world sitting in darkness that all men may walk in the light, and be
children of the light.