Friends in Christ,
Holy Saturday is perhaps my favorite day of the Church year. I’m not sure why. It should be a day of sorrow, of shock, when hope is lost. Not a day we celebrate in the church very often, mostly because it is a day filled with pain.
Christ has died. The journey from Palm Sunday through Maundy Thursday to Good Friday ends this way. The Light has gone out of the world. And the disciples, the faithful women and men who had come to believe that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, the fulfillment of all of God’s promises throughout the ages, abandoned their teacher and Lord. He had called them “Friends,” a name they—we—proved unworthy of, because of fear. Now they huddle together in an upper room, hiding from the authorities, mourning the death of the Beloved.
They do not yet know what joy waits for them when the sun breaks through the horizon. The women—Mary alone, in our reading from John tomorrow—will go to the tomb to care for Jesus body, and discover that the cross was no end, but only a new beginning. The disciples will all soon be caught up in Easter joy. Soon. But not yet.
Why do I like this day? Maybe it’s how real it seems. My own life has challenge enough, but I am quite privileged. The world out there, the one I see in my friends, the one I see on the news, the one we must face when we are honest about the way life really works, is full of difficulty, of pain. The resurrection can feel too-good-to-be-true. Waiting for Christ to come seems more likely than the possibility that he already has.
Or maybe it’s the simplicity of the the day. The complexity of our world today, the challenge of the modern world… many people crave an antidote to this. Something quiet, meditative, familiar. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday—these are all filled with riches for our faith, depth of meaning. Holy Saturday really offers only one thing for us: We wait.
And that waiting is, I think, the real reason I love this Church “holiday.” We wait, not like the disciples who do not yet know what is coming (however many times Jesus told them). We wait with hope and anticipation. We know the truth of what comes in the morning. Like Jesus standing before the tomb of his friend Lazarus, we can grieve the real losses we experience in this world. But we also know what is about to happen when God acts, and life comes anew.
Death tolls from CoViD-19 increase in every part of the globe, to numbers so large our brains cannot process them. Winds rip through our own neighborhoods, tearing down power lines and destroying more than modern conveniences. The holidays approach, and they remind us of loved ones who will not be with us, because of vocation, or anger, or geography, or death. There is much to grieve in our homes, in our communities, in our nation, in our world.
And still, we know that joy comes in the mo[u]rning.
The thought of my affliction and my homelessness
Is wormwood and gall!
My soul continually thinks of it
And is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope.
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
His mercies never come to an end:
They are new every morning;
Great is your faithfulness.
Lamentations 3:19–23
The Lectionary Reading for Holy Saturday