The Chasm in the Rock of Calvary

Saint Matthew - Chapter 27

the earth quaked, and the rocks were rent. J-J Tissot

[51] Et ecce ... terra mota est, et petrae scissae sunt,
And behold ... the earth quaked, and the rocks were rent.

From The Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ, by J-J Tissot (1897)

The rock is rent open and the sub-soil is laid bare, the numerous cracks across it proving how widespread and extraordinary has been the phenomenon which has just taken place.  The widest of these cracks is a regular chasm which has opened between the Cross of Jesus and that of the impenitent thief.  It appears to be deep as well as wide, and the Jews wish to examine its dimensions, which are such as to astonish them.  To be able to ascertain better the effect produced by the convulsion, they penetrate into the cave named after Adam, where, according to a tradition, the skull of the first man had been buried, and which had also served as the grave of Melchisedek.  As this cave is hewn out of the very rock from which rises the Cross with the Redeemer upon it and the rent can be clearly seen from it, some of the spectators put their hands into the rent, and, to their intense horror, when they draw them back they find that they are covered with blood.

Even at the present day, an extraordinary fissure in the rock of Golgotha can still be seen in the church of the Holy Sepulchre; it is alluded to by Saint Cyril of Alexandria, and it has the peculiarity that, instead of running, as is usual in ordinary convulsions of nature, in the same direction as the strata of the rock, it is perpendicular rent, or one at right angles to the layers of the rock of Golgotha.  Competent authorities have declared this strange fissure to be the result of a miracle, and when their testimony is compared with that of the Gospel narrative, the same conclusion is forced on us.  If we are to believe certain tales, which, however, have little evidence to corroborate them, similar phenomenon occurred throughout the rest of Palestine at the same time as the one just described.  Secular buildings and Temples fell down here and there, whilst the whole of Egypt was the scene of disasters, nearly all the Temples been much injured, their massive columns, enshrined though they were in the cyclopean masses of the living rock, there architraves and cornices, were flung to the ground, bearing witness to the mighty event which had just been accomplished.

In the crowded sea ports and on the deserted coasts alike the mighty cry was heard in the night: "Great Plan is dead!" As if Paganism, its very existence threatened by the sacrifice offered up on Calvary, was condemned to proclaim the efficacy of that sacrifice before its own extinction.  We are all well acquainted with the celebrated sentence of Dionysus the Aeropogite, said to have been uttered at the very moment when these awful events were occurring,: "Either the God of nature is suffering or the framework of the world is falling to pieces."

It probably was a darkness spreading over all the earth which led Dionysus to pronounce these remarkable words.  Moreover, Tertullian, in his "Apology", did not hesitate, in addressing the Roman authorities, to refer to the phenomena in question as well-known facts recorded in the public archives.  These phenomena did not all take place simultaneously: "Now from the sixth hour", says Saint Matthew, that is to say from the middle of the day, or three hours before the death of Jesus, "there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour", this darkness continuing throughout and rendering more awful and terrible the other manifestations of Almighty power: the rending in twain of the veil of the Temple, the earthquake, the opening of the chasm in the rock and the apparition of the dead, all of which phenomena, as is well known, took place immediately after the Saviour yielded up His last breath.

Totus tuus ego sum 

Et omnia mea tua sunt;

Tecum semper tutus sum:
Ad Jesum per Mariam