Holy Saturday The empty day?

Holy Saturday is a unique day in the liturgical pattern of the church. Today there is no formal ceremony until the vigil service of Easter. There are no sacraments celebrated unless someone is in danger of death when the sacrament of the sick or baptism might be celebrated. It is a day of silence before the mystery of a God who tastes death. The church is gathered around the silent tomb, guarded by two Roman soldiers. It’s a mystery. Where is The Son of God now? In the tomb? In heaven? In hell? Any of these answers may be true because we don’t know when the resurrection actually occurred. We know it was announced with appearances on Sunday morning. Above all else we know it was a shock, no one was expecting it, and the first reaction was disbelief and fear. We need to remember that emptiness when we think about this Holy Saturday because it was a time of grief, disbelief, confusion and for many of the disciples there was feeling of deep shame at having abandoned Jesus.

Soldiers guarding the tomb on Holy Saturday

So Holy Saturday is about blank, helpless waiting. It’s about abandoning ourselves to God’s plans, God’s timetables, God’s transforming presence. All this happens as we wait, in our helpless confusion, clinging to hope when all hope seems to be gone. This holy waiting, this day of silence, is an admittance that God is in charge. In the face of the many deaths we experience, it is only God who can give eternal life and meaning to our own fragile lives. The waiting today is dissimilar to the waiting of Advent which is focused on the arrival of Jesus as God with us. Today the focus is on the one who is no longer with us, an absent Son of God whom we allowed to be destroyed.

The disciples, gathered together for fear of the Jews must have been overwhelmed by sadness. There was nothing to do now. Nowhere to go. They could not even visit the tomb on the Sabbath day. They just had to wait and manage their guilt and grief. Holy Saturday for the disciples probably meant the experience of a lot of tension between themselves as they managed to stay together. They had all reached rock bottom, they were tired, exhausted and had no sense of meaning left, no direction for their lives. It was the end.

Francis Thompson in his poem “In no strange land” captures this moment of despair we can all feel and he asks us to cry out of these depths.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)

Cry; and upon thy so sore loss

Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder

Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,

Cry, clinging heaven by the hems:

And lo, Christ walking on the water,

Not of Gennesareth, but Thames

Francis Thompson   In no strange land

Today the church cries out a silent question: why? Why do these disasters wipe out our brief lives as they did the life of Jesus? Why do dictators persist in enslaving others? Why do cheats and liars go unpunished? Why does my life always shiver in the shadow of death?

Francis Thompson tells us that we only get the answer when we cry out in our helplessness. When we step into our own darkest places, in our heart and our history. It is there that we meet our messiah. We can only embrace Jesus as our saviour when we know in our bones that we need to be saved most of all from ourselves. Jesus experienced the helplessness of human existence, sharing our vulnerability, our uncertainties and death itself. Therefore, when we meet difficulties Jesus knows what that is like, when we are betrayed Jesus understands and when we die Jesus will be with us with compassion. At every step of our lives Jesus is now our saviour and will be with us even in the grave and then forever in heaven.

The stillness of waiting may seem empty, we do nothing. We are helpless. We don’t know what to do anymore, all our certainties are gone. But this is not a sterile time at all. Waiting has always been a time for God to act in hidden ways. Like flour that needs time for the hidden yeast to work before it can rise, waiting gives us time to put the yeast of God’s presence back into the pattern of our living. There’s no rushing this process it takes its own time and God’s plans stretch through eons of time well beyond the short span of our individual lives. We just have to wait, to trust that new life will come from death, new hopes from despair, new friends from enemies and new light from darkness. We are not in charge and need to rely on the mystery that is buried in Jesus’ tomb so that it will become the slow seed of something that draws us deeper into union with God but in God’s time.

The Byzantine liturgy reminds us of another tradition attached to today’s liturgy in a text from its morning prayer:

“Today the one who holds all creation in his hand

is himself held in the tomb,

a rock covers the One who covered the heavens with beauty,

Life has fallen asleep,

Hades is seized with fear,

and Adam is freed from his bonds.[1]

The prayer refers to Hades or Hell which tradition tells us that Jesus visited to set free the souls of the dead. The images pick out Adam and Noah for specific mention. Jesus is shown reaching down into the realms of death and drawing people from their graves. It is a reminder to us that in Christ everyone is alive. It is an indication that our timetables are not God’s. So, whilst as a church we wait in silence for Christ to arise, we also wait with grief and sadness for all those we have lost to death. We sit with all our griefs of lost youth, lost opportunities, lost friendships and lost hopes. We wait for all those who have gone before us marked with the seal of baptism, members of the communion of saints with whom we have an eternal relationship in Christ. We wait for all of those to be touched by the light of a risen Christ and drawn into the Easter mystery we will celebrate on Sunday.

[1] From the Byzantine Matins of Great & Holy Saturday.