Holy Saturday
It’s Holy Saturday
Jesus is dead and buried. Everyone has gone home.
The Gospel of Mark underscores this with striking finality: “Pilate couldn’t believe that Jesus was already dead, so he called for the Roman officer and asked if he had died yet. The officer confirmed that Jesus was dead” (Mark 15:44–45). Jesus was dead.
Holy Saturday is the quiet day between the agony of Good Friday and the glory of Easter Sunday. It is a day that sits in the tension between two opposites—between death and life, between sorrow and joy, between the darkness of what has been and the hope of what will be.
In every sense, it is a liminal space—a threshold moment—the kind of space where we feel unmoored and uncertain, no longer where we were but not yet where we’re going. Liminal spaces are uncomfortable. They ask us to wait without knowing what comes next. They strip away our illusions of control and press us to confront the silence, the stillness, and the ache of the in-between.
In so many ways, we live much of our lives on Holy Saturday: between diagnosis and healing, between loss and new life, between despair and hope, between crucifixion and resurrection. The waiting can feel like wilderness, but it is also where transformation takes root.
Wendell Berry captures what gives me hope on this Holy Saturday—what helps me remain in the liminal space without running ahead or turning back—beautifully:
“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.”
Love is the thread that binds the already and the not-yet. Divine love dwells even in the silence of Holy Saturday. Even when we cannot see the ending, love is there—steady, patient, calling us forward.
So we wait in the liminal space—not with despair, but with hope. Because love has not left the tomb. Love is about to rise.
Friends, Sunday is coming!
Pastor Jamey
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