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It’s easy to misunderstand prophecy. That statement is true in several senses, but especially when it comes to Jesus fulfilling prophecies as he does in our Gospel today. Jesus moves to Capernaum and it fulfills a passage in Isaiah. Did Jesus have to live there? Or did he choose to?

Our culture has largely reduced prophecy to “foretelling the future.” Someone peers into the ages to come and reveals what must be so. As a result, one might be tempted to imagine Jesus wandering the Holy Land with a long scroll: a checklist, a sovereign “to do” list of prophecy after prophecy. In order to be a proper Messiah, he has to be in place “x”, at time “y”, and say or do thing “z.” In this conception, the Jewish people, long awaiting a savior, would be keeping score and statistics like baseball fans. If Jesus manages to thread the needle or stick the landing, then he is worthy of faith.

This seems to reduce Our Lord quite a bit. We might wonder if he has any freedom at all, or is it all just a carefully orchestrated dance of fate? But again, this misunderstands the gift of prophecy entirely and puts the cart before the horse.

First: the real gift of prophecy is concerned with two things: The Holy Spirit and the revelation of truth. Prophets are those anointed and moved by the Spirit of God to tell the necessary truth, be it truth about God or a given state of affairs in the world. This “told truth” can be in regard to the past, present or future. The key function is that it’s the Holy Spirit and not the prophet who initiates the process.

In other words, prophets respond to the Holy Spirit and say true things about God and the world in light of God. This even extends to us to a lesser extent: we are baptized as prophets and exercise a prophetic witness whenever we are guided by the Holy Spirit to tell truths of salvation. For instance, one might speak of the church’s prophetic witness on several moral issues of our day.

Moreover, a given prophet may not understand the full import of what they’re saying or even know what a prophecy will look like when it comes to fruition. Most of the prophecies about Jesus were only understood by the guidance of the Holy Spirit in hindsight. The Jewish people knew of messianic prophecies, but by no means was there an official checklist. Many of the prophecies fulfilled by Jesus in the New Testament are realizations about Christ’s ministry in retrospect. The apostles and first Christians prayerfully reflect on their experiences
with the Lord. To their wonder, they discover that the regular events of their lives complete a given passage in the Old Testament. “Oh yeah! Jesus did that too! Huh.”

It’s essential to frame things in the right perspective. Jesus is God. He is the prime mover of the universe. What he freely chooses to do, the prophets merely observe from their vantage point in time. Jesus acts freely, they merely are given a picture or insight about those free actions, like how a security guard might observe actions through CCTV. He knows what happens without controlling it in the slightest. Truth and knowledge never remove freedom.

All this is to say that Christ likely chose Capernaum for a whole host of reasons, but not because he was compelled to do so. It’s likely he loved the sea and the people who worked near it. After all, in short order he calls a few to be fishers of men and then apostles on which he will build his church. As king of the prophets and fully alive in the Spirit, Jesus knows the divine truth written on their hearts and their destiny in eternity. He speaks it prophetically in a call and they respond freely, becoming saints little by little, day by day, by the power of the cross and Resurrection.