Faith Works 3-29-24

Faith Works 3-29-24
Jeff Gill

Holy Saturday defines our time and circumstances
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When it comes to the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, you'd be forgiven if you thought of it as "Egg Hunt Day."

Holy Saturday isn't a part of many church traditions, even when Easter, or the celebration of Christ's resurrection, is observed. Liturgical churches have a whole series of events from Palm Sunday through what's often called "Holy Week" to mark that last period of the earthly ministry of Jesus, but Holy Saturday can get left out.

As the sun sets on Holy Saturday, Easter vigils begin in many traditions, and some Christian preachers just make sure to get to bed early (if they can) to wake up in time for sunrise services, a more Protestant tradition in place of Easter vigils.

But over the last decade or so I've found myself increasingly drawn to consideration of Holy Saturday itself. The time unambiguously between the death of Christ Jesus on the cross, and the first dawning awareness of his rising, or what English speaking churches call Easter.

One apocryphal line of the tradition teaches that this is the time when, according to a certain reading of I Peter 3:19, Christ "went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison," or in the medieval iconography, performed "the harrowing of Hell." My favorite Bosch work shows Jesus basically kicking down the doors of Hades, which would have gotten everyone's attention down there. Some even suggest he left behind a "Closed for Business" sign which is a topic for another day.

It's the quiet sad clarity of what Holy Saturday points back to that has my attention: the time after Jesus was declared dead and publicly buried in his borrowed garden tomb, and before the promise of new life was fulfilled. We think of Mary and John and those who left with them; of Peter wandering distraught through the streets of Jerusalem. It's all too easy to imagine the disciples left to their own devices the night before, and facing a new day, a chill sunrise, with their confusion bumping up against their faith. Food had to be found in the marketplace, cooking in the kitchen, cleaning to be done as the guests for Passover left for the countryside. It seemed to most of them to be "life after Jesus." What now?

We can jump ahead too quickly. Into Easter, into resurrection, into proof and witness and belief. Thomas will remind us soon enough of the depth of that despair which had to be settling in for many of Jesus's followers on Holy Saturday. They could remember Jesus, but what value was memory in the presence of hideous loss?

Where we can jump ahead is to our day, and the parallels and echoes and holographic comparisons between that Holy Week and our own journey with Jesus. On Holy Saturday, in our lives lived out in faith, we are between promise and fulfillment; death is a continued reality, with resurrection still a prophetic reality we struggle to make sense of in the day to day. "Practice resurrection" as Wendell Berry suggests, but we still ask ourselves "how?"

We know what's coming Easter morning. Lilies and anthems and maybe even some trumpets, certainly songs celebrating "Christ arose!" The disciples in their rented rooms and borrowed campsites around Jerusalem after the crucifixion knew what Jesus kept telling them, "and on the third day rise." But they struggled to make sense of it, too. Some probably better than others.

We're given reason to think Mary Magdalene may have had a better idea than most of what was coming, but even she set herself to practical arrangements for life as usual. Spices and aloe, burial preparations for a body already entombed. Somehow, what Jesus said will make sense. So she carried on.

As shall we, this Holy Saturday.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he knows it's too soon to say "Christ is risen" but it's good practice. Tell him what you endure in faith at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.