And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? That is, My God, My God, why have You forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46)
Let us devoutly consider Jesus as passing through this eclipse of His soul, and receive the holy instruction and comfort the spectacle was designed to convey.
(Consider) what was a cloud of thick, all-enshrouding darkness to Jesus is salvation’s light to us. Even as His sorrow is our joy, His wounds our healing, His death our life–so His abandonment on the cross is “our bridge to heaven; an unfathomable abyss for all our sins, cares, and anxieties; the charter of our citizenship, the key whereby we may open the secret chamber of communion with God.”
Thus, if you are, O my soul! walking in darkness and have no light, it is not the darkness of hell and condemnation, but the darkness only through which all the ‘children of light’ more or less travel–the darkness with which the Sun of Righteousness Himself was enshrouded–and which, when it is past, will make the sunshine of God’s love and the Savior’s presence all the sweeter, dearer, brighter.
What supported and comforted Jesus during this total and dreadful eclipse through which His sinless soul passed? He trusted in God. His faith could still exclaim, “MY God, MY God.” So lean upon your covenant God, O you children of light walking in darkness. As the veiling clouds, though they hide, cannot extinguish the sun, neither can your gloomy seasons of Divine desertion extinguish one beam of the Savior’s love to you. If all is dark–a hidden God, an absent Savior, a frowning providence–now is the time to have faith in God. “Who is among you that walks in darkness, and has no light? let him trust in the name of the lord, and stay upon his God.” Stay yourself upon His covenant faithfulness and unchanging love, and believe that Jesus intercedes for you in heaven, and that soon you shall reach that blissful world where your sun shall no more go down, nor your moon withdraw itself.
–Octavius Winslow
