Who Walks in Darkness and Has No Light (Isaiah 50, Palm Sunday)

There is a little gem hidden just after the Old Testament reading for Palm Sunday (Isaiah 50:10):

Who among you fears the Lord

   and obeys the voice of his servant,

who walks in darkness

   and has no light,

yet trusts in the name of the Lord

   and relies upon his God?

As we walk through Holy Week, as the gathering storm becomes ever darker, these are words to cling to. We will soon find that, with the disciples, we scatter and flee; that with Peter we deny him. And yet we will also trust Jesus who walk into the darkness of deepest abandonment for us and for all. Even though he walks into darkness, he who is the Light of the world carries all the light within him that he will ever need.

This Jesus descends into Hell, into the outermost darkness, that we can remember that even should we find ourselves in Hell itself, even there he is still Lord for us. As Psalm 139 reminds us, there is no where we can go to flee from God's searching out love:

 

Where can I go from your spirit?

   Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

   if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning

   and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

even there your hand shall lead me,

   and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,

   and the light around me become night’,

even the darkness is not dark to you;

   the night is as bright as the day,

   for darkness is as light to you.

Image: Could Silence Protect Us..., from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54131 [retrieved March 25, 2024]. Original source: Piotr.amigo, Flickr Creative Commons.