NOTES for Isa 9:2

Speaking about the birth of the Messiah, Isaiah indicates the place where He will spend His childhood. But why the prophet speaks of Galilee “of nations"? There are two reasons for that.

In the time of Isaiah of Jerusalem, when the kingdom of the North had already stop its existence after the Assyrian conquest, there were almost no more Jews in the territory (including Galilee and the North of Samaria), they were partially deported to other regions of the vast Assyrian Empire, and partially ran away southward, to Judea.

The Assyrian authorities moved to these places others, heathen peoples mixed with the rest of the Jewish local population. But there is a different explanation, comprehensible rather in the latest context, the evangelic history, than in the context of Assyrian history. At the evangelic time, Jewish educational centers were Jerusalem and Babylon.

Particularly there, were the best theological academies, known by Jews all over the world. People having received education in Jerusalem and Babylon were rather often looked by the inhabitants of other cities from above; even if it was about their fellow compatriots and coreligionists, and Galilee in their eyes was a profoundly spiritual province, where by definition could be nothing interesting.

But Jesus however begins his ministry especially there, in Galilee, at the places, where He spent His childhood. And in the first that listen to His word are not the students and professors of the theological academies, but simple artisans, farmers and fishermen. And not because they were probably more educated than those who learnt and taught in academies, but because it was easier for them to leave everything and follow the One who brings Kingdom into the world.

A wonderful gift: prophecy. Several centuries after these words were written, the apostle Paul will say that we should especially seek this very gift, because it opens the Lord's ways to us.

It would seem that Isaiah is simply prophesying about the birth of an earthly Messiah, the King from the line of David, but he lists names that can refer only to God Himself. And for a person of Isaiah's time a name was not a conventional label, but something that expressed the essence of the bearer of the name.

So the King from David's line in some astonishing way turns out to be God Himself, establishing His Kingdom forever. And all this is accomplished by the zeal of God, or, as the New Testament would later clarify, by the love of God.

In this prophecy, a rebuke to Israel and Judah sounds by way of contrast, because they do not want to turn to God even in a time of trials. Alongside it comes the message of the exaltation of Gentile Galilee, where oppression and wars will cease because the Prince of Peace will shine there - peace as a state of harmony between God and people. It is paradoxical that the promise of the Son comes against the background of unbelief and forgetfulness of God among His people. But beyond human unfaithfulness and sin, another power is at work in the world: the zeal of the Lord, His fiery love for people, which stops at nothing.

Today's reading includes a messianic hymn (vv. 1-7) linking the Messiah's earthly ministry with Galilee - a place of no religious distinction. There were no major Yahwist religious centers here like those that existed farther south, in Samaria, and Jerusalem with its Temple was, by local standards, rather far away. But none of this prevented Galilee from hearing the preaching of the Messiah-Christ or from becoming the place where the Savior's childhood passed.

External greatness and ancient tradition do not always help the work of God. Who knows what Jesus' childhood would have been like if He had spent it not in quiet Nazareth, but in Jerusalem? God's plan often requires quietness and hiddenness, especially at the first stages, when its fulfillment is only beginning. Human plans, by contrast, often assume from the very start noise, fame, and the earthly greatness that fallen man loves so much (vv. 8-10).

Today's reading not accidentally contrasts despised Galilee with the Kingdom of Israel. The irony of the situation was that Galilee belonged, though not completely, to this state, but was considered in it a remote backwater, of no interest to anyone and of no distinction. All the large cities and all the important political and religious centers of the country lay farther south, in Samaria. Galilee, however, was a border region already partly settled by Gentiles (which is why the prophet calls it "of the nations," v. 1). But centuries passed, and of the Kingdom of Israel, whose rulers were proud of the greatness of their, in essence, quite small country, only memories remained. And the most famous city in this land today is not even Bethel, which was the religious capital of the North and one of the most ancient Yahwist religious centers, but Nazareth, which in the flourishing era of the Northern Kingdom did not yet exist at all and later was by no means distinguished by fame until it was glorified by the One to whom Isaiah bore witness.