Matthew 4:12-16: in context

When Jesus begins his public ministry, Matthew is careful to tell us where he goes, and it is not where we might expect. He leaves Nazareth and settles in Capernaum, up in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali, and Matthew sees in this the fulfillment of a prophecy from Isaiah: Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and on those who sat in the region and shadow of death, light has dawned. Galilee was not the religious center; it was the mixed, half-Gentile, looked-down-upon north, the region the sophisticated in Jerusalem regarded as backward and spiritually dark. And that is precisely where the great light chose to dawn first. Not on the temple mount, but on the region written off as darkness.

There is a pattern in that worth holding onto. The light of Christ does not begin where you would expect, in the impressive religious center, among the people who considered themselves the enlightened ones. It dawns on the dark places, the overlooked region, the people sitting in shadow whom everyone else had given up on. Isaiah did not say the light came to those who were already bright; he said it dawned on those sitting in darkness and the shadow of death. The darker and more hopeless the corner, the more it is exactly the kind of place God's light is drawn to break into.

That speaks to the corners I am tempted to write off as too dark for the light, whether places and people in the world I assume are beyond hope, or the shadowed regions of my own life that feel lost and past reaching. Matthew says the great light dawned specifically on the region sitting in darkness. Is there a dark corner, out there or in me, that I have consigned to the shadows as beyond the reach of God's light, when the light is exactly what dawns on the people sitting in darkness and the shadow of death?