Holy Saturday
On Easter, people always say “Friday is Good because we know Sunday is coming”. They say the death of Christ is okay because we know how the story ends. We know that Christ rose again and triumphed over death, making a way forward through death for us, too. But only focusing on Friday and Sunday ignores the experience that the followers of Jesus lived through. They didn’t know that Sunday was coming. All they knew was that their teacher, the man they had followed for years - their friend - was dead. They didn’t know he would come back. So for them, Saturday was a day of loss. A day of mourning the loss of their loved one. A day of unanswered questions. A day without hope. The day in between.
Holy Saturday gives us an opportunity to engage with the darkness and confusion of our current reality, too. We all have questions that go unanswered, grief that demands to be felt. If we get honest, we can see the gap between where things are and where they are supposed to be. We see the darkness that is in the world. In Joan Chittister’s book The Liturgical Year, she discusses Holy Saturday: “The importance of Holy Saturday lies in its power to bring us to the kind of faith the spiritual masters call ‘mature.’ Holy Saturday faith is not about counting our blessings; it is about dealing with darkness and growing in hope. Without the Holy Saturdays of life, none of us may ever really grow up spiritually.” How often do we seek maturity without the willingness to experience the depths of life? Without the willingness to look darkness in the face and find a way forward in spite of our fear and confusion?
Chittister goes on to say: “Today the church is empty. Today, the loss finally sets in. We sit in the empty pews, past the empty churches, heavy-hearted from the reality of yesterday, of Good Friday and its dashing of our securities. Today, alone and bereft, we come face-to-face with the question we try so hard to avoid the rest of the year: how do we deal with the God of darkness as well as the Giver of light? Have we been abandoned? Are we left now on our own in this world? Is there nothing else? Was all the rest of it pure fairy tale?”
Sitting with big, scary questions can be an intimidating experience. When we finally get honest about the question in our heart, the confusion and doubt, we are living in a Holy Saturday day of our own. A day of darkness and confusion. The challenge we are presented with is how to find hope in the midst of the darkness. The quick response is to again say “we know it will be okay because Sunday is coming and Jesus will return”. But this invalidates the whole purpose of Holy Saturday. We must deal with the darkness of reality and grow in hope. We must seek hope in the midst of uncertainty.
“Hope, you see, is a slippery thing, often confused with certainty, seldom understood as the spiritual discipline that makes us certain of only one thing: in the end, whatever happens, will be resolved only by the doing of the will of God, however much we attempt to wrench it to our own ends. There is the hope that we can begin, finally, to see the world as God sees it and so trust that God is indeed everywhere and in everything at all times—in abstruse as well as the luminous, whether we ourselves can see the hand of God in this moment or not.” Joan Chittister, The Liturgical Year
This Holy Saturday, I challenge you to get honest. I challenge you to really sit with your questions and pain. And, in the midst of that pain, where can you find courage and hope without negating the significance of your hardship? How can you hold the truth of pain and the hope of the future in tension?