From the character of the narrative, and still more from the later call of these four, [2205] it would seem that, after the return of Jesus from Judæa into Galilee, His disciples had left Him, probably in Cana, and returned to their homes and ordinary avocations. They were not yet called to forsake all and follow Him - not merely to discipleship, but to fellowship and Apostolate. When He went from Cana to Nazareth, they returned to Capernaum. They knew He was near them. Presently He came; and now His Ministry was in their own Capernaum, or in its immediate neighbourhood.
For Capernaum was not the only place where He taught. Rather was it the center for itinerancy through all that district, to preach in its Synagogues. [2206] Amidst such ministry of quiet power,' chiefly alone and unattended by His disciples, the summer passed. Truly, it was summer in the ancient land of Zebulun and Naphtali, in the Galilee of the Gentiles, when the glorious Light that had risen chased away the long winter's darkness, and those who had been the first exiles in Assyrian bondage were the first brought back to Israel's true liberty, and by Israel's Messiah-King. To the writer of the first Gospel, as, long years afterwards, he looked back on this, the happy time when he had first seen the Light, till it had sprung up even to him in the region and shadow of death,' it must have been a time of peculiarly bright memories. How often, as he sat at the receipt of custom, must he have seen Jesus passing by; how often must he have heard His Words, some, perhaps, spoken to himself, but all falling like good seed into the field of his heart, and preparing him at once and joyously to obey the summons when it came: Follow Me! And not to him only, but to many more, would it be a glowing, growing time of heaven's own summer.
There was a dim tradition in the Synagogue, that this prediction, [2207] The people that walk in the darkness see a great light,' referred to the new light, with which God would enlighten the eyes of those who had penetrated into the mysteries of Rabbinic lore, enabling them to perceive concerning loosing and binding, concerning what was clean and what was unclean.' [2208] Others [2209] regarded it as a promise to the early exiles, fulfilled when the great liberty came to them. To Levi-Matthew it seemed as if both interpretations had come true in those days of Christ's first Galilean ministry. Nay, he saw them combined in a higher unity when to their eyes, enlightened by the great Light, came the new knowledge of what was bound and what loosed, what unclean and clean, though quite differently from what Judaism had declared it to them; and when, in that orient Sun, the promise of liberty to long-banished Israel was at last seen fulfilled. It was, indeed, the highest and only true fulfilment of that prediction of Isaiah, [2210] in a history where all was prophetic, every partial fulfilment only an unfolding and opening of the bud, and each symbolic of further unfolding till, in the fulness of time, the great Reality came, to which all that was prophetic in Israel's history and predictions pointed. And so as, in the evening of his days, Levi-Matthew looked back to distant Galilee, the glow of the setting sun seemed once more to rest on that lake, as it lay bathed in its sheen of gold. It lit up that city, those shores, that custom-house; it spread far off, over those hills, and across the Jordan. Truly, and in the only true sense, had then the promise been fulfilled: [2211] To them which sat in the region and shadow of death, light is sprung up.' __________________________________________________________________
[2174] St. Matt. xxvi. 60, 61.
[2175] St. Matt. xxvi. 40-42.