Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A (2026) - Fr Anthony Walsh, OP

There are moments in history when everything changes, yet almost no one realises it at the time. Life seems merely to continue—until, later on, we look back and see that a door had closed forever and another had opened, irreversibly.

Saint Matthew presents just such a moment at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. “When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee” (Mt 4:12). At first glance, it seems like a simple narrative transition. In reality, it marks one of the most decisive turning points in salvation history: the end of one dispensation and the irreversible beginning of another.

John the Baptist’s arrest is not merely a personal tragedy or a political injustice—though it is both. It is the definitive sign that the age of preparation has reached its limit. John is not simply another prophet; he is the last prophet of the old order, the final voice crying out before the Word Himself begins to speak. Once John is silenced, his role cannot be resumed, extended, or repeated. What prepared the way must now give way to what fulfils it. Indeed, Jesus’ message is the same as John the Baptist: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand.”

This is precisely how the Church understands revelation. As the Second Vatican Council teaches in Dei Verbum, God reveals Himself through deeds and words bound together in history, and that revelation reaches its fullness in Jesus Christ. When Christ appears, something genuinely new has begun—new not in the sense of novelty, but in the sense of finality. There is no return to what came before, because what came before has reached its goal.

Jesus does not protest the injustice, rally support, or attempt to preserve the old prophetic arrangement. Instead, Matthew tells us that Jesus “withdraws.” The Greek verb Matthew uses—anachōrein—is important. It does not mean flight in fear. In Matthew’s Gospel, it consistently signals a theologically charged repositioning: a deliberate movement that allows God’s plan to advance when human structures begin to resist it. Jesus’ withdrawal, then, is not retreat. It is transition.

And where does He go? Not to Jerusalem. Not to the Temple. Not to the religious, political, or symbolic centre of Israel. He goes to Galilee—“Galilee of the nations,” as Matthew insists, quoting the prophet Isaiah. A marginal region. Religiously suspect. Culturally mixed. Far from the certainties of priesthood, sacrifice, and scribal authority. This is the shock of the Gospel.

If we expect God to act by reinforcing the centre, we will miss what is happening. Jerusalem represents continuity, stability, and religious legitimacy. Galilee represents ambiguity, fragility, and obscurity. Yet it is in Galilee that “the people that lived in darkness has seen a great light.” Salvation history does not pivot toward greater control or consolidation. It pivots outward, toward the borderlands of Israel. This pattern is not accidental. God begins where the old order has the least investment in preserving itself.

That same logic governs the calling of the first disciples. Jesus does not gather priests from the Temple or scribes from the schools. He calls fishermen—men whose lives are shaped by uncertainty, labour, and dependence rather than ritual mastery or institutional authority. They are not custodians of the sacred past; they are free to be drawn into a future that has not yet been mapped.

This is not an anti-priestly or anti-intellectual gesture. It is a salvation-historical one. The new dispensation cannot be built primarily on those whose vocation is to maintain the old forms. It must be entrusted first to those who can leave their nets immediately—not because they are morally superior, but because they are not structurally bound to what is passing away.

Here, the insight of Pope Benedict XVI is crucial. In his teaching on Dei Verbum, Pope Benedict repeatedly emphasised that revelation reaches its definitive fullness in Christ. This does not mean that everything is instantly clear or complete, but it does mean that there can be no return to a purely preparatory mode of faith. Once the Son has come, God has said everything He intends to say—definitively, though not exhaustively.

John’s arrest, then, is not simply the silencing of a prophet. It is the historical closure of the preparatory economy. What follows is not an improvement on John’s message but its fulfilment in person. Yet those living through this moment would not have experienced it as fulfilment. They would have felt loss, confusion, and destabilisation. The centre goes quiet. The prophet is imprisoned. The Messiah does not march on Jerusalem but disappears into Galilee.

This is where the perspective emphasised by Pope Leo XIV is illuminating. In his catechesis on revelation and discernment, Pope Leo has stressed that decisive moments in God’s action are rarely recognised as such when they occur. Those who live through them often experience disorientation rather than clarity. Meaning becomes visible only in hindsight.

That is a word our own time needs to hear. We live in an age when long-standing certainties—political, cultural, even ecclesial—feel less stable than they once did. There is a temptation either to panic, or to defend familiar pastoral arrangements as though they were the tradition itself—when in fact the Church is renewed not by clinging to recent strategies that have borne little fruit, but by drawing again from the deep well of her tradition. Matthew’s Gospel offers us to recognise that God may be acting decisively precisely through what feels like withdrawal, marginalisation, and loss of centre.

Jesus’ move to Galilee does not abandon Israel. It reveals where God is now at work. The Kingdom is proclaimed. The sick are healed. Disciples are called. Light shines—not from the Temple courts, but from the edges. The arrest of John marks the end of one dispensation. Jesus’ withdrawal marks the irreversible beginning of another. From this point on, everything changes, even if it takes time to understand how.

For us, the question is not whether we live in a time of change—we know that we do. The question is whether we have the eyes to see where the light is dawning now, and the courage to follow Christ even when He leads us away from the places we thought He ought to begin.

Yet Galilee is not the end of the story. The same Jesus who begins in Galilee will one day set His face toward Jerusalem. He does not reject the holy city; He fulfils it. He goes there not to restore the old order, but to bring it to its decisive completion. From Galilee He gathers His disciples; in Jerusalem He will give them Himself.

It is there, at the Last Supper, that the new and eternal covenant is established—not in the Temple sacrifices, but in His own Body and Blood given “for you and for many.” And it is there, outside the city walls, that the covenant is sealed in suffering and obedience upon the Cross. Jerusalem does not disappear from salvation history; it is transformed.

This is the full movement of the Gospel: from Galilee to Jerusalem, from calling to self-gift, from proclamation to sacrifice. The withdrawal was never an escape. It was the long road by which God prepared a people capable of receiving not merely a message, but a covenant written in Christ’s Blood. And so, the quiet pivot that begins with John’s arrest reaches its fulfilment not in triumph, but in love poured out to the end. What began among fishermen culminates in the offering of the Lamb.

That is why this turning point matters for us. God’s decisive work often begins far from where we expect—but it always leads, in the end, to the Cross and the gift of life. To follow Christ is to trust that movement: from loss to fulfilment, from obscurity to glory, from Galilee to Jerusalem, and through the Cross into the Kingdom that will never pass away.

Fr Anthony Walsh, OP is the Master of Novices, assigned to St Laurence's Priory, North Adelaide, South Australia.