“From noon until three in the afternoon, darkness came over the whole land.” (Matthew 27:45)
In the Biblical reckoning of time, the First hour is sunrise and the Twelfth hour is sunset so in Matthew’s telling of the final hours of Jesus’ earthly life verse 45 says that at the sixth hour – what is usually the brightest moment of the day – the sun was suddenly switched off at the Creator’s command and “there was darkness over all the land.” For centuries commentators on this passage have suggested that – as with most things that God does – several things are represented by this darkness.
Meditating on the experience of Calvary we realize that from the moment of his arrest, through the injustice of his trials, the humiliation of being mocked, beaten and whipped and the physical torment of carrying his cross on his tattered back, being nailed to that cross and lifted up to slowly die of shock and suffocation, Jesus was paying the penalty that I deserved (and you) for the sins we have committed against a holy God.
But we don’t often think about the greatest penalty of all that began at the sixth hour – separation from God. The second person of the Trinity who had been eternally one with the Father and Holy Spirit had to experience what it is really like to truly exist without God. To be cut off from God means to be cut off from light and life: from the fruit of God’s Spirit like love, joy and peace, and from the common grace of God’s creation like the warmth of the sun and the comfort of a loving touch. In the Gospels, hell is most often depicted as being alone in the “outer darkness.” From the sixth hour to the ninth hour that’s what Jesus experienced.
But at the ninth hour, after the pain and darkness, the light of the sun returns and Jesus cries out in Aramaic, “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?” Why didn’t we hear that cry emanating from the preceding darkness? Surely that was the depths of being forsaken.
As most of you know, “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?” is the first line of Psalm 22, perhaps the greatest of the Messianic psalms. King David is looking a thousand years into the future and describing the view from the cross. As you read through the painful verses you notice a sudden shift beginning with verse 22. Suddenly, the suffering messiah is praising God and prophesying about the glorious future awaiting “You who fear the Lord.”
Matthew and Mark both tell us that the first verse of the Psalm is the last utterance Jesus makes from the cross and that a few moments later, “with a loud cry,” he yielded up his spirit. Salvation was accomplished. Luke and John tell us that the “loud cry” was to say, “It is finished.” Is this a contradiction? Not at all. Look at the final verses of Psalm 22. Verses 30 and 31 say, “Posterity shall serve him; it shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation; they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn, that he has done it.”