We had a Lent group tonight looking at darkness. Jesus died in the dark. In the middle of day, when the sun was supposed to shine, from noon to three, a deep darkness shrouded the whole land. The sun wouldn’t shine.
Just as, “In the beginning,” when the earth was a dark, formless, chaotic mass, before God said, “Let there be light,” as Jesus hung on the cross, the earth was plunged, once again, into chaotic darkness. Which is strange, because Jesus came to be a light in the darkness. At Christmas, we read…
- “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.” (Isaiah 9:2)
- “The light shines in the darkness ,and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1:5)
Yet, that Friday, it seemed darkness had overcome the light, overwhelmed the light, snuffed out the light. The light of the world – the innocent, sinless, Lamb of God, who came to take away the sins of the world – was crucified by evil.
They’d conspired. They’d told lies. They’d taken advantage of the weakness and greed of one of Jesus’ own trusted inner circle. And, now, the miracle worker and so called, “King of the Jews,” was defeated. Darkness won, or so it appeared. How do we cope with life’s dark moments?
It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining.
If Scripture teaches us anything, it’s that God is with us when darkness crashes over us.
Martin Luther King preached, “We must also remember that God does not forget his children who are victims of evil forces… When the lamp of hope flickers and candle of faith runs low, he restoreth our souls, giving us renewed vigour to carry on. He is with us not only in the noontime of fulfilment but also in the midnight of despair.”
And, in his final moments Jesus said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” When he had said this, he breathed his last. At last, at about 3:00 in the afternoon, his ordeal was over. The Son of God was dead. For the moment, darkness defeated the light.
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Think ahead to Easter, something has happened in the darkness. In the darkness of the tomb, something wonderful, something hardly believable, something earth-shattering, has happened. Jesus is no longer there; he has been raised and is on his way to Galilee.
While so much of our focus is on the light, let us not forget where it all began.
As Barbara Brown Taylor writes in Learning to Walk in the Dark, “As many years as I have been listening to Easter sermons, I have never heard anyone talk about that part. Resurrection is always announced with Easter lilies, the sound of trumpets, bright streaming light. But it did not happen that way. If it happened in a cave, it happened in complete silence, in absolute darkness, with the smell of damp stone and dug earth in the air.... new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.”
As Christians, we are prone to talking about dark versus light— more specifically, to see the light as a conqueror of the dark. But to pit the two against each other is to miss the ways God is present and working in both.
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