The women wept, the soldiers gambled, one prisoner mocked, the other pleaded. The centurion acknowledged that they’d killed the king.

The next day was dark. Not the darkness that had come with Jesus’ death, the sun rose as usual. But the light had gone.

The night before Jesus’ death he prayed in the garden and asked his father to take this cup from him, but only if that was his will. He didn’t want to go through with this, he wondered if there was another way, a way out, a way that could avoid the darkness. But the darkness was already around him. He had already been betrayed, the authorities had decided once and for all that this menace, this man who claimed to be from God should be silenced.

And for a day he was.

And so are the scriptures, we can only guess what went on during that passover Sabbath. The religious leaders were so keen to protect their purity on the Sabbath that they hurried him off the cross and into the pristine tomb donated for his body. They wanted this finished so they could enjoy their festival without blood on their hands.

I suspect the women cried and the men were silent. I suspect some were in shock, others angry, most afraid for their lives. Because the Son of God they had came to believe in was now gone. The one they had placed their trust in was no longer there. The distance was impenetrable.

The distance from God that they felt that day. The distance from God that Jesus experienced as he was torn away from the father he had known from the start. The distance that is reflected into this day when we call on God to answer our prays and all we get is silence.

Unanswered prayer is nothing new. When Jesus prayed in the garden, if this be your will, he was not pretending to be more spiritual than he was. He wanted to avoid having to die. How often we want to avoid things. We pray to God for something and he seems to reject our pleas. We ask God for what we want and he leaves us to our own.

How often we want to avoid having to die. We cling to ourself. We hold onto the life we know.

Because we do not think that God is there, we think that he has left us, ignored us, rejected us. We think that we are not good enough to come to him, and he is too far away to reach out to us. We think the distance is unreachable.

We think that the king has gone.