The glimpse of glory on the darkest day
By Angela McDonald
Spring is a wonderful season. I love how Easter coincides with the bursting forth of new life: budding trees, emerging flowers, and carpets of colour that declare, “Spring is here.”
But spring only comes after winter, with its starkness, its closeness of darkness, and the shiver that seeps into your bones before you even step outside.
This is the true picture of Easter. We can only understand and bask in the glory of new life through the memory of gloom, through the reality that the darkest day brings.
Two millennia ago, the promise of new life — the promise of life ever after — seemed distant, forgotten. Darkness overshadowed everything that had come before.
Jesus hung on the cross in full view of his followers. The horror before them brought confusion and fear. They mourned the one they had believed to be the long-promised Messiah, the King of Kings. In his helplessness, darkness touched their souls.
Yet it was in this darkness that his glory shone. The darkness could not diminish the promise of all he was. It could not erase the transformative power of his ministry, the lives he had touched, the hearts once like stone now restored.
The darkness could not stop him from caring — for friend or foe alike. His glory lay in the moment when, in the midst of excruciating suffering, he cried out not for himself but for the forgiveness of those who caused him pain. Those who ridiculed his divinity and dehumanized his humanity.
And yet a greater darkness lay ahead. Not the suffering of the servant, but the separation of judgment: the wrath of God against sin, against worldly cynicism and all systems of evil, against the one who instigates all wrongdoing.
This divine judgment poured out, not on humanity, but upon God’s own Son. Jesus, who had never known separation from the Father, bore it in our place. He came from heaven to earth as God’s promise of new life, a new beginning, despite the brokenness and evil of the human heart.
God had always intended life in the light for humanity — the place to flourish, to grow. And yet, the one true God offered his own Son as the ultimate sacrifice to rescue those who had set themselves against him.
The darkest hour came when judgment fell upon him. Even the thought of it made him sweat blood. And yet this darkness would give birth to the greatest promise: just as spring brings new life, so too does God’s glory erupt from the deepest darkness.
This is the wonder of Easter: not only that spring has sprung, but that darkness has been destroyed. Our fleeting springtime points to an eternal promise — no more sin, no more death, no more tears. All because on that first Good Friday, Jesus laid down his glory to take on the darkness of God’s judgment against our sin.
We shouldn’t be surprised by the darkness of our broken world, nor by our own hearts. Evil may seem sovereign, suffering pervasive. And yet God’s goodness breaks into the darkness. His promise of resurrection shines this side of heaven each time another soul declares: “You are the Messiah. You are the King of Kings.”
May we choose to surrender the justification of our own darkness and bask in his light. For this is his eternal plan: from darkness to glory, from death to life, from despair to everlasting hope.
Angela was one of the guests on our recent Writing Greenhouse - a short term mentoring project to encourage and equip women to give writing a go.