Easter Sunday came in darkness.
When the gloom descended the previous Friday, the whole world was engulfed in shadow.
The shades of Saturday deepened, and when Sunday came at midnight, the darkness was absolute.
The Galilean’s disciples welcomed the darkness because it hid them from Herod’s agents. They huddled in grief and fear. Never had God seemed so far away.
The sun’s light failed at noon on Friday, and the meager crowd could barely make out the features of the three forlorn men nailed to crosses of execution.
So, too, the men on crosses were engulfed in the darkness, feeling abandoned by their friends and spurned by God.
Jesus felt the loneliness, too, crying into the blackness, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
There are over twelve thousand dark nights in a lifetime of 33 years.
Jesus had been awake for many of them, contemplating his mission from God. Even through the darkest nights, when he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, he could feel God’s presence.
But dark had come early that Friday, and Jesus knew this was his last nighttime on earth. God felt far away.
In the darkness, he must have reflected on how close God felt during all the days of his life, even when he was struggling with how to carry out his special calling.
Posing in his secret identity as Jesus Bar Joseph, Jesus knew his very existence was an unprecedented moment, not only for humanity, but also for the Creator.
As a man, the Son of God had sampled most of the joys and woes of human existence: hunger and thirst, pain and pleasure, loneliness and friendship.
Until the Son of God took on human flesh, these were but vicarious experiences for the Creator of the Universe: merely theoretical suppositions that this is how the created experience life.
But Jesus rose and fell with all the heaving waves of human existence, without a safety vest, vulnerable and unprotected.
He laughed. He cried. He reveled in friendship and reeled at rejection.
Sometimes he fasted, sometimes he ate too much. Sometimes his critics called him a glutton. Sometimes they called him a drunk. Often they called him crazy.
Perhaps the only human experience Jesus did not know was motherhood, the ecstasy and pain that comes with bringing life into the world. His own mother felt the ecstasy, but now, at the foot of the cross, she remembers an old man’s prediction three decades earlier: the day will come when a sword will pierce your heart.
Throughout his lifetime, Jesus experienced what it was like to live the same way we all do.
Life was being warmed by the sun and burned by the sun.
Life was being refreshed by the rain, and chilled by the rain.
Life was feeling comforted and fulfilled by human touches, and frustrated by human touches that brought unbidden pleasures.
Life was being happy one moment, sad the next.
And Jesus had a unique set of pressures we cannot imagine.
He knew at an early age who he was, and what God expected him to do. He was God’s son.
He was being sent into the world not merely to sample its sensations, tastes and smells. He was sent into the world to redeem the world.
He was God’s son, sent to be a living example of God’s unconditional love, and sent to show people how to love unconditionally.
Now, in the darkness so complete he could not see his mother’s face, he knew that he had arrived at the final stage of his ministry, a climax he dreaded but knew he could not evade.
Here he was, in the blackness, dying in agony on a crude slab of wood, the final stage in God’s plan to save the world.
What did Jesus think when he first knew he was God’s messiah?
That question is left to our imagination.
As a child did his uniqueness puzzle him?
As a hormonal adolescent, did it exhilarate him to know he was genuinely God’s gift to women, and men?
As a young man yearning for a normal life with a wife, family, and friends, did he try to escape it? Nikos Kazantzakis imagines God forced to pursue a reluctant Jesus relentlessly, digging talons into his scalp until he surrendered to his call.
But surrender he did, and faithfully he walked the dusty paths of Galilee to proclaim the arrival of God’s loving realm.
And now, it was over.
Jesus had been hanging on the cross for hours. He, like the two thieves beside him, was dying slowly of asphyxiation. He could no longer fill his lungs with air.
That is why his last words must be shouted. It requires an act of enormous will to summon the very last of his strength, the very last of his air, to force the words out of his mouth:
“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
His last words express an intimate familiarity with God that has undergirded him all the years of his ministry: Abba! Papa! I am coming to you.
His last words are a shout of triumph that he has fulfilled his appointed task to be God’s instrument for the forgiveness of sinful humanity. His last words are a prayer of gratitude that his onerous tasks are over.
His last words may even be a signal that he has forgiven God for putting him through this.
And now, in the darkness, he breathes his last.
In the darkness, God prepares the setting for what is to happen next.
In the darkness.
Admittedly, we are a little creeped out by the darkness. But theologian Barbara Brown Taylor invites us to embrace the darkness, because – as the ancient mystics understood – darkness holds the divine mystery.
Taylor’s new book, Learning to Walk in the Darkness, is TIME magazine’s cover story this week.
An excerpt from the story:
The preacher in Taylor points out that darkness was often the setting for humanity’s closest encounters with the divine. God appeared to Abraham in the night and promised him descendants more numerous than the stars. The exodus from Egypt happened at night. God met Moses in the thick darkness atop Mount Sinai to hand down the Ten Commandments. The apostle Paul’s conversion happened after he lost his sight. Jesus was born beneath a star and resurrected in the darkness of a cave. “If we turn away from darkness on principle,” she asks, “doing everything we can to avoid it because there is simply no telling what it contains, isn’t there a chance we are running away from God?”
Usually, when we think of Easter day, we think of the misty morning light in the garden. We think of the two Marys, perhaps after another sleepless might, blink their eyes in incredulity at what the light reveals: the Lord has risen!
But as Barbara Brown Taylor points out, the miracle itself happened in the dark.
Quoting Taylor, TIME reports:
“Most of the world’s major religions have something helpful to say about finding God in the shadows. Gautama Buddha meditated in the caves of northern India. Muhammad received the Koran in a cave outside Mecca. St. Francis prayed in a tiny grotto near Assisi. Darkness is inviting everyone in to know God, Taylor believes, to heal us of our weaknesses and strengthen us for the journey.”
She could have added that it was in the darkness, in Gethsemane, that Jesus felt a special closeness to God on the night before he was arrested.
In her book, Taylor writes, “I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.”
Now, in the bright sunlight of Easter Day, we pause to ponder exactly what has happened in the darkness.
The Lord is risen.
The Lord is risen in darkness, and he invites us to engage in our own special communion with God, in the darkness.
And to begin that journey, we can reflect in daylight that it was – to coin a phrase – when all seemed darkest that Jesus gave his life to reconcile us with the God of love.
In darkness he cried out, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
His last words express the partnership of God the Father and God the Son for expressing unconditional love.
This is the great joy of Easter that can sustain us throughout out lives.
And when our own light begins to dim, when the ultimate darkness descends on us, Jesus’ sacrifice makes it possible to follow him to abundant life, joyously repeating after him:
Papa, Poppi, Daddy, we throw ourselves into your loving arms, forever.
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