The Coffin They Buried at Midnight

On the night of July 31, 1838, thousands of formerly enslaved men and women packed into churches across Jamaica. For four years they had endured a cruel half-freedom called "apprenticeship," still bound to the plantations that had broken their bodies. But word had come from London — Parliament had ended the system. At midnight, full emancipation would arrive.

In a Baptist chapel in Spanish Town, the congregation had built a coffin. Inside it they placed iron shackles, a whip, and an iron collar — the instruments of their suffering. They sang hymns through the evening hours, voices swelling as the clock moved toward twelve. When the hour finally struck, the chapel erupted. Men and women wept and embraced. They carried that coffin outside and lowered it into the earth by torchlight, burying the symbols of bondage forever. Then from the hilltops around the island, bonfires blazed, and the shout went up from village to village: "Free! Free! We are free!"

Isaiah saw this kind of moment from centuries away. "How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who say to Zion, 'Your God reigns!'" The prophet described watchmen lifting their voices together, ruins bursting into song, because the Lord had comforted His people. Every chain has a midnight. Every exile has a homecoming. And the God who reigns is still in the business of setting captives free.