The Day the Sky Went Dark

It was noon on the hill outside Jerusalem, the hour when the sun stands highest. Jesus had been hanging on the cross since morning, with a robber on each side of him.

Then the light began to go.

Darkness came down over the whole land, and it stayed. One hour. Two hours. Three. The soldiers, the leaders, and the people who had come to laugh at Jesus all waited in the dark.

At three in the afternoon, Jesus cried out with a loud voice. "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?"

That means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Forsaken means left all alone by the one who should be with you. (Those were the first words of Psalm 22, an old song God's people knew well. It begins in the dark and ends with the whole earth turning back to God.)

Some of the people near the cross heard it wrong. "Listen!" one said. "He's calling for Elijah!"

A man ran and soaked a sponge in sour wine, stuck it on a stick, and held it up to Jesus' mouth.

"Leave him alone," the others said. "Let's see if Elijah comes to take him down."

Elijah did not come. Jesus had chosen this road himself.

Then Jesus shouted once more. "Father, into your hands I place my spirit!" He bowed his head, and Jesus died.

At that very moment, across the city in the temple, something tore.

The temple was God's house in Jerusalem. Deep inside it, in front of a room called the Most Holy Place, hung a curtain. (It was taller than a house, and so thick and heavy that a grown man could not have pushed through it.) The curtain meant: stay out. Only the high priest could go behind it, on one day a year, carrying the blood of an animal that had died for the people's sins.

Now the curtain ripped in two, from the top all the way to the bottom. No priest could reach that high. God himself had torn it.

The ground shook. Rocks split apart. Tombs broke open, and Matthew tells us that after Jesus rose, many of God's people who had died came out of those tombs alive and walked into the city. It was a hint of what was coming.

In front of the cross stood a Roman captain, the officer in charge of the soldiers. He had seen how Jesus died and felt the ground move under his boots. He and his soldiers were terrified.

"Truly," the captain said, "this man was the Son of God!"

Some women who loved Jesus watched from far off, and they did not leave.

But that curtain had always fallen shut again. The high priest would come back out with an empty bowl, and an animal's blood could cover the people's sins for only one year. Then it all had to be done again. So God's people kept the curtain and the sacrifices, and waited for a priest whose offering would never need repeating.

Now the priest and the offering were the same person. Jesus gave his own life once, and it was enough. God tore the curtain open from his own side. And the first person at the cross to say plainly that Jesus was the Son of God was a Roman soldier, a man who would never have been let past the temple's outer court.

The light came back over the hill. Jesus was dead, and the way into God's house stood open.