Holy Saturday
The cross stands empty
In a world grown silent….
These words from the Divine Office for today are so evocative.
Holy Saturday – we pause, we wait. The death has happened. He has gone from this world, from his disciples, his friends, his enemies. He is no more, just as all he stood for seems lost and dead.
So we pause, waiting in bewilderment for the loss and confusion to make some sense.
Today we sit with the disciples – uncertain, confused, bereft. It is easy for us because we know the outcome, the ‘happy ending’. The disciples had no real sense of the resurrection, just a vague promise in their tradition about the death of a just person having a deeper resonance.
From the adulation of Palm Sunday to the intimacy of the Last Supper, to the few, mainly women who remained at the place of execution, the core of those who trusted in Him dwindled down. In the darkness of their shattered hopes and love for their friend and rabbi, Jesus, they stayed in the darkness, confusion, grief and loss of this person who had given them hope, dignity and who embodies their God of Israel.
It is recorded in the Gospels that a few were able to do the loving things even in that darkness – Joseph of Arimathea gave him a tomb for decent burial, the women prepared to anoint his body in a ritual of love, respect and reverence.
Evil in the guise of political and religious expediency and status quo carried on as usual. For them, all was well now. They had achieved their end.
Holy Saturdays
We all face our own Holy Saturdays, when what has given us hope, delight, meaning, happiness disappears. Anything has the ability to evoke such a time – past trauma, illness, death, loss of a beloved or just that grey, misty, taste-less loss of meaning and drive that catapults us into this terrible darkness. What makes it even more bewildering and painful, is that the rest of the world, like Jesus’ opponents and the ephemeral crowds of Palm Sunday just go on about their business and ordinary life swirls around us.
How do we cope with our own Holy Saturdays? Will we, like Jesus’ opponents dismiss the darkness and carry on ‘business as usual’? Or perhaps like the adulating crowds and some of Jesus’ disciples, disappear in fear or hopelessness or disgust?
However, the alternative is like the women and faithful ones, wait, abide, do the loving things that are possible at that moment and tend the dead body of our hopes in respect for what is past, in the shear darkness of faith – faith in the unknown future that is hidden in God.
We will only experience the full power of Jesus’ resurrection, as the faithful women did, when we embrace the loss of what we have known in the Good Fridays and Holy Saturdays of our lives, when we too wait for the appropriate time for the power of the Resurrection to manifest. We do this by reverently laying to rest the body of our past hopes, loves and securities and wait in dark faith for what the future will be. This is both active and passive – we do what is possible at the appropriate time, like the women who could not anoint Jesus’ body on the Sabbath – they had to wait until the time was right; but we also wait with attentive, aware active-passivity without trying to ‘make things right’ or return to old certainties.
The women’s and other disciples’ encounter with the risen Jesus was so shocking, surprising and unexpected – even his appearance was changed – that all their prior expectations of how God would act were swept aside. They could not have imagined Easter Sunday on Holy Saturday.
So, in the Holy Saturdays of our lives let us wait with trusting, expectant faith for Jesus’ risen life to make sense of our darkness – not to pretend that it never happened, that our loss was not real, or indeed even a loss, but to allow the void to be surprisingly filled with life.
So, today in the silence and emptiness of Holy Saturday, let us wait at the tomb of Jesus and the tomb of our own losses, let us wait in reverence, gratitude and awe that we know how the Story ends. The trouble with knowing how the Story ends, is thinking we know how the Story ends, well let us pray to be surprised.
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