4. The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Words. — The Death of Jesus, and the Wonders which accompanied His Death.
Now from the sixth hour[1] there was darkness[2] over the whole earth until the ninth hour[3], while Jesus was in His agony. That He might drink the chalice of sorrow even to the dregs, our Divine Lord was abandoned at that awful moment by His Eternal Father. This was the crowning point of His terrible agony; for He exclaimed: “Eli, Eli[4], lamma sabacthani", that is “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” (Matthew, Mark.)
After a few moments’ silence, He said: “I thirst.” [5] (John.) Then one of the soldiers took a sponge, and steeping it in vinegar
- ↑ The sixth hour. i. e. from noon.
- ↑ Darkness. This was not a natural eclipse of the sun, for the Jewish Pasch was kept at the time of full moon, when a natural eclipse is an impossibility.
This wonderful darkening of the sun lasted three hours. It began soon after our
Lord was crucified, and only ended when He died. Darkness in the middle of
the day is a very terrible thing. Men feel very uneasy, and even the wild beasts
creep into their dens.
The darkness was observed beyond the confines of Palestine. The pagan Phlegon mentions in his Annals that the greatest eclipse of the sun ever known occurred in the year of our Lord’s Death; and that at the sixth hour of the day it became so dark that the stars could be seen in the heavens. The Christian writer, Tertullian, who lived in the second century of our era, referred the pagans to the archives of the Roman State, wherein this extraordinary darkness was described as an “event which had astonished the whole world”. [Schuster- Holzamnur, Handbuch xur Bibl. Gesch.7 II 549.) - ↑ The ninth hour. Till three o’clock in the afternoon.
- ↑ Eli, Eli. Jesus had borne all His torments and insults without uttering a word. The impression might have been thereby given that though, as was the case with so many of the holy martyrs, He was outwardly tormented, He was inwardly full of joy and consolation. This opinion would be quite wrong. The terrible darkness that covered the whole earth was but a weak picture of the more terrible darkness and absence of all comfort which reigned in the Heart of Jesus. As His bodily sufferings increased, so did His Soul become more and more oppressed by the burden of sin which He had taken on Himself, and by the ingratitude of His people. His divine nature left it to His human nature to endure all this pain of soul and body, until, deprived of all help and consolation, His Soul sank into the feeling of being abandoned by God — the greatest of all sufferings for any soul which loves God. In order to make known this full measure of His interior and invisible pain, and with it the greatness of His love for us, He cried aloud to His heavenly Father: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me!”
- ↑ I thirst. The loss of Blood suffered by Jesus, first on the Mount of Olives, then when He was scourged, and finally on the Cross, must have produced the most violent thirst. The first cry of a soldier lying wounded on the battle-field is, not to have his wounds dressed, but for some cooling drink. Moreover, the wounds of Jesus, being exposed to the open air, were- inflamed, and caused a burning pain. He cried aloud: “I thirst”, to show us that He was not spared even this suffering. Even as the sense of abandonment by God was the greatest pain to His Soul, so was this raging internal fire the climax of His corporal sufferings.
