Holy Saturday (the day before Easter) is usually pretty busy for me. Since, well, the second Easter that I experienced as a new creation I’ve been intimately involved in the church and making everything just right for Easter Sunday. But this year is different. Theres no music for me to rehearse, no chairs to set up, no mulch to lay down, or lilies to arrange. In fact it’s kind of eerie how quiet things are. Today, rather than rush around doing the work of the church, I had to sit. I had to feel. I had to experience a type of depression (not only brought on by a visit to Walmart – however that didn’t help) that I normally skip right over. I think I had to experience the reality of the cross, and for once I didn’t know how to deal with that. The despair of knowing that come Monday the physical realities of this world will be the same hurts. It had me asking the question, What if Resurrection doesn’t come?
Waiting
Now I don’t mean to negate the power of the resurrection. Of course Easter is going to happen, it is going to matter, and honestly it’s going to be awesome. We are going to celebrate resurrection day in a few short hours, and from our homes we will say “He is risen indeed!” And we will mean it. But what I’m talking about here is the fact that it feels different this year. We face a crisis and a life that probably echoes the feelings and reality of the disciples’ on the first holy Saturday more closely than ever before. They sat, and they waited. Jesus had told them that he would rise from the grave. But not until the third day. Here on the second day they wondered, will it really happen?
I think that living in this space, in the waiting, and allowing it to take its course in our psyches and our emotional lives is healthy. It’s healthy because it allows us to connect with a major theme within the biblical narrative. Abraham had to wait for God’s promise of a son and descendants to come to fruition. The Israelites waited in Egypt, and then in the Wilderness, and then again in Exile. And that’s just the major meta-narrative stuff. The psalmist cries out “How long will you hide your face from me?” (113:1). David had to wait to become king, and then never saw the temple completed. The list goes on, and the point is this: God has a purpose in the waiting, but for us, for the disciples, for the Israelites, it just feels like abandonment and a good time to complain and doubt.
Why Does Resurrection Even Matter?
I know some of you who read this may not be on the same page as me when it comes to this whole resurrection thing. But here’s the thing, for me nothing matters without Jesus’s resurrection. It is the cornerstone of all of my beliefs. If there is no resurrection, every other miracle has no ground. If there is no resurrection, the Bible doesn’t have any authority over me. If there is no resurrection, Jesus was a liar. And if there is no resurrection, then every single thing that I have aspired to in my entire life is worthless. All people have presupposed truths that they read into every single situation, for me it’s the resurrection.
So for us, as people who are living in the midst of global and personal crises at a time when we are supposed to be celebrating the miraculous return of Jesus from the grave, resurrection has more meaning. More hinges on this whole thing, because we long for a world that is healed and experiences resurrection. And many of us hoped we would see it around “Resurrection Sunday.” But while we celebrate the physical resurrection of Jesus and the spiritual resurrection that moment in history has brought us, we still in this moment, and every moment since the cross are living in holy Saturday.
The Age of the Wait
Whether we realize it or not, the physical resurrection of Jesus foreshadows a physical resurrection that he promised would come to us as well. So we are in an in-between time. The narrative of Jesus’s life ends with the grief of the Cross, the pain of Waiting, and the glory of the Resurrection. The narrative of history grieves the loss of our identity when Jerusalem was destroyed and we were deported to Babylon as well as the grief of the Cross. As the church we live in the pain of waiting. We hold to the promise of God making all things new, while we watch the world, the nations, the earth, and even our own churches spiral through cycles of death and despair. And we cry out “how long Lord? How long must we wait?” We cry out, because we recognize the wait. We acknowledge the hope that is anchored in the reality of that first Easter.
And so that is where I am on Holy Saturday. Probably the most “Holy Saturdayest” Holy Saturday that I’ve ever experienced. But this is good. This reminds me of my place in this story. Yes, on Easter Sunday of 2013 I began my journey as a new creation in Christ, but I’m not finished yet. Or rather, God’s not finished. God promises to make all things new, God promises that our destiny is to live physically in a world where heaven and earth coincide. A place where the power structures that perpetuate evil on all levels no longer sink their claws into us. A place where we belong. That is what resurrection is all about, that is what we have to look forward to, and that is what we are called to imagine, create, and image into this world while we wait.
So if Monday comes, and the world is the same, and the resurrection hasn’t come yet for you, that’s ok. If you question, and doubt a bit, or search, or just cry our “HOW LONG!?” that’s good. That’s part of the wait. It’s the part of the wait that helps us to heal and focus on the coming resurrection. This is a staging ground, a green room, a dress rehearsal for life after COVID-19, and beyond that for life in the age to come. After Jesus’s resurrection the world was changed forever by a handful of believers and the Spirit of God moving in and through them. We have been given an opportunity to change our own world once the world is back in business. Will it be business as usual, or will we look to the coming resurrection for our inspiration of how to live now? Resurrection changed the game 2000 years ago, and it can change the game for us now, we just have to hold on to promise of resurrection.
Grace and Recovery 