Holy Saturday

The streets of Jerusalem were empty. Observing the Sabbath, the people kept to their homes. In the upper room, the Apostles lay hunkered down, scared and despondent. Their Savior was dead, crucified and buried. Were they next? The Romans still prowled about the city on the Sabbath, were they looking for them? Would the Jewish leadership want to kill them as they had Jesus?

And what of the cause for which they had dedicated the past three years of their lives to? What of the man in whom they had placed their faith? Did they lose hope? Did they begin to realize all the times He had foretold of His death? What of Peter who had denied his Lord three times? Guilty and still afraid, did he pray? What did he pray?

Holy Saturday, the actual day and not our commemoration and remembrance of it, is a day unique in the history of the world--of Reality, really. God was dead. The world had murdered its Savior. It’s Creator. No cataclysm, no war, no tragedy was or ever will be as dark as that day. The world got what it always wanted, to be the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, of good and evil, and found itself in despair.

This time, this space between two different realities, with salvation as a hope on the one side and with it actualized in Jesus’s resurrection on the other left this particular Sabbath a haunting and desperate quality. A quality that for those of us who spent time outside the faith find all too familiar.

Life without Christ is a sad, desperate, and lonely place, one in which the depths of our despair are only fully realized once we have come to know Jesus. I am always reminded of a line from the film Excalibur when King Arthur drinks from the Holy Grail, “I didn't know how empty was my soul... until it was filled.”

Like that Holy Saturday long ago, life without Christ can seem normal, even good at times. But that is because God was and still is the source of our Being, the immutable One who keeps all Creation in existence. Yet mere existence and our human capacity to know good and evil can only get us so far. It can only whet the appetite but can never truly fill. The world promises us meaning, but in the end the only meaning it really offers is our usefulness to it. If we are not useful, as consumers, as cogs in a machine, as propagators of the world’s values or ideals, we become its enemy, to be cast aside if we don’t put up a fight or killed when we do.

That same impulse to destroy Jesus is of the same virulent strain that seeks to discard the elderly, euthanize the suffering, anesthetize those in mental anguish, and abort the inconvenient child. That is the world without Jesus, that is the world as it existed that first Holy Saturday, and it is the world far too many men and women live enslaved in. But just as Jesus did not come in the guise of a conqueror but as the servant, subservient even unto death, the answer to the anguish of those in that eternal Holy Saturday, those who are still haven’t answered Jesus beckoning call, Is not one of our force or cajoling.  For Jesus, the one who rose again from the dead, giving us the gift of life everlasting, did so by inviting us die and rise with and in Him. And to have one’s invitation accepted, one must be inviting.