Isaiah 8:23 – 9:3 (RM) or 9: 1-4 (RCL); Psalm 27; I Corinthians 1: 10-13, 17 (RM) or 10-18 (RCL); Matthew 4: 12-23.

Context, they say, is everything.

Well OK, maybe not everything, but context situates ideas that may look very different from one context to the next. And makes it very hard to absolutize them.

The author of Matthew’s Gospel made some deliberate choices in the writing style that aren’t apparent to us today (even if we can read Greek) but which gave a distinctive cast to his theology of Jesus’ early ministry. The Greek word translated “withdrew,” as in, “he withdrew to Galilee” implies that Jesus set up shop in a house there – he wasn’t just passing through. And the region wasn’t called Zebulun and Naphtali anymore – by that time those names were obsolete.

But they were in current use in the time of the First Reading from Isaiah, where they referred to, respectively, an area in southern Galilee and the northernmost part of the kingdom of Israel. In the year 733 BCE this region was invaded and conquered by Assyria and was suffering all the bleak consequences of military occupation, political dissolution, social and religious devastation, and slaughter — a time of darkness. This forms the background of the breathtakingly beautiful “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light,” the beginning of a hymn of thanksgiving to the God who saved and delivered them in their despair.

So for Matthew, the author constructing a well-situated story, Galilee was a perfect setting for the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. In this telling, Jesus didn’t start at home in Nazareth. He was living in a foreign land whose population at this time was half Gentile, bilingual Greek/Aramaic, and whose local culture was characterized by the worship of Greek gods and other deities. It was far enough from Jerusalem to be outside the direct control of the religious authorities, and Judeans of the southern kingdom looked down their noses at its Jewish inhabitants. This region thrived as a centre of the confluence of major trade routes.

He strikes up a friendship with some local fishermen. These men are practicing a profession that only thrives because they are bound by the terms of their contracts with local Roman officials to deliver a certain quantity of fish for a predetermined price. Their position, while dependent on the occupation government, was stable. When Jesus invites them to “fish” for people, they become economically and socially vulnerable. The stakes were even higher for the second crew, who left their father behind in a society in which kinship ties determined the entire social structure.

Matthew makes explicit that the lands which suffered first from the Assyrian invasion in the eighth century BCE, and were the first to “walk in the light,” are now the lands in which the new light, the new promise of deliverance from evil, was first given. And the new promise was made, not by a powerful prince or a military leader, but a preacher who travelled the local roads and healed the sick.

Matthew inserts another quirk of language: the content of this preaching was the arrival of the “kingdom of the heavens.” Why “the heavens?” Because he’s shifted the discourse from political control of lands and local populations, to a concept of the presence and promise of the Holy One who pervades and transcends, who heals and infuses with the power that is not Macht, as in dominative totalitarian power, but Kraft, strength.

The context had shifted. Radically. Scripture scholar Benedict Viviano O.P. writes,

“Matthew uses the old Israelite tribal names … because he wishes to defend the activity of the Messiah in this unexpected place rather than in the religious capital Jerusalem or in the desert.”

Much good can come from a shift of context. An ancient context, or our contexts.

© Susan K. Roll