Posted on 03/29/2024 11:32:17 AM PDT by Charles Henrickson
“The Great Good Friday Eclipse” (Mark 15:1-47)
It’s early afternoon on an early spring day, with lots of people in town, and the sky turns completely dark. No, I’m not talking about what will happen here on April 8, when Greenwood and the whole Indianapolis area will lie in the path of totality of a solar eclipse, and lots of people will be here to experience that rare event.
No, I’m talking about what happened in Jerusalem back on the day when Jesus was crucified. On that day, lots of people were in town for the Passover festival. And on that day, Good Friday, the heavens did turn dark, very dark. Mark tells us: “And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.” And so our theme for this Tenebrae service: “The Great Good Friday Eclipse.”
For three hours, from noon until 3:00 in the afternoon, darkness came over the land! Three hours! That’s a long time for an eclipse! How much of that was total darkness, the Bible doesn’t say. And whether God caused an unusual eclipse to happen or cast the darkness over the land in some other way--again, the Bible doesn’t say.
But God had done this type of thing before. Remember, one of the plagues on Egypt was total darkness. In the book of Exodus, the ninth plague was darkness over the whole land, and the tenth plague was the death of the firstborn. Now, on Good Friday, both happen on the same day, darkness and the death of the firstborn.
Also in the Old Testament, and in reverse, God extended the daylight--the sun stood still, so to speak--when Joshua was fighting a battle and needed more time. And in the New Testament, God used a star to guide the wise men to the Christ child. Certainly God, who created the sun and the moon and the stars, can do this sort of thing, including casting darkness over the land, with or without an eclipse.
So, in whatever way God did it, on Good Friday there was darkness over the whole land for three hours. The darkness lasts until Jesus breathes his last.
But why? What does this darkness signify? Here again, the Old Testament can help us shed light on the darkness. From the Book of Joel: “The day of the Lord is coming; it is near, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness!” Likewise, from Zephaniah: “A day of wrath is that day, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness.” Taken together, we see that the day of the Lord will be a day of wrath and judgment on humanity, and thus the darkness.
Well, on Good Friday, Jesus is humanity reduced to one. And, even though he had no sin of his own, he is bearing the judgment and the wrath of God against sinners, hanging there on the cross, on our behalf, in our place. And thus the darkness.
But perhaps the most remarkable prophecy about the darkness on Good Friday is from Amos chapter 8, where the Lord says: “And on that day, I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. . . . I will make it like the mourning for an only son and the end of it like a bitter day.” Wow! Darkness at noon, and it will be like mourning for an only son! That’s exactly what happened on Good Friday! Darkness did come over the land at noon. And it was as if creation itself was mourning the death of an only son--namely, the one and only Son of God dying for us sinners!
Judgment and wrath and sorrow--all signified by the darkness coming over the land. It’s like we sang in the hymn:
Well might the sun in darkness hide
And shut his glories in
When God, the mighty Maker, died
For His own creatures’ sin.
But in the darkness, there is not only judgment, there is also salvation. For by Jesus suffering this judgment for us, the judgment and the wrath are lifted from us!
Psalm 107: “Some sat in darkness and in the shadow of death, prisoners in affliction and in irons, for they had rebelled against the words of God, and spurned the counsel of the Most High.” Friends, that’s us. Because of our rebellion against God, we were sitting in darkness and shadows. We were lying in the path of totality of sin and death. We were those prisoners bound in chains.
But through the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, God has freed us from our prison. Again from Psalm 107: “He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and burst their bonds apart.” That’s us too! God has brought us out of darkness and the shadow of death, and burst our bonds apart! Let us “thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man!”
Brothers and sisters in Christ, what has God done for us? The Bible tells us: “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” “The people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned.” That light, the light of Christ--“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.
Ping.
If there was unusual darkness and this is not just a literary allusion, it had nothing to do with the moon, Jesus was crucified around Passover which occurs at the full moon.
No solar eclipse can last longer than about eight minutes (most are two to four minutes long).
If the crucifixion took place in 33 AD, there was (according to astronomers) a total eclipse of the rising moon on the evening of April 3rd, 33 AD.
A “dark day” was recorded in New England in may, 1780, and was later attributed to forest fires in upstate NY and eastern Canada. Other cases of dark days around the world are related to nearby volcanic activity. A very low cloud ceiling (not all that unusual in early spring) could create relatively dark conditions too.
Or it could have been a supernatural event, God’s direct intervention in the Sun’s ability to cast light during those hours (either the Sun was “turned down” or turned off, or a shielding unobservable from the ground).
But if anyone thinks it was just a very long eclipse by the oon, that cannot happen and even a nor al solar eclipse would not be expected on any day within a week of Passover’s set date.
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