Take a moment to sit and soak in a devotion for Holy Saturday written by Love’s Executive Director, Jodi Cole Meyer.
Holy Saturday
The Christian calendar is full at the beginning of every year. We move quickly from Epiphany to the long observance of Lent, with Holy Week capping it off:
Maundy Thursday, when we viscerally understand the connection Jesus had with his disciples, and his instruction on how to remember him.
Good Friday, when we deeply feel the horror of a convict’s execution and the fear the disciples must have felt.
And then Easter Sunday. Celebrating Easter is the heart of Christian observance – all of our hope, our doctrine, our understanding of our place in the world comes with Jesus’ resurrection.
But what about Saturday?
Of the three days Jesus was in the grave, the Bible highlights events on both Friday and Sunday, with the unexpected (whether welcome or not), with deep significance, and with narrative after narrative. But Saturday is silent.
I don’t believe, though, that Saturday was without emotion. I can almost feel the despair, the confusion, the isolation, the fear…. maybe the regret? The disciples had been following, trying to understand, getting a lot wrong, but slowly comprehending the Kingdom call of Jesus. You can see their growing commitment as you read through the gospels. I especially love thinking about how difficult it must have been for them to listen to Jesus’ parables and metaphor-heavy teachings without the benefit of them being written down to go back and study.
Understanding the principles and philosophy of a new kingdom was hard-won ground for these folks. They studied on their feet and argued about it when they sat down to rest. They asked Jesus the big questions and then quarreled about what his replies meant. They followed and they learned. They were putting together an understanding of what Jesus called them to and what the Kingdom of God was like.
And then they killed Jesus.
How unsettling was that? What kind of terror goes through you when what you thought you had learned was suddenly undone by a crowd and a cross? When the understanding of a Kingdom suddenly didn’t make sense any more. These disciples had believed in the message, and now the messenger was gone.
We often jump quickly to Sunday after Good Friday, eager to have the answer restored, the expectations cleared up, and the promise of a Risen Savior to explain the pain, the disappointment, the confusion that a crucifixion brough., But the truth is that on Saturday, I believe the disciples lost a lot of WHAT they believed in. They believed that Jesus was there to save them from the Romans, that he would relieve their political and economic burdens, that he would establish a new order that looked more like creation and less like a power grab. They lost what they believed in.
The next day, Christ’s resurrection reminded them that WHO they believed in was reliable even when WHAT they believed in seemed to crumble. That is Easter.
I believe it’s a good reminder for us, as we work in uncertain places and with people deeply feeling the loss of what they might have believed about how their life would turn out, or what they might have believed about the reliability of a job or a relationship, or what they believed about their own worthiness … all of these beliefs can be shattered. Even our understanding of how to live in community, how to best understand our call to love our neighbors… these can feel shaky. Sometimes what we thought we knew falls apart. We are in our own Holy Saturday – Disorienting. Discouraging. Unsure of what to believe.
But Saturday always leads us to Sunday. The news of Christ’s resurrection is a reminder that it is not WHAT we believe in that has to be reliable, it is WHO we believe in. The WHO of Jesus can be trusted, will not change, and is our salvation. Easter is a reminder of that.
And when we face those disillusionments, those times when what we believe seems unreliable, those Holy Saturdays, the answer is always to wait for Sunday, when the truth of WHO Jesus is will bring us true comfort and hope.
