The Darkness

It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness
came over the whole land until the ninth hour, for the sun stopped shining.
And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.
Jesus called out with a loud voice,
“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
When he had said this,he breathed his last.
The centurion, seeing what had happened,
praised God and said,“Surely this was a righteous man.”
When all the people who had gathered
to witness this sight saw what took place,
they beat their breasts and went away.
But all those who knew him,
including the women who had followed him from Galilee,
stood at a distance, watching these things.
Now there was a man named Joseph, a member of the Council,
a good and upright man, who had not consented to their decision and action.
He came from the Judean town of Arimathea
and he was waiting for the kingdom of God.
 Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body. Then he took it down,
wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock,
one in which no one had yet been laid. Luke 23 v 44-53

Jesus is crucified at “the sixth hour” (v 44): noon, the time when the sun is at its peak and the daylight is the brightest. And yet “darkness came over the whole land … for the sun stopped shining” (v 44-45). Instead of bright sunshine, everything is enveloped in three hours of sudden and miraculous pitch-black darkness.

What is the meaning of this darkness? If you look over the Bible, you see that darkness can mean three things (other than simply that it’s night-time!). First, the authors of the scriptures use the concept of darkness to describe shameful, wicked deeds. Evil men “walk in dark ways” (Proverbs 2 v 13) and rebels against God “sat in darkness” (Psalm 107 v 10-11). Paul says Christians should:

have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness,
 but rather expose them.For it is shameful even to mention
what the disobedient do in secret. 
Ephesians 5 v 11-12

“Darkness” represents a time when people can do shameful things without fear of being seen or known. And the whole of the last day of Jesus’ life—His betrayal and arrest, His trial and torture, and now His execution—are dark deeds, when human evil seems to prevail. It is, as Jesus told His enemies, “your hour—when darkness reigns” (Luke 22 v 53). So it’s appropriate that this most shameful deed of all, the murder of the Messiah, is cloaked in darkness.

Second, darkness denotes anti-God forces. Even at creation, this is pictured powerfully as God speaks into the darkness and the chaos, and creates… light! (Genesis 1 v 2-3). God’s spiritual enemies are described as “the powers of this dark world” (Ephesians 6 v 12), and the reign of His most powerful opponent, Satan, is pictured as the “dominion of darkness” (Colossians 1 v 13). God, on the  other hand, “is light; in him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1 v 5).

So there is a sense in which the darkness surrounding Jesus on the cross represents the momentary triumph of evil. All through history, Satan had been trying to prevent the coming of the Messiah. When God’s Son Jesus appeared, he focused all his efforts on stopping Him. He motivated Herod (the father of Herod Antipas, who we met earlier) to murder all the baby boys in Bethlehem. He tempted Jesus with the riches and respect of the world. He sent his spiritual forces into men and women who lay in the Son of God’s path.

None of these had stopped Jesus. But here, now, Satan has finally done it. The Messiah is dying, and will soon be dead, defeated by the forces of darkness. Or so it seems, for those three hours.

Third, darkness in the Bible can represent judgment from God. The penultimate plague He sent on Egypt in Exodus 10 was total darkness in the land. And when His prophets spoke of the future day when God would finally judge all sin, they pictured it as a day of darkness:

Let all who live in the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming.
It is close at hand—a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness!
( Joel 2 v 1-2; look also at Amos 5 v 18-20 and Ezekiel 32 v 7-8)

Human evil; spiritual rebellion; God’s judgment. The darkness which surrounds the dying Christ could be indicators of any of those three. And in fact, it’s an indicator of all of those three. As we combine those three streams of meaning, it’s easy to see that these three hours of darkness are quite significant. This is a shameful, wicked deed. This looks like the victory of Satan and evil. And this is also a place where God is judging sin and rebellion against Him in His world.

So when the darkness lifts, we’d expect that God’s judgment will have fallen on the people who are killing His Son. But when the light returns, only one person has experienced God’s wrath: His own Son. Jesus was plunged into the deep spiritual darkness. He hung there, suspended between heaven and earth, abandoned by His friends, destroyed by His enemies… and punished by His Father.

This is the most shocking aspect of the darkness around the cross. For the first, last and only time in eternity, God the Father and God the Son were not in perfect relationship. God the Father looked at Jesus, His Son with whom He’d always been “well pleased” (Luke 3 v 22), who He’d always loved (Mark 9 v 7); and He punished Him. He excluded Him from His presence and His pleasure. The darkness in the sky reflected the state of the relationship between Father and Son. For Jesus, the Son of God, the cross was utter, utter darkness.

Why did this have to happen? The rest of the New Testament shows us what Jesus accomplished as He hung in that darkness:

You are a chosen people … a people belonging to God,
that you may declare the praises of him
who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God;
once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (1 Peter 2 v 9-10)

On the cross, Jesus experienced darkness so that we might never know a minute of it. Jesus experienced the bone-shattering, soul-rending terror of rejection from God, of separation from all God’s blessings, so that we might never need to. And not only did He take away the darkness we earned for ourselves, He won for us the eternal light of God’s loving presence in our lives.

If you are a follower of Jesus, when you look at Him on the cross, enveloped in darkness both physical and spiritual, you should see that He was taking what you deserve. That is your darkness, your shame, and your grief, because that is your sin. And when you read in Revelation of an eternal future where God’s people “will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light” (22 v 5), you should see that Jesus has given you what He deserves. That is His glory, His perfection, and His joy, given to you.

What a Savior!

This is an edited extract from Mike McKinley's book, Passion: How Christ's Final Day Changes Your Every Day