The grief was so stiflingly heavy that Saturday morning on those who loved Jesus that they - most of them simple commoners - likely felt nothing but a despairing hollowness in their Saturday prayers like a howling echo in a bone-dry well returning their prayers unanswered. But->
something had happened in the last 18 hours that would transform everything about prayer for those who knew Jesus. Toward the end of Mark’s Gospel, he uses the word “schizo” to describe the temple veil as “torn.”What’s noteworthy is that he’d also used it at the very beginning.->
Describing Jesus’ baptism, Mark writes, “As soon as he came up out of the water, he saw the heavens being torn open (schizo) & the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”(1:10-11)The heavens didn’t->
just subtly widen in Mark’s “beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” The word is graphic. The heavens ripped wide open. These 2 uses of the word, 1 at Mark’s beginning, 1 at the end, call back to mind Isaiah’s plea in 64:1-2. “If only You would tear the heavens & come down,->
so that mountains would quake at Your presence...to make Your name known to Your enemies...(V.4) From ancient times no one has heard, no one has listened to, no eye has seen any God except You who acts on behalf of the one who waits for him.” As the veil tore from top to bottom->
Matthew’s Gospel records that the earth did indeed quake and the rocks split after Christ breathed His last and the veil tore. And it was exactly then the terrified centurion & the others keeping watch over Jesus cried out, “Truly this man was the Son of God!”
You see, God had->
You see, God had->
torn the heavens & come down. The Word made flesh. He’d walked among them. Taught them. Fed them. Healed them. Slept near them under the midnight stars. Calmed their storms then been crucified & killed that they might live, finishing a work that’d rip that temple veil wide open.
Oh, there was no despairing hollowness in the Saturday morning prayers of those Jesus-loving mourners. The heavens may have felt like brass but they were not. The prayers of those commoners had entered straight into the Holy of Holies. It will be a long day but a short night...
And God would do something far more abundantly than all they could fathom or even begin to ask.
He was going raise His Son from the stone cold dead.
He always was.
He was going raise His Son from the stone cold dead.
He always was.
