John was silenced, and that moved Jesus to go back to Galilee and take up His ministry there.  His reason has been thought to have been the wish to avoid a similar fate, but He was safer from Herod in Jerusalem than in Capernaum, within reach of the tyrant’s arm, stretched out from Tiberias close by, and the supposition is more probable, as well as more worthy, that a directly opposite motive impelled Him.  The voice that had cried, ‘After me cometh a greater than I,’ was stifled in a dungeon.  It was fitting that He, of whom John had spoken, should at once stand forth.  There must be no interval between the ringing proclamation by the herald and the appearance of the king, lest men should say that one more hope had been dashed, and one more prophet proved a dreamer.  And is there not a lesson for all times in the fact that when John is silenced, Jesus begins to speak?  Is not the quenching of a light kindled to bear witness to the true Light, ever the occasion for that unkindled and unquenchable Light to burn the more brightly, though tear-dimmed eyes often fail to see it?

The choice of Capernaum as a residence suggested to Matthew Isaiah’s prophecy, which he quotes freely, fusing into one sentence the geographical terms, in verse 15, which, in the Hebrew, are the close of one paragraph, and the prophecy in verse 16 which, in the Hebrew, begins another.  The territory of Zabulon lay in what is now called Lower Galilee, stretching right across from the northern end of the Sea of Gennesaret to the coast of the Mediterranean, while that of Naphtali lay further north.  ‘The way of the sea’ is here not the designation of another district, but a specification of those named in the preceding clauses, and may be rendered ‘towards the sea,’ while ‘beyond Jordan’ is the almost heathen territory on the east bank of the river, and ’Galilee of the Gentiles’ is the general name for all three, the two tribal territories and the trans-Jordanic district.  These are all smelted into one designation, ‘the people which sat in darkness,’ and thus the whole of verse 15 and the first clause of verse 16 make the nominative of the verb ‘saw.’  There is something very impressive in that long-drawn-out accumulation of geographical names, and in their being all massed in the one sad description of their inert darkness, and then equally massed as seeing the great light that springs up.  The intense pathos of that description and its sad truth to experience should not be unnoticed.  They sit in the dark—­the attitude of listless languor and constrained inaction, too true an emblem of the paralysis which falls on all the highest activities of the spirit, if the light from God has been quenched.  It is only wild beasts that are active in the night.  The lower parts of man’s nature may work energetically in that darkness, but all that makes his glory is torpid in it.  Christ’s light has been the great impulse to progress.  Races without it sit and do not march.