The despair of holy Saturday.
The day it seemed God had failed. As if Jesus was a liar. As if his followers were to be pitied. The earth grieved. The women wept. The Word of God lay silent in a tomb. The light of the world snuffed out by the powerful exhale of evil.
It is so important for Christians to sit in the despair of it all.
Look around. Can you see the despair that exists this very day?
Families torn apart by those in power.
Little children denied the critical gift of early childhood education.
Widows hoping their monthly checks will still arrive. You know the checks? The ones that keep a roof over their heads and their medicine cabinet stocked; those checks.
Public schools under-funded, de-funded, dismissed as failures.
Immigrants living in terror.
AIDS survivors in Africa, currently staring death down because their incredibly inexpensive medicine is now non-existent. The most powerful, wealthy nation on earth ended its availability.
I do not need to go on. Look out your window -- It's all right there.
If we are going to experience true Easter joy, we must first feel the sorrow of Good Friday. And we must also first feel the despair, the shock, and confusion of Holy Saturday.
Alan E. Lewis, in his book Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday, asks the right questions:
How could a Father be fatherly and yet forsake the supposedly beloved Son?
How could God be God, and good, and yet allow such victory to evil and to death?
If the Son himself has been delivered up to destruction, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Good Friday, it seems, marked not just the last day for Jesus and the end of his hopes, but the last day for all hope and for the cosmos as a whole: the apocalyptic end of everything. The Word of God, which creates all things and on which all reality constantly depends, has fallen silent.
How could we trust the love of God if even upon Christ, innocent, holy, and divinely cherished, there has been poured out such ruthless curse and wrathful malediction?
How could we hope in the power of God if not even for the sake of this heavenly victim could God triumph over the earth's ungodly executioners?
If at this moment a person who lived so close to God is lying in a criminal's grave, rejected, relationless, and God-betrayed, what reason has the world to believe that even on the best days God is with us, comforting the weak, resisting the tyrants, vindicating the innocent, battling the demonic?
Oh don't skip over these questions today, friends.
Please sit in the despair.
Because, as Lewis puts it,
"We have not really listened to the gospel story of the cross and grave until we have constructed this cold, dark Sabbath day as the day of atheism."
To remember on this day that,
"The Lord has forsaken the divine path of righteousness and truth, and relinquished the heavenly throne to the earthly lords of falsehood and injustice. In the death cry of Jesus of Nazareth there resonates the ageless, universal protest of human suffering, affronted by the crookedness of human life, whereby the innocent are tortured and the diabolic flourish."
Don't skip these questions.
Don't turn away from the sorrow, the fear, the doubt, the hushed and horrified silence of holy Saturday.
Please sit in the despair.
It's not Easter Sunday yet.
