Reliving The Passion #32

Mark 15.33–34

And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabach-thani?”—which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Noon. The sun at its zenith is hidden.

That great, black, frowning range of cloud from the west has killed the sunlight, closed the sky, swallowed the earth in a yellow darkness. The wind is still. The city stops breathing. Animals grow so restive they rear against their traces, rolling their eyes. Owners shout through the darkness the names of the beasts. Parents stand in stone doorways and cry out for their children: Miriam! Yeshy? Yeshy?

There descends from heaven a long, low muttering. Another. The commanders of the elements are taking counsel together.

Suddenly, lightning! The crack shatters the dark: blinding light, a splitting sound—as a cedar twists and screams and breaks from its trunk and tumbles down—and the boom of that thunder batters the houses of Jerusalem.

Yeshy! Yeshua, come home now! Now!

“And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day…and I will make it as the mourning for an only son and the end thereof as a bitter day.”

BOOM! The rain dots the dust with big drops. BOOM! Now it falls hard and straight and heavy. BOOM! The wind screams down and hurls raindrops like pellets flat-out at the faces of running human beings, stinging flesh. The black between the lightning is the darkness Egypt knew, thick darkness, even a darkness which may be felt.

Yeshua! Yeshua! Where are you? This is a pure, bloody panicking. But the weeping child cannot be heard. The weeping parents weep in vain.

BOOM!

No human mockery can match the voice of the storm for mortal scorn. Lightning flashes. The hill outside the city is white-wet and empty. Silhouettes stutter and black out: three crosses, the guards, some women at a distance. Those who laughed at the central figure this morning are gone. No one is laughing now.

Thus the first hour of the afternoon, and the second, and the third.

The few who stood the storm are still on the hill at the end of three hours—the ninth hour of the day. The lightning has fled. The thunder has exhausted itself. But the blackness persists—and suddenly a voice worse than thunder, because it is a human voice, a horrified wailing, arises: Eloi! Eloi! My God! My God!

Who is that? The one in the center. The one in the perfect center of elemental darkness, the focus of this storm, him: Eloi! Lama sabach-thani? Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, him. He hangs in an abyss, that one. Him.

My God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Who answers him?

The thunder is silent. The city holds its breath. The heavens are shut. The dark is rejection. This silence is worse than death. No one answers him. No, not even God. Not even God, his Father, because he who has become hateful in his own eyes now is hateful likewise to God, his Father.

Jesus. Him. It is against him that heaven has been shut.

In this terrible moment of storm, the loss of light for humanity is at once the loss of love and life for its Christ. He has entered the absolute void. Between the Father and the Son now exists a gulf of impassable width and substance. It is the divorce of despising. For, though the Son still loves the Father obediently and completely, the Father despises the Son completely because he sees in him the sum of human disobedience, the sum of it from the beginning of time to the end of time. He hates the Son, even unto damning him.

This is a mystery, that Christ can be the obedient, glorious love of God and the full measure of our disobedience, both at once. But right now this mystery is also a fact. And the fact must seem to last forever. Hell’s horror is that it lasts forever.

And this, precisely, is the bitterest drop in the cup: that, crying down eternity unheard, separated absolutely from God—from the God he cannot help but love even still—Jesus is in Hell. The darkness that covers Jerusalem from noon to the middle of the afternoon, it is no less than the damnation of the Messiah, who wails and gnashes his teeth in an utter solitude from now (so it must seem) unto eternity. Hell is eternal. And he has descended into Hell.

But your iniquities have separated you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.

No, my sins.

But you, my Savior, were my sins before the Father.

Then this, too, is what you have saved me from: the cold rejection of the living God, a wandering solitude forever and ever. Hell is colder than the promise of it is hot. Hell is zero in the bone of the universe.

You saved me from damnation.

Thank you, Jesus!