Something strange is happening on earth today, a great silence, and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.
He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captive Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: "My Lord be with you all." Christ answered him: "And with your spirit." He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: "Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light."
—The reading for Holy Saturday in the Liturgy of the Hours
Some years ago I read this essay on Holy Saturday by Eugene Peterson. It made a deep impression on me and led me to start a Holy Saturday service at our church when I became the pastor here.
We spend an hour on Saturday Evening (7 PM, in the sanctuary, if you are nearby and want to drop in), sitting, as it were, in front of the tomb. The disciples are gone. Only some women will show up this day. (It is not an "early Easter" as some may celebrate it.)
By the time we run into the disciples again, they have either been locked away in fear of the Jews, as it says in some places or they’ve been gathering together trying to figure out what to do with themselves. Most of them are downcast, few have gone back to their old trades, none of them expected a resurrection.
It’s worth pausing to think about that, as we who are so quick to run to Easter, that oftentimes we miss even Good Friday. Or oftentimes, even slower to recognize what it must have been like to have been disciples, who having given their lives to follow this one, who they believed would change the world, now had to recognize, at least in their own lives that their following had been failure. None of them understood what Paul would later describe on that cross that the sins of the world had been taken away. None of them at that point expected anything except to pick up the pieces of their lives and go back to work.
Through out the history of the church, Holy Saturday has been a day in which very few congregations have celebrated it together, but the people of God used to be encouraged to use it as a day of reflection. A day where you set aside ordinary tasks and instead consider again the great promises of God.
In times of God’s absence, what we have is the promise. Many scholars who’ve looked at this and other spiritual writers have recognized that Holy Saturday is a wonderful metaphor if you will, for the Christian life. The time in between, the work of Christ that secures our salvation and the coming back, the second coming of Christ, that gives us the fulfillment of the promise.
Where do we live in this in between time? Rest on the promises.
But, for this Holy Saturday, let me offer this prayer:
And so Lord God let today prepare our hearts for tomorrow. We are most fortunate for we know what tomorrow brings. We are most blessed because we know what we will celebrate. But our everyday experience is closer to those disciples. Though we have been told that all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his righteousness. And even though we have been told that what you have started in us that you will complete on the day of Christ Jesus. And even though we have been told that nothing will every separate us from the will of God, very often in the middle of the in between times, we forget. So like those disciples who were told so many times that you would raise from the dead, and yet didn’t hear, we come to you today. We humbly ask you to open our hearts and our ears, so that we might again hear the promises and that this time believing them, we might begin to live tomorrow as truly Easter people. Amen
