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PERICOPE STUDY
CENTER FOR THEOLOGY, LRC
THIRD SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY
JANUARY 23, 2005
Isaiah 9:1-4
"But
there will be no gloom for her that was in anguish.
In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and
the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he will make glorious the way
of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who
dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.
Thou hast multiplied the nation, thou hast increased its joy; they
rejoice before thee as with joy at the harvest, as men rejoice when they
divide the spoil. For the yoke
of his burden, and the staff for his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor,
thou has broken as on the day of Midian."
1.
The
Isaiah passage is one of promise. It
follows a passage of doom ("and they will look to the earth, but behold,
distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and they will be thrust into thick
darkness." 8:22) The
immediate context is the ravishing of Naphtali and Zebulon by Tiglath-pileser of
Assyria in 733-32 BC. According to
the vss.1-4 passage, honor and light shall come again to them. The original
(Isaiah) point of the prophecy was that even these regions most devastated would
share in the coming light. (In the
gospel lesson for today, Matthew uses it, in part, as a warrant to explain why
Jesus worked in despised Galilee, rather than in Judea.)
2.
Isaiah 9:2-7, constitutes an oracle of the messianic king.
The anointing of a king was both a political and religious rite.
He was known thereafter as "the Lord's anointed" or "the
Lord's messiah." This section can be seen as "a dynastic oracle uttered
on the occasion of the anointing of a new king.... The king, as son of Yahweh, is metaphorically begotten on the
day of his anointing....no longer, in the thought of the poet, an ordinary man
but.... the chosen and anointed son of Yahweh." (IB, Vol. 5, p. 231-2)
The reference to "the day of Midian" recalls the famous day of
Gideon's complete victory over the invading Midianites (Judges 6-8).
3.
Isaiah's audience, mainly Judah watching from the south the destruction
of Israel in the north, understood the oracle in the short run, with the
emphasis on the messianic king they soon expected.
Already in the gospel kerhgma Matthew
understands the passage in connection with Jesus, inspired by the Holy Spirit to
see that on them—Zebulon and Naphtali, yes, and all the world, too—the light
has come.
4.
Ancient humanity—foremost among them Plato—understood darkness as the
condition not only of ignorance but also of evil.
Illuminatio is yet among the
principal by-words of higher education. The
darkness that Isaiah saw was a darkness of defeat at the hands of evil, an evil
allowed or even prompted by God in the face of the apostasy of Israel (the
north) ... and a warning to the encroaching darkness of Judah (the south).
Physical darkness we have eroded, if not eradicated, by the modern
harnessing of electricity. Sydney Ahlstrom declares that modern man—particularly urban
and suburban modern man—has little sense of “darkness” in the same way as
renaissance and medieval ancestors. But
darkness remains, and plenty of it … in subjugation, in newly aroused blind
religious fervor, turned murderous in its rage and futility … in blind eyes
turned to those suffering … in countess ways … darkness remains, lurking
about the edges of civilization.
5.
What Christians proclaim as the manifestation of Light to the world was
dismissed summarily early in the last century by Freud, among others.
In Civilization and Its Discontents,
he followed his earlier scathing "analytic" (The Future of an Illusion) with this observation:
"Religion...imposes equally on everyone its own path to the
acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering.
Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the
picture of the real world in a delusional manner—which presupposes an
intimidation of the intelligence. [Thus]
by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them
into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual
neurosis. But hardly anything more.
... Even religion cannot keep its promise.
If the believer finally sees himself obliged to speak of God's
'inscrutable decrees,' he is admitting that all that is left to him as a last
possible consolation and source of pleasure in his suffering is an unconditional
submission." (p. 245, Civilization
selection in Great Books, Series I).
"The derivation of religious
needs from the infant's helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by
it seems to me incontrovertible, especially since the feeling is not simply
prolonged from childhood days, but is permanently sustained by fear of the
superior power of Fate....
"The common man cannot
imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted
father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of
men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse.
The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to any one
with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great
majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.
It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people
living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless
try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions.
One would like to mix among the ranks of the believers in order to meet
these philosophers, who think they can rescue the God of religion by replacing
him by an impersonal, shadowy and abstract principle, and to address them with
the warning words: 'Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in
vain.'" (Ibid, p. 239, 240)
9.
The Light of the World is only an illusion? One can agree with Freud only
where he properly chastises the "philosophers" who reduce the living
God to "shadowy and abstract principle."
His words, written at the dawn of the Nazi era, are less likely to inform
our people than are attitudes of self-imposed darkness clouded by over-sated
material prosperity. Who needs the
Light of the World when we have plenty of megawatts?
For many, the phenomenon of guilt, whether genuinely deserved or
ego-contrived, is not the force that Freud analyzed. Some see themselves guilty not of sin, but only of
"mistakes," or even not guilty at all: "what I choose is what I choose."
To that kind of darkness we proclaim the Light of the World, to
repent and live in God's grace.
10.
To those whose groping for grace knows darkness and desperately seeks
light, the proclamation is welcome. It
is not infantile. It is the
maturity of all the saints in light. Those
people who have walked in darkness, on them has light shined.
Isaiah’s prophecy has been fulfilled … and is once more invoked in
Epiphany, the season of light.
JLY
01.18.05
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