Holy Saturday: Saturday, April 16, 2022
I have never given much thought to the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter. As Jesus lay in the tomb, I went about my routine picking up groceries for Easter lunch and last-minute gifts for my children. But this year is different.
For the first followers of Jesus, it was a day of Sabbath rest. Jesus is dead and buried. Everyone has gone home.
Jesus is dead. The Gospel of Mark wants to make the point when he says, “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.
On the backside of the resurrection, Holy Saturday is a day that sits between two opposites. Between death and life. Between sadness and joy. Between what has been and what will be.
It is a day that describes those who sit in grief. We have forgotten how to grieve as a culture. We want to fix it and get over it. But, like everything else we do in modern Western society, we view grief as a problem to be solved. So patch it up, and let’s move on.
Megan Devine, in her book “It’s OK That You Are Not Ok,” writes, “The most effective and efficient way to be “safe” in this world is to stop denying that hard and impossible things happen.” She continues, “Real safety is entering each other’s pain, recognizing ourselves in it.”
Holy Saturday reminds us that grief is not a problem to be solved. It is an experience to be carried. Yes, Sunday is coming but naming the grief before us makes resurrection meaningful.
What gives me hope on this Holy Saturday amid the residue of COVID-19, division in the church, and war in Ukraine is said best by the poet Wendell Berry when he says, “I take the statement literally 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.”
Friends, Sunday is coming. Love is being resurrected, and I am here for it!
Jamey
Happening at Gainesville First United Methodist Church
This will be an Easter that you do not want to miss!
Beautiful reflection.
So profound and meaningful. Thank you!