When Darkness Reigns

In Luke 22:47-53 we see Jesus, having finished His protracted time in prayer, now resolutely facing His imminent execution but sublimely in control of all events including His death. His approaching circumstances were no different but He had complete trust in His Heavenly Father. And despite being diabolically betrayed, with a kiss even, Jesus reached out to Judas much as He had done at the Last Supper. In the middle of the very act of betrayal, Judas was a lost soul, and Jesus always cares about lost souls. The question Jesus asked Judas "are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?" combined both divine foreknowledge with an appeal for repentance. Sadly for Judas, it would go unheeded. But we see even here that, despite Albert Schweitzer's critique to the contrary, in the middle of the night that would devour him, Jesus was not helplessly falling into the gears of history!

"Then Jesus said to the chief priests, the officers of the temple guard, and the elders, who had come for Him, "Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come with swords and clubs? Every day I was with you in the temple courts, and you did not lay a hand on me" [vv. 52, 53a]. There is beautiful irony here. They could have arrested Him at any time they had wanted if they had not feared the people. As a point of fact, they were the lawless ones, and His challenge questioned the legality of His arrest. They came in the middle of the night like armed robbers to "number Him with the transgressors" when their very own conduct was an implicit admission of their guilt. This done, Jesus issued the defining statement for this night: "But this is your hour--when darkness reigns" [v. 53b]. The physical darkness of the night matched and covered the moral darkness reigning in their hearts. R. Kent Hughes asserts that what Jesus called "your hour" was "really three hours in one."

First of all, it was Earth's hour, in that it was the climactic moment when fallen human beings marshaled their forces against Jesus. Remembering Jesus' own words from Luke 11:33-34, their spiritual eyes were not "good" but "bad," so that their entire beings were "full of darkness." As a result of their resolute darkness and their appalling murder of Christ, darkness would fittingly come over the entire land from noon to 3:00 PM on the day of His crucifixion. This was fallen Earth's dark hour of infamy.

This was also Hell's hour. In fact, the very language "when darkness reigns" is used in other passages of Scripture to describe the rule and dominion of Satan [Eph. 6:12, Col. 1:13]. Earth's hour was also Satan's hour because fallen humanity had become Satan's instruments in his assault on Christ. After tempting Christ in the wilderness at the beginning of His public ministry, he had left Christ for a "more opportune time" [Luke 4:13]. He now had his hour! The Sanhedrin and Pilate himself may have thought themselves "free" when they condemned Christ to death, but they were slaves of impulses that came straight from Hell!

When all is said and done, however, "your hour," Earth's hour, which was also Hell's hour, was preeminently Heaven's hour. In the Upper Room Jesus began His oft-quoted prayer by saying, "Father, the hour has come" [John 17:1] -- that "hour" being the foreordained hour for the events that culminated in the cross. Luke records it as, "When the hour came, Jesus and His apostles reclined at the table" [22:14]. Thus, the "hour" for Jesus began with His self-giving at the Last Supper and concluded with His delivering His spirit into the hands of His Father. Ultimately, this was Heaven's hour because Satan was but an instrument in God's great plan for the salvation of the world. Hughes notes that Satan was the unwitting stage manager for God, and every fall and humiliation that he choreographed for Christ was actually a step toward our salvation. A very limited and little God? Not!