So much of the passion story happens at night. It’s dark when Judas goes to betray Jesus. Soldiers arrive by torchlight to arrest him, and he is deserted as his disciples flee into the night. Peter denies him in the shadowy light of a bonfire as a sleep-deprived Jesus is interrogated and beaten to force a confession. Pilate’s wife’s beauty sleep is interrupted by disturbing dreams, and now, when the sun should be at its highest, deep darkness covers the land for three hours.
Perhaps it is these things that have given darkness such a bad reputation in Christian spirituality. From earliest times it has been a codeword for sin, ignorance, evil and death. Come into this or any other number of places of worship late afternoon on any day of the week and you are likely to hear the words, ‘Lighten our darkness we beseech thee, O Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all dangers and perils of this night’ – one of the most beloved prayers of the Anglican tradition, and one of mine.
Darkness hasn’t fared much better in the popular imagination, acting as shorthand for anything sinister or negative. It’s as though when night falls, as it does every day without fail, God signs off and hands the world over to another deity.
And that might account for the various explanations offered for the darkness that fell on Good Friday. It was creation covering its shame with a dust storm, a volcanic ash cloud, a prolonged eclipse of the sun. It was a sign of judgment, like the plague of darkness God inflicted on Egypt, It was God turning his back on creation, unable to bear the sight of sin doing its very worst.
But when we look closer, scripture is more nuanced about darkness. In Genesis it heralds the moment of creation – it is preparation for a new beginning. The darkness that fell across Egypt portends salvation and freedom from enslavement. A pillar of thick cloud was the constant divine presence that led the way to the promised land. And numerous stories suggest that a night time encounter with God is something we might desire. Like the child Samuel, we might hear God calling our name at night. Like Joseph, when nothing Mary said to him made sense, God might finally be able to get through to us in our sleep, when our defences are down. Like the Bethlehem shepherds, the night may reveal a sky full of angels telling us where we can find the Saviour.
There are things we learn in the dark that we can never discover in the light. And so here is another possibility: the darkness of Good Friday comes as a friend. Sylvia Sands, again, envisages this in her poem Nocturne of the Night,
Twelve o’clock in the afternoon…
I, the Night,
Already fearful and brooding,
descended.
Tenderly I came,
Wrapping my cloak of darkness
round his twisted limbs,
as his mother once wrapped him
in swaddling clothes.
Slowly I came,
sending arms of darkness
round the shaking shoulders of his disciples,
hiding in the fields.
Gently I came,
dropping a jet blanket
over the trembling form
of a beautiful woman in scarlet
prostrate in the dust of Calvary.
Relentlessly I came,
stopping the heartless rattle of dice,
dulling the brazen glint of swords,
and spears,
and armour.
At twelve o’clock,
I, the Night, came to Calvary,
ushering in black shadows
In which humanity could hide its face like a child.
This kindly, all-embracing darkness hides, protects, comforts. It silences the taunts. Jesus dies in the darkness and the pain ends. Luke tells us that the crowds who had gathered to watch the spectacle go home, beating their breasts. Just hours ago they were shouting, ‘Crucify him, crucify him’ – did they get what they wanted? In the full light of day, they were blinded by their frenzied desires. Now, the darkness has enabled them to see, and they walk away, striking their hearts with clenched hands, the gesture of confession for Jews and Christians alike.
Others had wept all the way to Calvary as they’d followed Jesus there and stood in the distance watching it all. The darkness gives them respite. At last they can go home, close the door and nurse their grief. These are the people – and they are always with us – to whom Good Friday means more than Easter. They have nothing against the light-filled churches, the flowers, the joyous hymns, it is just that the darkness of Good Friday is more recognisable to them. These are the ones who know about suffering and death and there is some comfort in the fact that God knows about these things too. Easter can be hard to believe; Good Friday is not hard to believe for people living in the land at the foot of the cross.
Perhaps the scripture that resonates most deeply here is from the prophet Amos,
‘On that day’, says the Lord God, ‘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.’
Instead of the darkness a being a sign of God’s absence, God’s abandonment of his beloved son, the desertion of his own handiwork, could it be the insistent presence of the father ravaged by grief who, like the mother, cannot look away, who has to be there, who will let nothing, but nothing keep him away from us?
This, after all, is not a passive darkness. There is plenty going on in it: a sound like the heavens ripping apart as the curtain of the temple is torn from top to bottom, and the roar of splitting rocks as an earthquake convulses the ground.
We might see this as nature and the material world mourning with God, creation lamenting the death of the one through whom it all came into being – to tear a piece of clothing is an expression of grief we find several times in the Bible. Is the temple, and all the religion it contains, mourning the loss of the precious son too? But wait … there is always more to the gospel accounts than first meets the eye.
The first century Jewish historian Josephus was also a priest who knew the Temple and its giant curtain. He tells us it was richly embroidered in blue, crimson, scarlet and purple. It represented the universe and all its mysteries, and the rending of was a big bang moment, an equivalent of the moment of the first creation when God said ‘Let there be light’ and a world sprang into being. Now, as then, nothing will ever be the same. At the moment of death, the air of a new world is breaking in.
The earthquake is not like any we are familiar with. This one has generative not destructive power, and instead of taking life it restores life, breaking open graves, freeing the dead and beginning the rumour of resurrection, even at this darkest moment of Good Friday when Jesus dies.
All life begins in the dark, whether in the soil, the womb, or the tomb. A mystery hidden from our eyes, slowly, miraculously, it grows.
And so the time has come for talking to cease, for the shadows to descend, to let Jesus, the seed that dies, fall into the ground of our lives, and to wait in this mysterious darkness. Let another poet, T S Eliot, lead us there,
‘I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.’
