Hope in the darkness

Good Friday is the day the world went dark.

As Jesus hung on the cross, the sky itself bore witness to the weight of what was unfolding. Scripture tells us that from noon until three in the afternoon, darkness covered the land. It was as if creation itself mourned.

For the disciples, it must have felt like the end. The one they had followed, loved, and believed to be the Saviour was dead. The promises of a kingdom, the dreams of redemption, the presence of God—they all seemed to vanish with His final breath. The world was cloaked not just in physical darkness, but in soul-deep despair.

And yet…

Hidden in the shadows of Good Friday is a gift. Hope. Hope that survives in the silence of Saturday, in the tomb, in the grief. Hope, in its truest form, is not destroyed by darkness—it is forged in it.

Hope is the gift God gives us in the waiting. It is the steady heartbeat in the silence, the promise whispered when all seems lost.

On Good Friday, hope didn’t die. It went underground, waiting for the dawn of Resurrection. And in doing so, it became a gift not just for Sunday, but for every day we walk through our own darkness.

Hope is the gift for today—for those who mourn, for those who feel forgotten, for those sitting in the shadow of unanswered prayers. It’s a gift not because everything is fixed, but because Jesus entered the worst of it with us. He did not shy away from pain, and so neither must our hope.

Hope though is only for this world, it is not needed for the next. One day, all our hopes will be fulfilled. Every tear will be wiped away, every broken thing made whole. Faith will become sight. Hope will give way to joy. Love only will remain.

Until then, we hold onto hope—the gift in the darkness.

And that, perhaps, is the miracle of Good Friday. Not that it feels good, but that even in its darkest hour, God was at work.

Hope wasn’t gone.

It was just beginning.