His darkest day enlightens our darkest day.

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.

Matthew 27:45

As Jesus hung dying on the cross, a supernatural darkness enveloped Jerusalem and Israel. When the Father turned His face away from His Son, forsaking Him as He bore our sin, it is as if the universe itself turned away. The sun refused to light up this atrocity. Jesus, shrouded in darkness that symbolized all the evil done to Him and all the sins He bore on the cross, hung very much alone in His unique suffering. He cried out in His God-forsaken misery: “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?”

The darkness of that moment was unique to Jesus’ suffering and death. The sorrow on Jesus’ heart was an agony only He could know. The separation from the Father, as God the Father turned away from God the Son who bore all our sin upon Himself, was what Jesus had dreaded most while praying in Gethsemane just hours earlier. He now felt this in His aloneness, dying, bearing guilt, sorrow, and shame we cannot fully imagine, even in our darkest days.

Death always brings some darkness with it, even for believers. And the deeper we love, the more the darkness feels impenetrable. Yet Jesus bore the darkest day so that the death we now know is different. Grief and agony still attend mortality. But our choice to mourn death can be changed dramatically. Because Jesus has borne the darkest day, we have hope. A sunrise comes much sooner because Jesus did not stay shrouded in this darkness. He arose on the third day… a “Son Rise” that illuminates a Christian with hope. Even when dark death steals from us, Jesus gives back with a bright and sure hope. We still grieve, and should grieve. But that confident hope in Christ breaks through the clouds!

I’ve felt that darkest of days. But never without also clinging to hope that when my own personal darkest day arrives, I will be brought into the presence of my bright Savior! Though sadness should attend the emotionally healthy grieving of any death… mourning is finite and comes to a finish. And Christians trust Jesus as a pink glow on the horizon of even our darkest days warms us to the love of the Risen Son, inexplicably strengthened by rays of hope upon our faces by all He has done! We can smile through the tears. Our darkest days are truly undone!