I’d like to invite you to reflect with me for a moment on darkness – the darkness that, from noon until three, came over the whole land.  Matthew, the Evangelist, wanted to make sure we understand that the day he’s describing was the day of the Lord.  Matthew knew his hearers knew the prophet Amos, who wrote, “Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?...[and] 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 turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.”

      The whole land responded to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew.  All creation testified to Jesus’ importance – the remarkable star at his birth, the stormy wind and the crashing sea quieted at his command, the fig tree withered by his anger, the midday sun overcome by darkness at his death.  For Matthew, the universe itself, God’s whole created order, mourned at Jesus’ death.  It was as if God’s whole created order was remembering the formless void – the deep darkness that preceded the light.  Imagine that the mourning was so profound that the created order was longing for the time before light.  I imagine that there has been a time in your life when you mourned so intensely that you wished that the darkness would swallow you up. 

      There is a way in which darkness can be merciful – in which the midday sun is garish --  too bright – too harsh.  In the daylight, the last hours of Jesus’ life would have been too horrible to see – it would have been too horrific to take in Jesus’ agony.  Perhaps the darkness mercifully kept Jesus from seeing the others being crucified.  Perhaps the darkness mercifully kept Jesus from seeing the curiosity of the bystanders watching him die a gruesome, torturous death.  Perhaps the darkness mercifully prevented Jesus from seeing the horror what was happening reflected in the faces of the people that he loved.  Perhaps the darkness was God’s way of protecting Godself and others from seeing too much.  Perhaps there has been a time in your life when darkness saved you from seeing something that would have been too painful to bear.

      And, perhaps darkness was God’s way of mercifully stopping the show that the powerful Romans were putting on.  Perhaps darkness was God’s way of mercifully turning the lights out on “The spectacle of crucifixion, which long functioned for [Rome] to beat down courage and resistance”¹ in people who were poor and oppressed.  Perhaps for Matthew this was God’s way of completely stealing the show, a way to counter the “theatrics of terror” that state execution represents -- a sign of God’s immense displeasure with death dealing power, as well as a sign of hope for Jesus’ faithful followers that his execution was not going unnoticed by God. 

      Perhaps the darkness was a sign that creation was about to begin anew – that God the Compassionate Creator was mercifully about to begin an entirely new day.  This is where I invite you to linger today as you contemplate the cross.  I invite you to linger in the promise that, in the midst of seemingly unbearable darkness and mourning and grief, God is working to create a new day in us and for us.  Let’s give thanks for this mysterious and extraordinary gift.  And let’s get ready.  How shall we begin again?