Holy Saturday: Absence Makes the Heart Ponder

As I sit in my comfortable living room on this late-April Saturday and watch the snow falling on our spring garden, I find myself thinking about absence. About the disciples of Jesus, especially the women, who had seen their friend and teacher violently and shamefully executed and laid in a borrowed tomb.  About that sabbath night and day, how their weekly worship must have been overshadowed by the weight and darkness of what seemed like the end of what they had been hoping for. 

The Apostles' Creed teaches that between crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus descended to the dead, and tradition says that his purpose was to release the righteous men and women of the Hebrew Scriptures from hell.  But this is one of those doctrines that developed with the benefit of hindsight; Jesus' friends and followers had little evidence that his death was anything other than a personal and public tragedy.

Today is the time in between.  The rest between musical movements, the blank space between sentences or paragraphs, the empty place in the heart after a loved one's death.  The old has ended, the new not yet begun - unknown, uncertain, without any guarantee that something will even happen, let alone be better than what was before.  Today is the day when God's absence seems a very real possibility, when all bets are off, when the old rules and promises and assurances have all been questioned, torn down, unwoven, and nothing has yet been rebuilt in their place.

Holy Saturday is a day for Christians to mourn, to ponder these things in their hearts (as Mary did), to trust in the rhythms of prayer and worship and community even when they feel out of synch with reality.  It is a day for anyone who has rejected what they were taught growing up (whether that is a literal 6-day creation, women as inferior to men, the idea that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching, or the idea that Jesus died because God was angry about sin) but hasn't yet figured out what the life-giving alternatives are.  It is a day for anyone who has walked away from comfort and security for the sake of justice or integrity, and found themselves out on a limb, seemingly alone.  It is a day when we have seen what the powers of the world are capable of - a day when violence, self-preservation, and darkness seem to reign.

It is a day to lament, to confess our fears and doubts and loneliness, to acknowledge the holes in our hearts where we have known disappointment and grief.  It is a day to pray Psalm 22, as Jesus did on the cross: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"

And it is a day to remember how that psalm ends, not in a place of despair, but in the assurance that God is as faithful as God has always been:

For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations.
²⁹To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him.
³⁰Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord,
³¹and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.

Sometimes during Easter weekend, it feels like cheating to focus on Resurrection before we get to Sunday - like I'm supposed to live through the denials, trials, suffering, and horror of the disciples day by day, page by page, as they did, without looking ahead to the next chapter.  But Psalm 22 helps me remember that Resurrection, that new and wondrous thing, is in some ways the expected outcome from the God of our salvation, the God of Abraham and Sarah, Miriam and Moses, Ruth and David and Isaiah and Mary.  And with St Paul, I hold on to this hope:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

Today is a day for the times in between, the empty places in our hearts and our lives, a day to remember that God is faithful even when we cannot feel God's presence with us.  It is day to rest, and to prepare for what may come.

Blessings.