Today is a strange day, isn’t it? What do we do with today? It’s this empty, weird time just sort of suspended between Jesus’s death and his resurrection. Do we ignore it? Does it matter?  

Jesus could have risen the very next morning. I don’t think he waited just to prove he was really dead, the Roman authorities confirmed that by jabbing a spearhead into his side and through his heart, which turned out to be unnecessary since he was already dead anyway. Why wait? Why leave everybody in suspense a whole day? At first glance, it seems a little mean. 

But, I wonder whether there’s not some wise and compassionate intention toward us from Jesus built into the waiting this Saturday. It’s uncomfortable to sit with our grief. This day’s deep silence is a kind of resounding silence that sounds out the depths of our own hearts. Sailors take soundings to measure how far down the sea floor is, and today is a kind of sounding that calls us to float suspended and allow ourselves to fathom rather than fix the things that grief us most. We want to paddle the boat ashore and arrive as fast as possible at the resurrection; but Jesus himself, in the wisdom of his patience, seems to recommend against hurrying away from our pain. Jesus, his Father, and the Holy Spirit, seem themselves to be willing to pause here and take it in.  

 

I thought about not doing an episode today, but my mind is changed. This is an important day. We can’t skip it or rush past it. This Suspended Saturday is God’s gift to us just as much as Good Friday or Easter Morning. Because so much of our lives inhabit a space like this, if we’re honest. This in-betweenness may even take up the majority of our human experience? Death is all around us, literal dying as well as figurative deaths, and this is the same world Jesus died in. Resurrection has already literally taken place in this same world we live in, and we’re surrounded by little signs of its reality. 

But many of our days are long Saturdays like this one, where we sink down into our sorrows and disappointments, losses and failures, the ways others have trespassed against us and how we have trespassed against them, the death of certain hopes. We hold in our left hand the reality of all kinds of death, and we hold the reality of God’s victory in our right hand, and we don’t let either one cancel out the other. 

This Saturday frees us to be who and where we really are much of the time, which is suspended in the realm of pilgrimage, of being on the way, truthful about where we’ve come from, where we’re going, and patiently, with painful honesty, faithfully grieving where we are right now. 

 

Lewis’s devil Screwtape says, “Music and silence – how I hate them both!” And Josef Pieper says that there is a kind of music that “opens a path into the realm of silence.” It is a fruitful silence. This Silent Saturday, like a rest suspended between the two high notes of Friday and Sunday, has been intentionally composed by God. And the silent music he sings for us today, is one that we need to stop and attend carefully to. This silence, like the silence of a wintering garden, has its own way of speaking things that we desperately need to hear. 

How kind of Jesus to be willing himself to sit with us in this in-between space. How kind of Jesus to minister to us here, remaining silently present as the slow story of faith-keeping unfolds without jumping forward to conclusions, or interrupting with fix-its. How compassionate of Jesus to resist the temptation to prematurely cheer us up with Easter, when what we need most is to weep and make full contact with our grief. 

 

We say “Jesus is the answer”, and he is; and sometimes the answer he gives is to refrain from answering so we have time to sink down into the significance of good questions. Today, I wonder if maybe he’s setting us an example as a good listener and friend, one who knows the best ways to “bind up the brokenhearted”. 

Luke 23:50-56

 

Now there was a man named Joseph who was a member of the council, a good and righteous man. (He had not consented to their plan and action.) He was from the Judean town of Arimathea, and was looking forward to the kingdom of God. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then he took it down, wrapped it in a linen cloth, and placed it in a tomb cut out of the rock, where no one had yet been buried. It was the day of preparation and the Sabbath was beginning. The women who had accompanied Jesus from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid in it. Then they returned and prepared aromatic spices and perfumes.

On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.

 

Imagine with me – Taylor Leonhardt, “On Holy Saturday”

 

How I would like to skip this part.

 

I can do sorrow, Lord,

Weep with you in Gethsemane,

Climb beside you to Golgotha

Til your tears become mine

I am no stranger to death.

 

I can do joy, Lord

Look for angels in the graveyard,

Embrace you by the seashore,

Sit down with you to breakfast. 

I am no stranger to resurrection.

 

But stranger to me is the space between 

Death and life

Despair and hope

The crush of the grape and the first sip

Of new wine.

Strange is the silence between my question and your answer,

But this is the room you haunt,

This is where you hover,

over the liminal waters of my unknowing,

Breathing on the smoldering wicks.

 

Tell me again

You will not let the flame

go out. 

 

Song – Taylor Leonhardt – Lights gone out 

 

Lord, I pray your will be done 

On earth as it is in heaven 

Today it’s hard to believe in 

 

Hell has never come quite so close 

I see the whites of his eyes and oh 

I feel the breaking of every bone 

 

CHORUS 

What do I do now that all the light’s gone out? 

 

How many times did I promise to 

Walk through the smoke and the fire with you 

That long before I ever knew the flame 

 

Not them, not this, not the thing that I cannot fix 

The house is burning and I’m helpless, I’m helpless 

 

CHORUS 

What do I do now that all the light’s gone out? 

 

What will we find at the bottom of 

This bitter drink this awful cup 

When all the pain’s been swallowed up 

 

Will it make us different 

Will we say with confidence 

That the love was worth the risk 

That the end is joy? 

 

CHORUS 

What do I do now that all the light’s gone out? 

 

Poem – Matthew Clark, Christina Rossetti – “A Better Resurrection”  

 

I have no wit, no words, no tears;

My heart within me like a stone

Is numb’d too much for hopes or fears;

Look right, look left, I dwell alone;

I lift mine eyes, but dimm’d with grief

No everlasting hills I see;

My life is in the falling leaf:

O Jesus, quicken me.

 

My life is like a faded leaf,

My harvest dwindled to a husk:

Truly my life is void and brief

And tedious in the barren dusk;

My life is like a frozen thing,

No bud nor greenness can I see:

Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring;

O Jesus, rise in me.

 

My life is like a broken bowl,

A broken bowl that cannot hold

One drop of water for my soul

Or cordial in the searching cold;

Cast in the fire the perish’d thing;

Melt and remould it, till it be

A royal cup for Him, my King:

O Jesus, drink of me.

 

Prayer – Brian Brown, Collect for Holy Saturday 

 

O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the

crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and

rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the

coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of

life; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

*The image featured above was created by Shannon Sigler.