But as for me, I will watch expectantly for the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation. — Micah 7:7
Today, we wait. Today, the silence is deafening. Today, we stand stranded between dark and Light. And so we wait. But it is within such dark moments, when fear and hiding are our temptations, that we must recall relentless hope and enduring life.
Holy Saturday is a solemn day for mourning. We are asked to consider what it would have been like if we were close friends of Jesus when his life was taken. How would we have spent this day? Would we, like the disciples, have given up hope? Would we have found ourselves hiding in an upper room?
Our world today is not so different. It kind of feels like we have been in a period of spiritual silence for over a year, locked in our homes for fear of the world. Holy Saturday offers a remedy. “The entire Christian message stands as a countercultural emblem that shouts out to a suffering world that hope truly does reign. Hope is not blind trust nor a mental exercise in spiritual roulette that an outcome will turn out exactly as we desire. Hope is a condition in friendship when you know your friend is with you, even when he is not physically next to you. Hope is the capacity to see that we are never truly alone and that God can overcome any obstacle, even death.” [1]
Passion Week is not an easy week to sail through. If you really stop to ponder each day, it can feel like roller coaster, full of ups and downs. And then you have to face Holy Saturday and the silence that darkness brings. But silence offers a chance to ponder. Would we have left Christ all alone in his suffering? How are we being asked to journey with others in their suffering today?
The day in between Jesus’ death and resurrection stands at a pivotal juncture between despair and hope, fear and courage, death and new life. Holy Saturday was a real point in time, but it also symbolizes the current state of our world.
We are in time and place between darkness and light, destruction and renewal. We are in desperate need of looking toward brighter days for our country, politics, church, and world.
When intense, widespread suffering strikes again — and it will — we should not turn to the fear that evil wins. Instead, when the Holy Saturdays enter our lives, we must remember there is hope in the waiting. Trials and darkness never last forever. The tomb always turns up empty and our lives always recover if we hold fast to the Hope only found in Jesus Christ.
1 Thomas Griffin. EmptyTombProject.org