by Philip Turner.
‘It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed’[1]
When the sun should have been at its most radiant, Matthew, Mark and Luke are united in recording that the noon-day light is replaced by darkness at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion.
Without light it is near-impossible to see. ‘God is ignoring me,’ said the woman I was supporting in the hospital where I work as a chaplain. Doctors had told her she had cancer and, with her husband recently dead, she now sensed her own life was at it’s end. ‘I pray but God isn’t there,’ she said ‘but when I used to pray I knew God was there.’ How might we see when it feels like light has failed?
The contemporary experience of living on earth today might also be likened to a failure of light. Putin’s territorial ambitions. Genocide in Gaza.[2] 12 million Sudanese refugees.[3] Global temperatures soaring past the critical 1.5C threshold.[4] Foreign aid diverted to pay for military spending. We live in times where it can be difficult to glimpse light. Yet, the noon-day light should be burning bright. Never before has there been so many Christians on our planet as there are today.[5] So why is there darkness after noon?
Looking to Moses and the prophets[6] could suggest that God is the bringer of darkness, perhaps to dazzle us with how much the world is misaligned with God’s kingdom. This may be true, but it does not in itself offer hope for the cancer patient: it does not offer hope in a world where so much feels outside our control.
In the darkness of the afternoon when Jesus hung on the cross Luke offers two avenues that are hopeful, if not necessarily comfortable. The first is the example of Jesus who, in the noon-day darkness, articulates an active and embodied faith: ‘into your hands I commend my spirit’.[7] When we can no longer see, we can only trust in God’s vision, and stretch out our hands to be led.[8] The second is a reminder that trust in God can spring up beyond belief boundaries, like in the centurion who, as part of Rome’s military machine, seems to have developed eyes suited for seeing in darkness. Where might we find such people today: the people who praise God, because in darkness they have seen the flame of God’s love?[9]
Both avenues require surrendering the current way we see, in our own life, in the life of our churches and in the wider world. Tomáš Halík, a Czech Catholic priest, philosopher, and theologian, draws on analytical psychology to suggest that the noon-day crisis is where the image of ourselves we have worked hard to create begins to crack, inviting us to root ourselves more deeply, and let our ego decrease so that the Christ within us may increase.[10] It is a book that challenges the way Christians have often unconsciously made the Christian mission colonial, where we seek more people like us, or more people to become like us. Darkness might describe non-egocentric mission, the mission of the crucified Christ.
Perhaps Jesus’ followers today are called to the task of acknowledging how dark the afternoon can seem, but also that it cannot last. Halík notes that evening must follow the afternoon, and in the Bible the evening is when a new day begins.[11] A new day that is rooted in surrender, because what Easter celebrates is not resuscitation, but resurrection: a transformation into a new way of being.
[1] Luke 23.44f.
[2] UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war, 14 November 2024 [https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/11/un-special-committee-finds-israels-warfare-methods-gaza-consistent-genocide]
[3] Sudan war: A simple guide to what is happening [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-59035053]
[4] January 2025 sees record global temperatures despite La Niña [https://wmo.int/media/news/january-2025-sees-record-global-temperatures-despite-la-nina]
[5] Tomáš Halík, The Afternoon of Christianity: The Courage to Change (University of Notre Dame Press, 2024), p.60.
[6] e.g Exodus 10.22, Amos 8.9
[7] Luke 23.46
[8] John 21.18
[9] Luke 23.47.
[10] Halík, The Afternoon of Christianity, p.31-33
[11]Halík, The Afternoon of Christianity, p.211
Theology Everywhere 