Light Dawning in Galilee: A Palestinian Christian Reflection

*Reflection given to Living Faith Lutheran Church in Sechelt, BC on Sunday, 25th 2026.

Matthew 4:12-23

Opening: A Nazarene's Geography

I grew up in Nazareth, the same village where Jesus spent his childhood, and spent childhood summers camping at the Sea of Galilee, we call it Tabariya in Arabic, often at Susita beach on the southeast shore. Those camping trips were more than recreation, they were acts of memory-keeping, connecting our Palestinian Christian family to the landscape that shaped Jesus' ministry.

As a Palestinian Christian, I was taught in seminary not to lean into my experience and heritage, but rather to learn one prescribed way to interpret scripture. But since the genocide in Gaza, that is changing and I am trying to lean into my Palestinian Christian identity more intentionally alongside academic tools. There is more than one way to interpret, especially if you live in the same land where these biblical events unfolded. Matthew's geographic choices take on different meaning when you understand them from embodied Palestinian experience working alongside rigorous exegetical methods rather than abstract academic distance alone.

When I read Matthew's account of Jesus "withdrawing into Galilee... leaving Nazareth he went and dwelt in Capernaum by the sea" (4:12-13), this represents lived geography rather than ancient biography.

This reflection itself represents what Palestinian Christians are calling 'making theology alongside or After Gaza' - the urgent work of biblical interpretation and theological reflection that emerges from witnessing genocide. From Munther Isaac's Christ in the Rubble to Mitri Raheb's Theology After Gaza, from the collective voices in The Cross and the Olive Tree: Cultivating Palestinian Theology Amid Gaza to grassroots study groups examining Joshua's conquest narratives during Gaza's destruction, Palestinian Christians are creating theological meaning in real time. This is not theology about Gaza from a distance, but theology made alongside the suffering, emerging from the same margins where Matthew locates divine action.

The Prophetic Handoff: John's Arrest

Matthew opens with state violence: παρεδόθη (paredothē) for John's arrest means "handed over," the same verb used for Jesus' betrayal (26:15) and crucifixion (27:2).[1] John the Baptist becomes the first prophetic casualty, establishing the pattern: prophetic voice threatens imperial power.

Jesus responds through withdrawal, going back, ἀνεχώρησεν (anechōrēsen), rather than fearful retreat.[2] When empire silences prophetic voice, divine action repositions itself. This establishes Matthew's template: imperial violence against prophets catalyzes divine movement, but always within colonized territories.

From Nazareth to Capernaum: Strategic Margins

Nazareth was tiny in Jesus' time, estimated at 200-400 inhabitants, carved into limestone hillsides.[3] When Nathanael asks, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" (John 1:46), he's voicing first-century prejudice against our small, marginalized village. You can ask me after the service how the local Nazarenes answer this question. Living in Nazareth today means inhabiting the tension Jesus knew: being from the margins while called to wider ministry.

Jesus makes a deliberate choice regarding Capernaum. Matthew uses κατῴκησεν (katōkēsen), meaning "he settled" or "made his dwelling."[4]

Capernaum (Hebrew Kfar Nahum, "village of Nahum/comfort") was everything Nazareth was not: a bustling commercial center of perhaps 1,000-1,500 inhabitants on the Via Maris trade route.[5] The Via Maris connected Egypt to Mesopotamia, running north from the Nile Delta through Palestine's coastal plains, then inland through the Jezreel Valley and past the Sea of Galilee toward Damascus and beyond. Yet it remained colonized territory requiring Roman military presence to control this strategic border location and manage the customs house.[6] A Roman garrison, permanent military post, was necessary for tax collection and maintaining imperial order.[7]

This move models Matthew's theological geography: divine action begins in margins (Nazareth) but expands strategically to reach broader communities while remaining in colonized space (Capernaum).

Borderland Theology: Why "Sea" for a Lake?

Matthew calls the body of water θάλασσα (thalassa), "sea," as do Mark (1:16), though Luke uses "lake" (λίμνη, limne) and calls it "the lake of Gennesaret" (τὴν λίμνην Γεννησαρέτ, ten limnen Gennesaret) in 5:1, using Gennesaret as an alternative geographic designation for the same body of water. This variety in naming reflects the multiple cultural communities who lived around and fished these waters. Only John prefers "Sea of Tiberias" (6:1). If you have been there, you would notice the dissonance of calling Tabariya a sea, especially if you come from here. For British Columbians, the Sea of Galilee is roughly the size of Harrison Lake - substantial enough to support major fishing industries while intimate enough that Jesus' voice could carry across its waters during teaching moments.

Matthew employs theological intention through geographic language. In Hebrew and Greek cosmology, "sea" represents primordial chaos that God must subdue.[8] Matthew signals that Jesus' ministry begins at the edge of chaos, where imperial order meets local resistance. Divine action emerges from borderlands rather than centers.

Mark and Luke follow this same theological pattern because they understand the symbolic power of "sea" language for their audiences. Mark, writing to a Roman audience, uses thalassa to signal that Jesus confronts the chaos of imperial occupation. Luke, emphasizing Jesus' concern for marginalized peoples, employs "sea" to locate divine action at the turbulent edges where different peoples meet. All three Synoptic authors recognize that calling it "sea" positions Jesus' ministry as cosmic intervention in spaces of political and social upheaval.

Demographic Complexity: "Galilee of the Gentiles"

The designation γλιλαία τῶν ἐθνῶν (galilaia ton ethnon, "Galilee of the Gentiles") reflected demographic reality. The Hebrew גליל הגוים (galil hagoyim, "district of the nations") originally described northern Israel's mixed population after Assyrian conquest brought foreign settlers alongside remaining Israelites.[9]

By Jesus' time, this mixing had deepened through centuries of Hellenistic influence and Roman colonization. Capernaum embodied this reality: Greeks, Syrians, Arabs, and other Mediterranean peoples drawn by trade opportunities lived alongside Jewish communities. The fishing industry brought different ethnic groups together around shared economic space.[10]

This diversity created genuine integration across ethnic lines. According to one theory, Jesus calls Matthew (Levi) from the tax booth here (9:9),[11] symbolically recruiting from the very apparatus of Roman economic control, a Jewish collaborator whose work required daily interaction with merchants, soldiers, and officials from across the empire. Peter's house becomes ministry headquarters (Mark 1:29-34), establishing a Jewish fisherman's home as the operational center for a movement that would span cultures. Most remarkably, a Roman centurion builds the local synagogue (Luke 7:5), demonstrating how occupying military forces and occupied Jewish communities sometimes developed collaborative religious relationships that transcended simple oppressor-oppressed dynamics.

Matthew's point: Jesus begins ministry in mixed, multicultural borderlands rather than ethnically "pure" Jerusalem, prefiguring the gospel's movement to "all nations" (πάντα τὰ ἔθνη, panta ta ethnē, 28:19 - Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit). Divine action emerges from demographic margins rather than ethnic centers.

This geographic choice creates fascinating tension within Matthew's theological project. While Matthew works extensively to demonstrate Jesus as the New Moses who fulfills Torah law, he simultaneously positions Jesus' ministry launch in the most culturally mixed territory of first-century Palestine.

Economic Disruption as Discipleship

The disciples Jesus calls represent the economic and social margins of imperial society. Simon and Andrew are fishermen, skilled laborers but hardly elite. James and John work in their father Zebedee's fishing operation, a small family business under Roman taxation. Their names reflect Capernaum's multicultural reality: Simon (Hebrew), Andrew (Greek), but all working-class people with no standing in imperial hierarchies.

Notably, John and James’ mother later approaches Jesus asking that her sons sit at his right and left hand in his kingdom (Matthew 20:20-21), revealing the social aspirations that even working-class families held within Jesus’ movement. This request exposes the tension between Jesus’ radical economic disruption—calling fishermen away from family businesses—and the persistent imperial mindset that seeks status and position even within alternative communities. The Zebedee family represents both the margins from which Jesus calls disciples and the imperial ambitions that disciples must continually unlearn.

 Even Matthew the tax collector, while economically better positioned, remains a social outcast, a Jewish collaborator despised by his own community and ignored by Roman elites. These are nobodies on the empire's scale: no aristocrats, no priests, no scribes, no Roman citizens, no Herodian court members, no wealthy merchants with imperial connections.

Matthew presents Jesus building his movement through people empire considers expendable: the working families who fuel the economy but hold no political power, who live in multicultural borderlands but rate no mention in imperial histories, who know multiple languages but speak with accents that mark them as provincial.

When fishermen abandon their nets (δίκτυον, diktyon), they're leaving tools that connect them to imperial taxation systems. Capernaum's customs house taxed fish heavily; Roman authorities controlled fishing licenses.[12] "Fishers of men" (ἁλιεῖς ἀνθρώπων, halieis anthropon) transforms the metaphor: instead of catching fish for Roman markets, they'll gather people for God's kingdom.

Throughout Matthew, discipleship requires economic disruption: leaving nets (4:20), abandoning tax collection (9:9), selling possessions (19:21). This represents systemic challenge to imperial economics: the kingdom of heaven operates by different economic principles than the kingdom of Rome.

In contemporary terms, empire recruits from tech moguls who shape global communications, investment bankers who move international capital, central bank governors who set monetary policy, defense contractors who supply imperial expansion, and elite university graduates who staff policy institutes. These are people whose decisions shape global markets and whose networks span from financial centers to government halls.

When divine action begins, it calls the undocumented workers cleaning those offices, the gig economy drivers delivering their meals, the call center operators managing their communications, the warehouse workers fulfilling their orders. It calls people whose names appear on no donor lists, whose opinions shape no policy papers, whose accents mark them as dispensable in empire's calculations.

Matthew's pattern remains constant: empire builds from credentialed centers downward, divine liberation emerges from working margins upward.

Also, from a contemporary perspective, what is notably absent from this initial calling narrative are women's voices and experiences. The fishing industry, tax collection, and public religious teaching were male-dominated spheres in first-century Palestine. While women sustained these communities through domestic labor, care work, and economic support, they remain invisible in Matthew's account of Jesus' initial team formation. This absence reflects the patriarchal structures of both Roman imperial systems and Jewish religious culture, even as Jesus' movement would later challenge these boundaries.

Light Dawning from Colonized Territories

Matthew quotes Isaiah 9:1-2, originally addressing Assyrian devastation of northern Israel. The "darkness" (σκότος, skotos) and "shadow of death" (σκιᾷ θανάτου, skia thanatou) described the lived reality of imperial occupation: deportation of populations, destruction of cities, heavy taxation, forced labor, and constant threat of state violence that characterized Assyrian rule.[13]

Matthew's light/darkness imagery requires careful reading. These terms in their original context describe political conditions: the lived experience of imperial occupation versus liberation from that oppression. The 'darkness' represents concrete systems of domination, violence, taxation, and forced labor that characterized Assyrian rule. The 'great light' represents material transformation of these oppressive conditions, not abstract spiritual concepts.

Traditional imperial theology worked differently. Roman ideology proclaimed divine blessing flowing from Caesar outward to conquered peoples, the emperor as conduit of divine favor to grateful provinces. Similarly, temple theology positioned Jerusalem as the source from which God's blessing flowed to surrounding nations. Divine action moved from center to periphery.

Matthew reverses this completely. The light dawns in occupied Galilee, in mixed borderlands, among fishing communities under imperial taxation rather than from Jerusalem's temple or Rome's throne. This is what decolonial theologians recognize as God's preferential presence with marginalized peoples: divine liberation emerges from the margins.[14]

Contemporary Realities: Theological Perception of Margins

Matthew's theological geography challenges how we perceive contemporary margins. If divine action emerges from multicultural borderlands rather than centers of power, this should transform how we see places like Gaza. Today we're confronted with competing images of Gaza that reveal different theological orientations toward margins.

The AI-generated fantasy Gaza that has been circulating the news recently represents imperial perception of marginalized spaces: empty territories to be developed, problems requiring external solutions, places where diversity and existing communities are obstacles to progress. These fantasy renderings systematically exclude Palestinian faces, voices, families, and communities, presenting empty landscapes ready for colonial development. This erasure extends beyond visual representation into governance structures that consistently exclude Palestinians in any leadership or decision-making roles, treating Palestinians as objects to be managed rather than subjects with agency over their own territory.

But Matthew's geographic theology suggests a different way of seeing: margins as spaces where God's action begins, diversity as the context for divine work, borderlands as locations of transformation rather than problems to be solved. The new yellow lines carving territory represent imperial attempts to control and fragment, but people in marginalized spaces create the dynamic between periphery and center. Palestinian presence and refusal to disappear transforms Gaza from imperial periphery into a space where divine light might dawn, just as Jesus' presence transformed marginalized Galilee into the launching point for global transformation.

The Call to Costly Discipleship

The disciples abandoned economic systems that bound them to imperial extraction rather than leaving their nets for individual salvation. Contemporary discipleship requires the same courage: leaving comfortable complicity with empire to join networks of liberation.

As we witness a fundamental shift in world order, empires and leaders remain consumed with preserving their power, clinging to old centers, old certainties, old models of control. But Matthew's pattern directs our attention elsewhere: to the margins where diversity flourishes, to the borderlands where different peoples encounter each other, to the colonized spaces where divine light breaks through imperial darkness.

The question becomes: are we willing to follow this pattern in our own discipleship? Are we willing to throw our economic bets away from empire's structures toward God's alternative economy emerging from the margins?

Conclusion: Prophetic Geography for Today

Jesus' move from Nazareth to Capernaum establishes the pattern: divine action begins in margins but expands strategically while remaining in colonized space. The fishermen who smell like their nets become apostles while the credentialed elites who shape global communications remain footnotes in the kingdom's advancement.

Jesus' ministry in first-century Galilee reveals divine action emerging from diversity and marginality rather than homogeneity and centrality. From Nazareth's obscurity to Capernaum's multicultural borderlands, Matthew shows God's work beginning in the mixed spaces where different peoples encounter each other.

The light that dawned in first-century Galilee continues dawning wherever people refuse imperial erasure. From Gaza to Minneapolis to Venezuela to Burrard Inlet in British Columbia, divine liberation emerges from colonized territories where communities choose resistance over complicity rather than from centers of power.

This is Matthew's enduring insight and our prophetic calling: to recognize that God's liberating light dawns precisely where empire least expects it, among the peoples empire most overlooks, in the diverse margins empire most seeks to control.

[1] Blue Letter Bible - Greek paredothē: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g3860/kjv/tr/0-1/

[2] Blue Letter Bible - Greek anachōreō: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g402/kjv/tr/0-1/

[3] Reed, Jonathan L. The HarperCollins Visual Guide to the New Testament: What Archaeology Reveals about the First Christians. New York: HarperOne, 2007, 145-150.

[4] Blue Letter Bible - Greek katōkeō: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g2730/kjv/tr/0-1/

[5] Horsley, Richard A. Archaeology, History and Society in Galilee: The Social Context of Jesus and the Rabbis. Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1996, 156-175.

[6] Freyne, Sean. Jesus, a Jewish Galilean: A New Reading of the Jesus-Story. London: T&T Clark, 2004, 78-95.

[7] Roman garrisons typically consisted of auxiliary troops stationed to maintain order and collect taxes at strategic locations. Archaeological evidence suggests military infrastructure at Capernaum, though debate continues over whether certain structures were permanent Roman installations or civilian buildings with different functions, and the exact size and nature of any garrison remains contested. See Reed, Jonathan L. The HarperCollins Visual Guide to the New Testament: What Archaeology Reveals about the First Christians. New York: HarperOne, 2007. Horsley, Richard A. Archaeology, History and Society in Galilee: The Social Context of Jesus and the Rabbis. Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1996.

[8] Blue Letter Bible - Hebrew yam (sea): https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h3220/kjv/wlc/0-1/

[9] Blue Letter Bible - Hebrew galil: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h1551/kjv/wlc/0-1/

[10] Freyne, Sean. Jesus, a Jewish Galilean, 112-135.

[11] Scholarly debate exists about whether Matthew and Levi are the same person or different individuals. See Crossley, James G. Jesus and the Chaos of History: Redirecting the Life of the Historical Jesus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 234-251.

[12] Hanson, K.C. and Douglas E. Oakman. Palestine in the Time of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conflicts. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008, 106-110.

[13] Brueggemann, Walter. Isaiah 1-39. Westminster Bible Companion. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998, 78-89.

[14] Ateek, Naim. A Palestinian Theology of Liberation: The Bible, Justice, and the Palestine-Israel Conflict. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2017, 85-110.