The Preacher's Lectionary Notebook - Darkness Is Not Final
The Third Sunday after the Epiphany (Year A)
The prophet does not rush past the anguish of Zebulun and Naphtali, those borderlands that have known invasion, humiliation, and neglect. These are places people pass through rather than settle in, regions shaped by loss and memory of defeat. Isaiah remembers them precisely because God remembers them. The text insists that the story of salvation does not begin in the center of power but on the margins, where despair has settled in like a long winter. Darkness here is not metaphorical gloom alone; it is political, social, and spiritual. It is the weight of history pressing down on a people who have learned to expect little and fear much.
Yet into that thick darkness, light appears—not gradually, not tentatively, but decisively. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” The verb matters. They are walking, still moving forward even when the way is unclear. The light does not wait for them to escape the darkness; it meets them within it. Isaiah does not describe a flicker or a candle but a great light, something strong enough to reorient a whole people. This is not private illumination or inner peace; it is a public, communal transformation. The light falls on those who dwell in the land of deep darkness, suggesting permanence—people who had settled into despair, who assumed this was simply how life would be. God’s light interrupts that settled hopelessness.
With light comes joy, but Isaiah is careful about how joy is described. It is not sentimental happiness or shallow relief. It is joy “as with the joy at the harvest,” joy like the celebration after long labor, after months of waiting and risk. It is the joy of people who know scarcity and therefore understand abundance when it finally arrives. Isaiah also compares it to the joy of dividing plunder after battle, an image that carries both relief and astonishment. These are people who did not expect to win, who survived against odds stacked heavily against them. Joy here is embodied, noisy, shared. It belongs to a people who remember what it felt like to live without hope.
The reason for this joy is not vague optimism but concrete liberation. Isaiah names the yoke, the bar across the shoulders, the rod of the oppressor—tools of domination that shape daily life. These are not abstract evils; they are instruments that bruise bodies and break spirits. God does not merely comfort those who carry them; God breaks them. The comparison to the day of Midian recalls an unlikely victory, when deliverance came not through strength or strategy but through God’s surprising action. Liberation, Isaiah suggests, is not achieved by matching the oppressor’s power but by God overturning the very logic of oppression.
Isaiah invites us to trust that God’s future is born precisely where we least expect it. Light rises in forgotten places. Joy emerges among weary people. Freedom comes not by human triumph but by divine intervention. The passage does not deny the darkness; it dares to proclaim that darkness is not final. In a world still shaped by fear, injustice, and weariness, Isaiah’s words remind us that God’s redemptive work often begins quietly, on the margins, yet it changes everything.
FOR FURTHER EXPLORATION
What kinds of “darkness” do people or communities experience today that mirror the situation Isaiah describes?
How does the image of light appearing in a forgotten or oppressed place challenge where we expect God to act?
What might it look like in our own context for God to “break the yoke” rather than simply help us endure it?