Commentary on Matthew 4:12-23

After the birth narrative, Matthew’s story of Jesus skips to the adult Jesus coming to the Judean desert to be baptized by John the Baptizer. When John the Baptizer is handed over and eventually executed, Jesus returns to Galilee. Then he moves from his hometown, Nazareth, to Capernaum, a fishing village on the north side of the Sea of Galilee.

Matthew finds a significant theological meaning in this otherwise simple geographical relocation. Invoking his favorite fulfillment formula, Matthew cites a passage from Isaiah about the lands of Zebulun and Naphtali, the ancient location of Capernaum, which the prophet characterizes as “Galilee of the gentiles.” The oracle promises the residents in this region that a great light will shine upon them. This is a poetic oracle and therefore cannot be taken as a basis of any theological tenet. However, in Matthew’s narrative world, this citation points forward to Matthew’s evolving motif of the expansion of the gospel beyond the boundaries of the house of Israel, ultimately to all the gentiles.

The ministry of Jesus is summarized by Matthew as preaching the Kingdom of Heavens (4:17), which is the same message as John the Baptizer preached (3:2). Here, the “Kingdom of Heavens,” which is Matthew’s preferred expression, is synonymous with the “Kingdom of God,” as “Heavens [Shamayim]” was sometimes used as a metonym for God in Jewish parlance. The “Kingdom of God” derives from the Hebrew phrase makkhut Yahweh (“rule of Yahweh”), which refers to the Davidic dynasty as a theocratic political system.¹ As such, it projects the vision of the political order of the imagined direct rule of God; the rulers of Israel should rule, as if God directly ruled, with justice and impartiality (Leviticus 19:15).

When this vision of the “Rule/Kingdom of God” was not realized and when the earthly rulers, be they Israelite kings or rulers of foreign empires colonizing Israel, abused their power and committed various forms of injustice against the people of God, prophets arose and proclaimed the forgotten vision of “What would it be like if God directly ruled?” In this context, the Kingdom of God has an inherently anti-imperial and anti-establishment ethos. It reflects an intense yearning for a sociopolitical order based on the will of God for justice and fairness.

Later in the history of Israel, when the colonizing superpowers such as Babylon, Persia, the Seleucids, and Rome looked too strong and invincible for them to reckon with, many Jews turned toward apocalypticism, wishing for God’s direct intervention at the cosmic level to crush the current evil empires and establish the everlasting divine rule. In that sense, the Jewish apocalypticism in the late Second Temple period was highly political, and yet its ultimate orientation was otherworldly. John the Baptizer and Jesus in Matthew stand in this prophetic tradition in Israel.²

This theme of the Kingdom/Rule of God, with which Jesus begins his ministry, will continue to be the main subject for the entire proclamation, teaching, and ministry of Jesus in the rest of Matthew’s Gospel. This is illustrated by the recurring presence of the language of the Kingdom of Heavens in all five major discourses in Matthew:

1. The Sermon on the Mount (5:3, 10, 19, 20; 6:10, 33; 7:21)
2. The Commissioning Discourse (9:35; 10:7)
3. The Parable Discourse (13:11, 24, 31, 33, 44, 45, 47, 52),
4. The Community Discourse (18:1, 3, 4, 23), and
5. The Eschatological Discourse (24:14; 25:1, 34).

The Matthean Jesus is single-mindedly and consistently committed to proclaiming, teaching, and enacting the Kingdom of Heavens from the beginning to the end.

In Matthew, both John the Baptizer and Jesus seem to share optimism about the impending arrival of the Kingdom of Heavens as they both use the same verb, engiken, the perfect tense of engizo (“come near,” “approach”), in their respective proclamations (3:2 and 4:17). It reflects an apocalyptic eschatology with the expectation of the imminent end of history. Whether this type of apocalyptic eschatology goes back to the heroic Jesus is a matter of scholarly debate, but it seems to be Matthew’s understanding of Jesus.

This Kingdom-centered life and ministry of Jesus is to be continued and further carried out by his disciples beyond the public phase of Jesus’ life, and this point is exemplified by the call story in 4:18–22. On the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus passes by Simon and Andrew. He calls them, and immediately they leave their nets and follow (akolouthein) him (verse 20). In the same manner Jesus calls James and John, and immediately they leave their boat and their father and follow (akolouthein) him (verse 22).

This motif of discipleship of the Kingdom-centered life in the language of “following Jesus” is to be embraced and practiced by the intended audience of the Gospel of Matthew—in other words, the members of the Matthean community—and, by inference, by all subsequent readers of the same gospel.

The concluding verse in this passage functions as a summary of Jesus’ ministry, not just at the beginning but during the entire Galilean period of his life. That is, the focal point of the teaching, proclaiming, and healing ministry is the “gospel (euangelion) of the Kingdom” (verse 23). This is a theocentric gospel, and Jesus in Matthew’s gospel is primarily, if not exclusively, the proclaimer of this gospel of the Kingdom rather than its core content.³

Notes

1. This phrase makkhut Yahweh is a hapax legomenon, appearing only once in 1 Chronicles 28:5 in the Old Testament, while a similar concept, “Yahweh is King”/“Yahweh rules,” is found in Psalms 97:1 and 99:1.
2. The question of whether the historical Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher or not has been a matter of scholarly debate and has not been resolved yet, mostly because of the lack of sufficient data.
3. Still relevant today is the famous dictum by Rudolf Bultmann, “The Proclaimer became the proclaimed.” Theology of the New Testament, tr. K. Grobel (Baylor University Press, 2007), 33.