The Sound of Saturday

Holy Saturday Musings

Last year on Holy Saturday, I made a post on Instagram and asked a question.

Have you ever thought about what Holy Saturday sounded like?

The day in between the cross and resurrection. Death and life.

How many questions of self-doubt or even dismissal or fear did the hundreds of disciples ask themselves when their Lord was dead and buried?

"All that for nothing."

What sighs of relief do you think the Pharisees sighed?

"Glad that's over."

What tears was Jesus' mom sobbing for her son?

What questions of, "Well now what? What next?" did the disciples ask?

...

Jesus didn't say he was finished.

I think Holy Saturday is my favorite moment in Holy Week, and perhaps the entire Christian calendar. For a number of reasons. For one - on the surface, particularly on the actual day after Jesus' murder on the cross, not only did it seem like nothing was happening; it seemed like everything had ended. Everything his disciples had suffered so much for (albeit...they had been prepared for this moment...but let's be real. Jesus was into cryptic, cosmic communication when it came to his poor disciples), everything they'd been hoping would happen, the hopes of an entire people seeking deliverance from oppression...over.

Jesus didn't say he was finished Friday. He said tetelestai: the work is finished.

The work that God, the Great I Am, the Creator of everything and everyone, came to earth through a birth canal and took on embodied human-ness to complete...was completed. But man, did that completion not look like what his disciples, much less everyone screaming, "Hosanna!" on Palm Sunday, were looking for.

But God knew.

God knew what was required for us to have relationship with him and experience the fullness of who he is. I think we lose that sometimes. We get so wrapped up in the gruesome scene of the cross on Friday and often skip right ahead to the spiritual high of the resurrection on Sunday.

As believers today, especially steeped in a culture that likes to skip through the valleys and straight to the peaks, it's all too easy to skip to the resurrection of Sunday. Which in some ways, isn't all bad. We are empowered now to live with the living God in each of us who resurrected on Sunday. That's important.

But we live in a Saturday kind of world. Empowered and indwelt by the Holy Spirit, we live in between resurrection and glorification. We see echoes of the Lord's promise to return and redeem; we also see echoes of brokenness in this in-between space.

I like sitting in the in-between-ness of Holy Saturday, I think, because it reminds me the most of our world today. A world where questions abound, our immediate circumstances aren't all that encouraging, and we're just...waiting for something good to happen, I guess. (Points to you if you get that reference to the little kid on a trike in The Incredibles.)

In a world that calls for what you can produce, quick, and easy, Saturday provides the space to be still; with our questions, with our thoughts, with our creativity, with our curiosity, and we get to do it with the assurance that Sunday brought.

Don't forget Saturday.