Holy Saturday
Most of life is closer to Holy Saturday than Good Friday or Easter Sunday. We live in the in between, the already and not yet. We live most days not in great tragedy or in joyous celebration, rather in the waiting, in the expectancy that despite the reality that things are not the way they ought to be, something in our bones knows that one day all will be made right.
T.S. Eliot reveals our problem well when he writes “humankind cannot bear very much reality”. We rush through Friday because we are uncomfortable with pain, with our mortality, with a God wrapped in skin who exposes his naked vulnerability for the world to see. This is uncomfortable for a people who cannot even bear to see a loved one cry without shrinking away in discomfort. We unsuccessfully try to fortify ourselves against all possible pain, only to run face first into the reality of our powerlessness.
Not only that, but we turn the authentic hope of Sunday, hope that forms worldview and solidifies unshakeable conviction, into a syrupy sweet caricature of chocolate bunnies and ostrich-like avoidance of the way things are. We dress up Easter in facades that don’t fit quite right and expect a candy basket to satisfy the soul level hunger we all try desperately to fulfill.
We find Holy Saturday situated after Good Friday, after our introspective reflections on the death of Jesus, the abuse of his body, the truly Innocent One wrongfully murdered by the empire, the corrupt religious authorities, and the manipulated masses. We sit in the darkness of Good Friday, the shadow filled valley, the dry desert of the temptation to abandon hope, we sit with the weight of lament in the pit of our stomachs. We need this.
Cementerio General, Ciudad de Guatemala, Zona 3
Then comes Sunday. He is risen, risen indeed. The hope, the joy, the celebration. The lights and flowers and feasts. Sunday knows that a better day is coming, that the aches and traumas and corrupt corners of ourselves will all come untrue. That not the way it ought to be will become unknown. Because He rose, everything changes.
We are, in the words of Zechariah (and later reused by Dr. Cornel West) “prisoners of hope”. Because He gave His life, because He rose again, we can be discipled into our Holy Saturday identity of prisoners of hope. Prisoners- because we cannot look away from the pain of the world that our redeeming Savior is inviting us to step into, to demonstrate what His Kingdom is like, to pray the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven in tangible ways. Hope- because we have been given the end of the story, we know what the kingdom will look like, will feel like. Despite the brokenness of the world, individually, collectively, systematically, and cosmically, our Savior is bigger.
Holy Saturday invites into the tension. We are invited to feel deeply and hope with certainty. We are invited to become a prisoner of hope, one who cannot abandon hope despite the layers of brokenness life confronts us with daily. Either extreme would be easier, but, ultimately, unhelpful. I invite us to Holy Saturday, to become familiar in these spaces, to be discipled towards becoming prisoners of hope.
Will Vucurevich
I have practiced using the Psalms as prayers through different times of struggle, grief, injustice, and pain. Psalm 143 gave voice to the desperate prayers whispered during a series of unjust events I have faced.