The Long, Dark Night (Passover Study)

When it comes to bible study around the holy days, I usually love delving into different themes, connections, and the infinitely-rich meanings that we can glean from God’s word and His plan for mankind.  The holy days are like a cut gemstone, with dozens of facets that reflect light differently as you examine them.

As the Passover approached this year, however, I was led in a slightly different direction.  For whatever reason, I found myself meditating on Jesus’s actual experience in the hours leading up to His crucifixion.  It became visceral and REAL to me in a way it hadn’t been before.

Have you ever really considered what it was like, knowing what awaited Him in terms of the torture, humiliation, pain, and abandonment?  What if you knew something like that was awaiting you?  Would that make it easier to bear, or harder?  Personally, I think it would be much harder.

I’ve never watched “The Passion of the Christ”, Mel Gibson’s movie about Jesus’s crucifixion.  Honestly, I know I don’t have the stomach for it.  But after spending some time really sitting with it, I thought I’d share with you a more personal, intimate, raw consideration of Jesus’s experience in His last hours before dying for our sins.

I think we often don’t really grasp what it meant in this moment for Jesus to be a physical man.  Even though we know “the Word became flesh”, we tend to focus on Him as our perfect, sin-less Savior, who could see the heart of a person and always reacted in a Godly way.

The gospel accounts are fairly dry, so it’s easy to keep an emotional remove from what we’re reading.  Artistic renderings tend to show His face as serene and mournful, peaceful and accepting of His role.  And while He was not only accepting but lovingly offered Himself for us, that doesn’t diminish what He actually was experiencing as a human being.

In the garden of Gethsemane, He told His closest friends how sorrowful and weighed down He was feeling, and asked them to watch with Him.  But they failed Him, and later deserted Him.  These men that he’d spent practically every moment with for years ran at the first sign of trouble.  He was abandoned and alone.

Though a full moon illuminated the landscape, this was, for Jesus, the darkest night.  As He knelt for hours and prayed to the Father, asking for courage and strength and comfort—likely marveling that this moment They had envisioned for thousands of years had finally come—He contemplated what He was about to go through.  I can’t begin to imagine what was running through His mind.

Do you think He was scared?  I do.  Not bone-deep mental fear, because He was still connected to the Father and knew what would happen to Him and why.  But the human body can’t help it.  It reacts physically even when our brains try to tell it otherwise.  The heart jackrabbits until it feels like it will come out of our chest.  Our adrenaline floods with the “fight or flight” instinct, muddying our thoughts.  Our hands tremble and our breath comes in gasps.

He fell on His face before the Father multiple times, praying fervently that if there were any other way for Their plan to be accomplished, He would not have to go through with it.  When we really think about this, it’s astonishing, and gives us a tiny glimpse of how truly horrific Jesus knew the coming hours would be—if our perfect Savior would go so far as to ask if there was even a miniscule chance that there might be another way?

Luke tells us that Jesus’s prayers were full of agony and struggle, and He was pouring sweat that fell to the ground like huge drops of blood.  God even sent an angel to comfort and minister to Jesus at this time, to help strengthen Him for what was to come.

We know but rarely truly comprehend that He was ENTIRELY human, as far as His body is concerned.  His flesh and brain and nerve endings and bones were completely physical, just as frail as yours and mine.  He bled from dozens of raw wounds.  He almost certainly cried.  He poured sweat, His breathing was labored.  He was dizzy from being struck on the head repeatedly.

And while He knew WHY He was doing it—He had waited eternity as a spirit being and then 30+ human years in a physical body to be able to offer Himself in the place of YOU, to pay the ultimate price for MY sins—He also knew that there would be a moment when He would be completely cut off from the Father for the first time ever, and He dreaded that moment.

*That* is when He broke down and cried out in agony, as God turned away from the Son as every single sin humanity had ever committed was laid on His shredded back.  Our pure, sin-free Messiah had to feel the impact of every filthy, evil, prideful, bitter thought and action of mankind, to be infected and tainted by it.  And the Father had to disconnect in order for it to happen.

None of us can begin to understand the emptiness, disorientation, and desperation Jesus must have felt in that moment.  To have the holy spirit yanked from Him and the Father’s back turned away.  He had spent every second of eternity (with possibly the exception of His time as a baby) in complete connection with God the Father.

“He was despised and rejected—a Man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.  We turned our backs on Him and looked the other way.  He was despised, and we did not care.

Yet it was our weaknesses He carried; it was our sorrows that weighed Him down.  And we thought His troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for His own sins!

But He was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins.  He was beaten so we could be whole.  He was whipped so we could be healed.

All of us, like sheep, have strayed away.  We have left God’s paths to follow our own.  Yet the Lord laid on Him the sins of us all…

But it was the Lord’s good plan to crush Him and cause Him grief.  Yet when His life is made an offering for sin, He will have many descendants, He will enjoy a long life, and the Lord’s good plan will prosper in His hands”  (Is. 53, NLT)

Crushed.  Beaten.  Pierced.  Whipped.  Weighed down.  Abandoned by God.  His life snuffed out.  So that we wouldn’t have to undergo the same things.  Not only can I not grasp the physical, emotional, and spiritual pain He endured, but I can’t comprehend the depth of love He had for us…for me and you…to be willing to undergo it in the first place.

Our Savior, who never sinned, was the ultimate offering for my sin, and for yours, and every human being who has ever lived, so that we could be “made right”—justified, sanctified, chosen, and redeemed—with God through Christ (II Cor. 5:21, NLT).

Because without His sacrifice, our sins would not only mean forfeiting our lives, but also forfeiting our place in the family of God.  It is only because of our Passover Lamb that we have that opportunity.

“God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8)

“[He] bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died [because of] sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed.  For you were like sheep going astray, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls” (I Pet. 2:24-25)

When it says “healed”, it doesn’t just mean from a sickness or injury, our physical infirmities, or even from a particular sin.  The Greek word there means cured.  Made whole.  Completed and lacking nothing, so that we can be accepted by God into His family (James 1:4).  Once the plan is finished, every hurt, sickness, every tear, sin, and every fear will be gone for good, as though they’d never existed (Rev. 21:4).

I have no doubt that while Jesus was praying in Gethsemane, and through His endless hours of trials, beatings, and while struggling to breathe on the cross, that He was not only dwelling on His physical agony and the moment of spiritual desertion to come, but on “better things” (Phil. 4:8).

He knew that three days and nights later (a split second for Him), He would awaken, and He spoke joyfully to His Father about their imminent reunion (John 17:5, 11, 13).

He was excited about Their plan, thousands of years in the making, finally coming to fruition…the first step in a mind-blowing design that will end with our Messiah returning to earth to usher in His eternal kingdom and complete the redemption of mankind forever.

And He prayed for His disciples and all who would believe in the coming centuries—He prayed for me, and for you.  That God would open our minds and our hearts, and we would believe in Him, follow Him, and become the firstfruits in His eternal spiritual family.

“Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,

looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Rom. 12:1-2)

Related bible studies you may like:

• “Take Up Your Cross Daily”: How Should Christians Look at the Cross?
• Jesus Christ as Our Kinsman-Redeemer: Redemption & Slavery
• Jesus As The “Author & Finisher” of Our Faith: What Does This Mean?
• Burnt Offerings to Living Sacrifices:  What Worshipping a Holy God Requires of Us
• A Deep-Dive into the Gospels:  This Life Isn’t Easy, & Comes With Expectations (Part 1)

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