Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, June 11, 2023
by Madison Johnston, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: God isn’t satisfied with pulling us out of the darkness and into the light—our God goes so far as to be light for us.
Isaiah leans on contrast as his main, rhetorical tool in this portion Chapter 9—and a paradoxical kind of contrast, at that! In just a few verses, we see darkness pitted against a great, shining light; the process of harvesting versus the process of divvying up a bounty (perhaps said better as “before” versus “after”); military destruction swallowed up by natural destruction; ultimate authority and endless cosmic influence ascribed to a little, newborn baby. On the whole, these binaries play into a spirit of promise. A foretelling of a savior.
If we zoom out a bit, we see contrast on an even larger scale. Isaiah Chapter 8, Verses 16-22 do not promise or foretell anything, but rather, condemn. They do not talk of hope, but rather, of despair. These verses describe time of divine silence—disconnection between God and God’s people that results in a hunger that is likely just as existential as it is literal.
Just about every one of us can relate to both of these states of being. Just about every one of us has experienced genuine hope, and probably genuine hopelessness, too. What the Holy Spirit is promising us in this Word today is that “good” and “bad” aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive realities. Joy doesn’t always play out separately from grief. Relief doesn’t always occur outside of the context of struggle. In other words, the line between the darkness and the light is very thin in our day to day.
But what we can trust is that we’ll always be able to cross over that line to the good—the joy, the relief, and the light—because Jesus came into the world the make sure of that very thing. Sure, we all experience hardship. But because we know Jesus, hardship doesn’t get the final word. Because we know Jesus, we can trust that hardship will be kept at bay. The grace that Jesus brought into the world makes it so that the battle between the darkness and the light isn’t really a fair fight. The light will always win out in the end.
