Sunday, January 26, 2014: Isaiah 9:1-4

"The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Everyone who has ever sat through a performance of the Messiah knows what’s next: “For unto us a child is born . . .” Handel’s exuberant chorus is probably playing in your mind right now: “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace . . .” Isaiah’s royal birth announcement, bright with possibility and expectation, is the centerpiece of the Old Testament lection for Christmas Eve. So it seems strange that the lectionary chooses to reprise it four weeks downstream from Christmas during the January doldrums. Stranger still, the reprise is aborted: we get only the introduction of the theme without its resolution in the announcement of the birth it is meant to herald.

The language of Isaiah 9:1–4 is elusive. It starts in prose, but most translations convert to poetry in verse two, following the editors of most Hebrew texts. There is imagery of despair—gloom, darkness and deep darkness—before the passage begins its turn toward the light. There are place names, mostly lost in the mists of history—Zebulon, Naphtali, “the way of the sea” and “Galilee of the nations”—places of contempt that may yet cherish the hope of recovery. There are the oblique references to vassalage and servitude: the bar across the shoulders, the rod of the oppressor. And if you push on one verse further than the lection, there is the detritus of war: “the boot of the tramping warrior,” “the garment rolled in blood.” Reading these words is like arising in the morning after a violent storm; you look out the window at a yard where turbulent and chaotic forces wreaked havoc during the night. You feel relieved and grateful to have survived, yet somehow drained.

Scholars say the historical context of these verses is the aftermath of the Aramaean-Israelite war. In the mid-730s BCE, a coalition of forces from Aram (Syria) and the northern Israelite kingdom invaded Judah, bent on tearing King Ahaz from his throne and replacing him with a puppet king. The invading forces crossed into the Transjordan. The plan was to form a united wall of resistance to the advance of the Assyrian army, which was moving steadily south and west on its way to the Medi­terranean and ultimately to Egypt. If the coalition could secure Judah in its rear, it could fight a single-front war against the mightier invader and perhaps preserve its political identity. But the Assyrians arrived early, and the coalition was caught with its northern frontier unprotected. Aram was crushed, Israel pacified, and Judah relieved and grateful to have survived.