Matthew 4:12-17, Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

The first time I went to Disneyland, I was a young adult. This was in the mid-80s. There were the usual rides but the one that has been memorable is the refrain of the song, “It’s a small world after all”.

It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears

It’s a world of hopes and a world of fears

There’s so much that we share

That it’s time we’re aware

It’s a small world after all.

I remember leaving Disneyland full of delight and longing. How I wished then and how I wish still that every child on earth could come to this place. It was a happy place where we left our differences at the gate and simply enjoyed riding with each other.

When John was arrested, Jesus withdrew to Galilee of the Gentiles, to Capernaum in particular. It was not Disneyland but the place was a melting pot of all sorts of faces, and the air was filled with fisherfolk tales and foreign tongues. It was an outpost for trade, busy, secular, with lots of traffic in goods and services, moving through Roman checkpoints. Galilee must have had its fair share of inter-racial mingling as it was a gateway and host to a diversity of cultures.

Galilee of the Gentiles was surely not Jerusalem, which was the center of religion and power in the region of Judea. Geographically, it was far from Jerusalem, separated from the holy city by the “pagan” place of Samaria. Nonetheless, there must have been thriving Jewish communities in Galilee because of the synagogues. But as it was surrounded by gentile territory, surely Galilee was not all just Jewish.

This detail of geography is not trivial to Matthew. He sees this as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy. Galilee of the Gentiles is where God would bring light to a people who for ages have been walking in darkness, waiting for God.

Nor should this geography be trivial to us, especially now that nativist (or ultra nationalist) leaders continue to prey on our fears and prejudices. Many have been captivated by their dangerous delusions of greatness. We see little pushback even as we are being driven to the brink. We are only fracturing ourselves every time we shut our doors to faces not like ours and to those in need.

It is in Galilee of the Gentiles where the light of God’s presence is first proclaimed to be at hand. Here Christ our Lord, the Word of God speaks to summon us to “repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Metanoiete, repent. Turn around.

Turn around from what, we ask. Turn around from our selfward and prideful and unforgiving ways. Turn around from our obsession with greatness and might. Turn around from our worship of wealth and power.

When we are under the spell of wealth and power, we build walls to protect what we possess and to keep others away. We become prisoners within the fences we have created.

To repent is to turn around from the fantasies and falsehoods we tell ourselves and others. To repent is to turn away from this fixation on what we think is pure and unstained. To repent is to turn our attention away from what makes us believe we are different and superior to others. To repent is to turn instead to what we all share in common.

When we turn our focus on the humanity that we share, the world becomes less strange. It becomes small. It becomes, as the song goes, a world of laughter and tears, a world of hopes and fears. When we realize that there is so much that we share in common, when we begin to see that we are not the only ones in pain or the only ones bound by fear, the world becomes small again as it is to a child and as it is in the eyes of God.

We do not need Disneyland to know again the smallness of our world. We only need a bit of geography to locate our Lord ever present in the Galilees of our time, in places of ferment and flux, where people have been walking in darkness far longer than they can remember.

We only need to see Jesus Christ in Capernaum, in Galilee of the Gentiles, mingling about the saintly and the unchurched, meeting those inside and outside all kinds of walls, moving through checkpoints, telling us in word and deed that the fences that separate us from one another are the same fences that separate us from God.

*illustration by Kirsten Ulve