The Brightest Day

It happened again this week.

On June 21st nearly every year I remind my wife of a fact I learned in grade school, and every year she impolitely interrupts me as I start my spiel, “Oh, don’t bother me with that nonsense again.”

Your teachers probably informed you too that June 20-21 has the most daylight hours of the year – the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere - 12 hours of daylight at the equator and 24 at the North Pole. Thus my dismal comment every June 21st, “Every day for the rest of the year will progressively have less daylight.”

By now it has become a corny joke – to my delight and her disgust.

Leap back in time with me to Jerusalem on the Friday before Passover, AD 30.  On that day at Jerusalem’s latitude, they would normally have 12.6 hours of daylight. Imagine the response of a Roman guard’s wife if her husband, while leaving for Golgotha duty that morning, would quip, “Well, buttercup, today we’ll have 3 hours less daylight than normal.”

I believe she would mutter, “Oh, don’t bother me with that nonsense.”

But that’s exactly what happened. Instead of 12.6 hours of daylight, there were only 9.6.

Contrary to baseless explanations of a solar or lunar eclipse, heavy cloud cover or a dust storm, it was caused by the Father’s powerful expression of great sorrow – “from the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land.” [Matthew 27:45]  That’s high noon to 3:00 pm – three hours when the day normally is the brightest.

Suddenly breaking his silence, “About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice . . .

‘My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?’” [Matthew 27:46] Though we can’t fathom the eternal relationship of the heavenly Father with his only Son, we know now that this moment was the central event in the history of the world, when the Creator of the universe – a loving Father - allowed his sinless Son to pay for all the rottenness of all humanity.

The darkest day literally became the brightest day – remembered by eternally grateful

Christ followers since that day, in the bread and cup which symbolize his body and blood.