Could you say the darkest day?

His body lies dead in a tomb. Nothing stirs there. They set a guard to guarantee it, but no one else goes near. It is Shabbat. Time of enforced rest.

How did they feel? Did despair weight every muscle, every bone? Did their souls feel dead, stone dead, yet required to go on somehow? Where some gathered, did they talk much? Even at all? This was grief extreme.

Or did restlessness resist restraint? Next morning, when free to go, those women “hurried to the tomb.” Why? Mere dread angst? The agitation of flailing depression? Or something else?

They had grieved near another tomb, not many days past. And He had come then and offered hope their bitter hearts could not embrace — until He said, until He shouted,

“Come forth!”

And the brother they had known was dead stumbled out from yawning darkness, dripping grave clothes…

What are we to make of darkest hours? Was it this very day that gave us the saying “…just before dawn”?

Here, now, this day-night, right  at dawning, moon shines such brightness through kitchen windows it stabs the eye with glare. But their darkness must have sunk and smothered far more real with great heavy cloud shroud blanketing both sky and soul. Truly the darkest hour ever…

Yet even in that there must have been sparks…

Of fantastic rumors: “… tombs opened and many came forth…,” “…and they appeared to many…,” And verifiable facts: “…and the temple veil was rent from top to bottom….”

In our darkest hours, let us remember Earth’s darkest hour, grasp any midnight glimmer… The God-man never sleeps anymore. “Always interceding…” And “joy comes in the morning.”

“The Lion lies down with the Lamb.”

The Lamb is awake, and with Him the Lion.

*****

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