Catholic Commentary
Jesus Arrives in Galilee
43After the two days he went out from there and went into Galilee.44For Jesus himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country.45So when he came into Galilee, the Galileans received him, having seen all the things that he did in Jerusalem at the feast, for they also went to the feast.
John 4:43–45 describes Jesus leaving Samaria for Galilee after a two-day stay, noting that prophets typically lack honor in their own country. The Galileans receive him based on the miraculous signs they witnessed at Jerusalem's feast, but John suggests this response reflects shallow sign-faith rather than genuine belief in his word.
A warm welcome is not the same as honor—the Galileans received Jesus because of his tricks, but the Samaritans received him because of his word.
John 4:43 — "After the two days he went out from there and went into Galilee." The phrase "after the two days" (Greek: meta de tas duo hēmeras) directly links this transition to the preceding Samaritan episode (Jn 4:40–42), in which Jesus tarried with the people of Sychar who had come to believe through the woman's testimony and then through his own word. The number two carries no overt symbolic freight here, but the deliberate temporal marker emphasizes the completeness of Jesus' Samaritan mission before he resumes his journey northward. Galilee is Jesus' homeland in the sense that he was raised in Nazareth (Lk 2:39–40) and conducted much of his public ministry around the Sea of Galilee. The movement from Samaria to Galilee is also geographically and theologically significant: Jesus has just been hailed as "Savior of the world" (Jn 4:42) by outsiders, and now he returns to his own region.
John 4:44 — "For Jesus himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country." This verse presents one of the great interpretive cruxes in the Fourth Gospel, because the conjunction "for" (gar) seems to give Jesus' proverb as the reason he went to Galilee — yet the proverb predicts a lack of honor there, making the logic seem paradoxical. The solution lies in understanding "his own country" (patris) carefully. The Synoptics apply this saying to Nazareth specifically (Mk 6:4; Lk 4:24; Mt 13:57), but John's framing is broader and more ironic. Some Fathers (e.g., St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on John, 35) read "his own country" as Judea and Jerusalem, where Jesus was born by divine destiny (cf. Mic 5:2) and where the religious establishment repeatedly rejected him. On this reading, Galilee is precisely not his native soil, and he goes there because it offers relative openness. Others read it as a self-aware irony: Jesus goes to Galilee knowing the honor he receives will be superficial. The proverb itself echoes wisdom-tradition sayings about the unrecognized sage and carries the weight of the entire prophetic tradition's suffering (cf. Jer 1:1; 1 Kgs 19:10).
John 4:45 — "The Galileans received him, having seen all the things that he did in Jerusalem at the feast." The Galileans' reception (edexanto auton) sounds positive on the surface, but John immediately qualifies it: their welcome is grounded in signs seen (heōrakotes), not in the deeper faith born of the word. This is the same inadequate sign-faith Jesus refused to endorse in Jerusalem: "he did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people" (Jn 2:24). The irony John constructs is precise — the Galileans "receive" Jesus, fulfilling the letter of hospitality, while the Samaritans (who saw no sign at all) received him as the Word himself. The feast reference anchors the reader in the Passover context of John 2, connecting the cleansing of the Temple and the early signs to this new Galilean encounter. The pilgrimage cycle — going up to Jerusalem for the feast — was a mark of Jewish fidelity (Ex 23:17), yet here the feast-goers' faith remains touristic, dependent on spectacle.
Typological and Spiritual Senses: At the allegorical level, Galilee represents the Gentile mission field (cf. Is 9:1–2; Mt 4:15–16), and Jesus' movement there after being received by Samaritans anticipates the Church's universal expansion. The "two days" in Samaria carry a faint typological resonance with Hosea 6:2 ("after two days he will revive us") — a patristic association developed by St. Augustine (Tractates on John, 15) — pointing toward resurrection and the ingathering of all peoples on the third day. The contrast between superficial sign-faith and true receptivity of the Word is a perennial moral sense: true honor given to Christ consists not in marveling at wonders but in obedience to his teaching.
Catholic tradition reads this passage within the theology of divine condescension and prophetic rejection that culminates in the Cross. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the Incarnation of God's Son reveals that God is the eternal Father and that the Son is consubstantial with the Father" (CCC 262); the prophet's lack of honor in his homeland is therefore not merely a sociological observation but a theological datum about the kenosis of the Second Person of the Trinity entering human familiarity and obscurity.
St. Augustine (In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus, 15.3) wrestles brilliantly with the "for" of verse 44, concluding that John intends an ironic inversion: Judea, not Galilee, is Christ's true patris in the order of fulfillment (he is son of David, born in Bethlehem), and it is there his rejection is most pointed. This reading is echoed by St. Thomas Aquinas (Commentary on John, lectio 5 on cap. 4), who sees the proverb as establishing the theological pattern of the entire Gospel: the closer to the source, the greater the blindness of those who should see.
The passage also speaks to the theology of faith and signs. Vatican I (Dei Filius, ch. 3) affirmed that miracles are genuine motives of credibility, but they do not replace the assent of faith to the Word. The Galileans' sign-based welcome illustrates what the Council called insufficient — an intellectual acknowledgment without the will's surrender to revealed truth. Pope Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth (Part I, ch. 8), reflects on this Johannine motif, noting that Jesus consistently refuses to be a wonder-worker whose signs become an end in themselves; the sign always points beyond itself to the Person.
Contemporary Catholics live in a culture that prizes religious experience, spiritual feeling, and visible results — the modern equivalent of the Galileans who followed Jesus because of what they had seen. This passage invites a pointed examination of conscience: Is my faith in Christ grounded in what he has done for me lately — answered prayers, consolations, felt moments of grace — or in his Word received and obeyed even in darkness? The prophet who receives no honor in his own country is also the Christ present in the ordinary: in the Sunday Eucharist that feels routine, in the neighbor whose need feels burdensome, in the Church's teaching that chafes against cultural preference. St. Teresa of Calcutta observed that we must learn to see Christ in his "distressing disguise." John 4:43–45 is a concrete diagnostic: familiarity breeds not necessarily contempt, but something more dangerous — a welcome without surrender. The practice of lectio divina on this short passage — sitting with the irony that the Samaritans believed through the Word alone while the Galileans required signs — can be a powerful corrective to a faith that has become tourism rather than pilgrimage.
Commentary