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This passage from Isaiah immediately strikes me as comforting, especially when, to echo the words of Hannah Arendt, we find ourselves living in “dark times.”
Yet imagine hearing these words from a place of exile, where everything familiar, comforting, and supportive has been torn away. For that is the context in which the Judeans in Babylonian captivity first heard these words in the sixth century BCE. They experienced first-hand what it is like to be on a strange, unknown road, wondering where, in the middle of all their suffering, loss, and confusion, their precious maker and protector Yahweh might be found.
Had he abandoned them?
The passage sounds a little less comforting once we understand its expectant nature, the fact that the light it promises is, here and now, nowhere to be found. Less comforting still is the prophet’s implicit suggestion that this alienating path is one Yahweh has in fact placed them on. Might Yahweh be right there, then, crouching alongside them in this palpable dark?
If so, why doesn’t he finally get up, light his divine lamp, and show his people the liberating path home?
But no, darkness remains. The light is not here; it is only promised. I find myself wondering how difficult it would be, in the teeth of this estrangement, suffering, and loss, to trust in such an audacious promise.
That’s the truly unsettling part.
If I am to understand the full weight of these words, and thereby even approach what they might ask of me, I must, from a position of settled comfort and relative ease, strive to imagine how the words of Isaiah 42 might land for ICE detainees on a hunger strike within the cruel and inhumane confines of Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, or for the over 15,000 fathers and 3,000 mothers the Trump administration has separated from their children in the first seven months of 2025 alone. How could they possibly hear and believe the promise that, despite all the darkness they have endured, light will come?
When I try, and inevitably fail, to imagine how such a promise might sound from that point of view, I come to have an inkling about how expensive authentic hope is, and how cheap it can sound for someone in my position to simply point to Isaiah 42 and say, “Fear not! Take courage! Have hope!”
Such words will always sound banal and cheap unless we are doing something to light the way ourselves.
In Men in Dark Times, Arendt profiles several figures she thinks proved to be sources of illumination amid the unfathomable darkness of their time. In telling their stories, she hoped that more people would awaken to their own luminary potential and thereby also strive to become beacons of light against the enveloping darkness. For Arendt, each story of this kind represents a weak, messianic light. As each new light flickers on, the darkness recedes a little more, and together this growing collection of candles becomes ever stronger and brighter. (See Matthew 5:14-16) If only more such stories could be told!
And so, I wonder: Could this be the way that God turns darkness into light?
Hope is expensive because it demands something from us, and only in responding to that demand does hope reveal its power to become an invigorating, illuminating force. And while this hope is expensive, we are constantly surprised to learn that our personal bank accounts contain more credit than we ever deposited there ourselves.
If we are but willing to spend these reserves, we are again surprised to find they are not depleted but replenished, and we come into a hope that empowers us to face a broken world with courage. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han so eloquently makes the point in his brief but amazing book, The Spirit of Hope, the essence of hope “is not a quietist withdrawal but the ‘cor inquietum’, the restless heart.” Hope, he tells us, “neither leaves out nor leaves aside the world. Rather, it confronts the world in its full negativity and files its objections.” (37) And in filing its objections, hope dares to imagine a world where such objections no longer need to be filed. “Hope dares to take the leap towards a new life.” (38)
If the tortured, malnourished hunger strikers in Delaney Hall can still, with incredibly expensive hope, shine a light within the darkness of such a terrible system of misery and oppression, how much harder can it be for people in much more comfortable circumstances to do the same?
While true expressions of hope will always be expensive, also for us, one thing we do know and can trust: wherever a light shines in the darkness, the darkness will not overcome it.
Shalom,
Ron Kuipers
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