The total eclipse of 2024 has come and gone and I’ve got to say I wasn’t all that impressed.

Total Eclipse 2024

Don’t get me wrong as far as I can remember this was my FIRST and perhaps only total eclipse in my 68-plus years and it was pretty cool, both figuratively and literally, during the four minutes of darkness…but. Then again, maybe I’m a bit jaded. “Now from the sixth hour until the ninth hour, there was darkness over all the land.” Matthew 27:45. Now THAT’S an eclipse.

But was it an eclipse?

In the scriptures, we see that at or about the time of Jesus’ death several unusual occurrences took place.

  • Darkness from the 6th to 9th hours (approximately noon until 3 PM)
  • Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom… (Matthew 27:51)
  • …and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split…
  • …and the graves were opened (Matthew 27:52)
  • …and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised…
  • …and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many

More than just a four-minute total eclipse. To think, so many people were expecting weird things to happen and all we saw was four minutes of darkness if you were in the direct path of the eclipse. In Jerusalem of old ALL of these took place within a short time of each other. Let’s unpack this a bit.

Darkness for three hours. How can that be? Remember when Jesus was talking about how hard it was for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? “But Jesus looked at them and said, “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for with God all things are possible.” (Mark 10:27). One need look no further than God.

The veil between the outer court of the temple and the Holy of Holies which contained the Ark of the Covenant and where God rested in His temple. To enter the Holy of Holies one would have to be a Hebrew priest from the lineage of Aaron, Moses’ brother, and be ritually purified. Even then the High Priest of Israel could only enter one day in a year. The veil being torn from top to bottom, nearly 45 feet high, removes the separation of man from God. Christ in His holiness and we who are in Christ and Christ is in us means we can now approach God as we have been washed in Christ’s blood, our sins forgiven by our initial baptism into Christ’s Church, and our continued theosis, struggling each day with our Cross to live in Christ and Him in us.

Earthquakes happen quite a bit in the Middle East but to see rocks split? How disturbing would that be to your average pious Jew of the Second Temple period? Especially after they had just watched “The King of the Jews” tortured, hung on a wooden cross, and killed…for what? Then the graves were opened?

Open graves were viewed as unclean in those days as they still are to modern rabbinical Jews and Muslims. To see a tomb made of rock or a grave with stones and dirt torn open and the bodies of your loved ones exposed? Now, understand this, in the next part of Matthew 27 after the graves were opened and many of the BODIES of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised…it wasn’t until AFTER Christ’s resurrection three days later that those saints rose themselves, came out of the graves, and were seen in Jerusalem. Why is that?

Because Christ had entered Hades and defeated Death. God had given us a premonition of what we can expect as Christians. Like the song we sing on Pascha morning, “Christ is Risen from the dead, trampling down Death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!”. For ours is a God of life, not Death. Jesus’ death on the cross and his journey to Hades where he preached to the dead and tore down the gates of Hades is the promise we have of eternal life in Christ.

And what must we do to have eternal life in Christ?

We must DO what Christ tells us to DO. But that’s something we’ll cover in a future discussion.

God Bless!

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Filed under: Orthodoxy

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