Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday is a day of waiting, a day of quiet, the day between Christ’s death and resurrection. It is a cosmic interlude, a moment in between the moments.

I don’t know if we often stop and think about Holy Saturday. If you’ve been through a tragedy, time can seem to stop and blur all together. For some reason I’ve thought a lot this week about one question - did the disciples celebrate Sabbath during all of this?

I’m sure this Saturday morning, this sabbath day, for the disciples all those years ago would have been strange. Time surely must have felt like it had come to a screeching halt. Do you attempt to return to normal after the one who you staked your whole life on as being the messiah has been crucified? They had to be wondering - was that it, is it all over? 

They knew a messiah would come, being followers of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob they had long waited for the messiah to save them and they thought finally they had found him! But, on this Saturday, it was back to longing, searching, waiting. Little did they know, their waiting was different. 

If we rarely think about Holy Saturday, we are even more rarely going to let it affect us in a spiritually forming way. 

Normally, Easter weekend signals the end of the church’s season of wilderness wandering. But in the midst of a global pandemic, we find ourselves this weekend driven into even more uncertainty and waiting. This waiting, this wilderness isolation, is all more tangible and real in this current moment for the world than our normal Lenten practices. So, I think we get Holy Saturday. We get an unknown amount of time of waiting, of feeling alone, holding onto doubt, fighting to believe, fighting for hope. 

But here is the good news. Easter weekend reminds us that God has acted, is acting, and will act again. The isolation, fear, and loneliness is swallowed up by the love of God. And though it may feel as if it is slow to come,   Hope for the world is coming because it has already come. We too find ourselves perpetually in the moment between the moments. Between the establishing of the kingdom and its second coming. 

So we wait.

What we want to invite you into this Saturday is a day of reflection, or a least a moment. 

Find a few minutes, or maybe if you are able a longer chunk of time, to spend in silence. Reflect on this day and what it says to our current moment we find ourselves in. Pause this day and think about the Hope that is just around the corner, the light that is coming. 

If you want a Psalm to guide your reflection, think of Psalm 130, specifically vv.5-8, what does it mean to pray with the psalmist to wait upon the Lord more than the watchman waits for the morning. 

In all of this, find Hope in your waiting. 

Grace and Peace.