Year A: 3^rd Sunday OT
Gospel: Matthew 4:12-23

This Sunday’s Gospel presents us not merely with a sequence of events, but with a divine choreography, a purposeful movement of the Heart of God into the heart of human darkness. When Jesus hears of John’s arrest, He does not retreat in fear, but advances in obedience. His withdrawal to Galilee is a tactical move of grace, a deliberate positioning of the Divine Light where the shadows are deepest.

Consider the geography of salvation. He leaves Nazareth, the hidden life, and establishes his base in Capernaum, a bustling crossroads. This is no accident. To understand the profound weight of this choice, we must recall the fractured history of this land. The region of Zebulun and Naphtali, the “Galilee of the Gentiles,” was a land soaked in history’s tears. It was part of the ancient northern Kingdom of Israel, which broke from Jerusalem after Solomon. This political split deepened into a cultural and spiritual prejudice. The southern kingdom of Judah, with its temple in Jerusalem, often viewed the north with suspicion—as a place of schism, diluted faith, and compromised purity. This prejudice was cemented by tragedy: Galilee was the first to be ravaged by the Assyrian invasion in the 8th century BC. Its people were exiled and foreigners were settled in their land. Though later reconquered and re-Judaized, it remained, in the minds of the Jerusalem elite, a periphery, a mixed and less-reliable “Galilee of the Gentiles.” To sit in its darkness was to dwell under the twin shadows of historical trauma and religious disdain.

And it is precisely here, in this borderland of broken unity and inherited prejudice, that the prophet Isaiah’s ancient promise ignites like the dawn. Jesus is that “great light.” The prophecy He fulfills (Isaiah 9:1-2) is not merely about illumination, but about restoration and unification. The Messiah’s light was prophesied to dawn first on the north, on the very people who walked in that deep darkness, as a sign of God’s faithfulness to all His scattered children. The dream embedded in Isaiah’s larger oracle is indeed of a reunited kingdom under a Davidic heir—a child born who will carry the government on his shoulders, called “Prince of Peace,” whose dominion will have no end. By beginning here, Jesus is silently declaring a divine campaign not of conquest, but of reconciliation; He is the light that shines from the scorned north to draw all tribes, both of Judah and of wayward Israel, back into one flock.

He does not merely bring a message; He is the message. The Light has not been sent; it has arisen. In His very person, God’s reign pierces the gloom and begins to mend the ancient rift. This is the first stirring of the Kingdom: a divine invasion of compassion that seeks first the lost sheep of the house of Israel, starting in the most forgotten fold.

But how does this Kingdom propagate? Not with legions, but with a glance and an invitation. Behold the stunning simplicity of its foundation. He walks by the Sea of Galilee, the very stage of Isaiah’s prophecy. He sees Simon and Andrew, James and John—not scholars in synagogues, but laborers in the muck and mundanity of their trade. Their nets are tools for subsistence, symbols of a life cast upon the uncertain waters of daily survival.

His call is both a disruption and a breathtaking elevation: “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” He does not ask them to abandon their skill, but to transfigure its purpose. The patience, the discernment of currents, the laborious hauling—all will be taken up, healed, and redirected into the drama of gathering hearts into the net of God’s mercy.

What does this mean for us, who sit perhaps in our own forms of shadow? We need to believe that the Light deliberately seeks out our darkest, most “Gentile” borderlands—the parts of our hearts or our society we consider irredeemable or distant from God. He pitches his tent there. Second, His call to “repent” is our daily summons to turn our face from the shadows of sin, despair, or self-sufficiency to the ever-at-hand Kingdom revealed in His face. Third, He calls us in our ordinariness, amid our “nets.” He will use our lived experience, our skills and struggles, if we leave them at His command, to draw others into the light of communion.

Fr. Jijo Kandamkulathy, CMF