What about Holy Saturday?

I have been continually struck by the absence of a proper title for the Saturday of Holy Week. As the day before Easter Sunday, arguably the most important day of the Christian calendar, you'd think it would have a more venerable role in the week long services that are called Holy Week. There's Palm Sunday to start off the week, but the momentum of the week really gets going on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. [In fact, I have noticed that many churches, assuming that congregants won't make it back to church before the next Sunday (Easter Sunday), race through the story of Christ's entrance to Jerusalem to the trial to the death on the cross to the anticipation of the Resurrection on Palm Sunday. Thus, a weeklong process is condensed into two days.]

On Good Friday, Jesus was nailed to the cross and uttered the words "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" before he died and was buried.

Even now as I type, my urge is to burst in with the "he rose again from the dead" part of the Apostle's Creed and voila! We're at the joy of the Resurrection!

But- what about Saturday?

The story of Jesus is reminiscent of a movie we're watched about 2000 times- once you've seen how it ends, it is pretty hard to appreciate the tension felt when we didn't know what was going to happen. To use a completely trivial example- I was a wreck when reading the Harry Potter series. I mean, that last book! Wow, I didn't sleep all night because I was completely absorbed in the story and riddled with anxiety about whether my hero, my beloved hero who I had basically grown up with, was going to make it out ok.

Thus, in my humble opinion, it seems that if Easter Sunday is the high point of the Christian year, Holy Saturday might be one of the darkest days. Holy Saturday was the time of silence, the time of waiting... where the folks watching weren't at all sure what was going to happen next.

This wasn't just me being a nervous wreck because of some character in a book- this was a group of believers who thought enough of one man's work to drop everything and follow him. They had left their families, their loved ones, and their jobs... all to follow a man through small towns in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire. And now... He was dead?? Really? What was the point of it all, if he was really gone? How can the Savior cry out that he has been forsaken and then die?

No one was sure of anything during that time. Had I been one of those followers of Jesus, I think I would have felt the doubt and uncertainty creep in. After all, how can a God be killed? Especially for the people of the time, this was in many ways a total impossibility (isn't the point of being divine that you don't have to deal with that sort of thing?) However you look at it, these folks had taken a major risk. And on Holy Saturday, the results of their gamble were still very much in the air. No side could claim victory, only anxiety.

What do you do on Holy Saturday, when it seems that all hope has been lost? How can we fully appreciate the joy of Easter Sunday without the utter hopelessness of Saturday?

If I might continue with my thought train, it also seems indicative of something within the church that we have never really known what to do with Holy Saturday. While I am far from being a church historian or liturgist, in my own experience I can't recall a service for the day.

Just because there is blank space in the narrative does not mean there is no substance. The silence of Holy Saturday might be one of the most profound lessons for our community. What does the church do, when all the lights go out? "The night may be darkest before the dawn," but that only comforts us because it presumes the dawn will come. What does it mean to live in the darkness with no certainty of the coming dawn?

The haunting quiet of Holy Saturday is too easy to lose in our race to the glory of Christ as a risen and victorious Lord. I wonder what we can do to slow that down, not just during Holy Week, but during the rest of the weeks in the year.
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Another thought: I also imagine the reactions of the broader community when faced with the grief of the followers of Jesus. What about the people who had condemned Jesus to the cross? Jesus might have left, but all the humans were still stuck in the same little corner of the Roman Empire. I hope this isn't too flippant to say... but I also imagine Holy Saturday must have been really awkward and uncomfortable. The broader community still had to interact with one another during this time of deep grief for a segment of it. The people who said they wanted Jesus crucified didn't evaporate- they continued to exist alongside the devout friends of Jesus.

That thought transitions me into a broader concept I am struggling with now. Thanks to a free month of Netflix, I have been racing through a large number of pretty depressing and poignant documentaries. The two I watched today, "Forgiving Dr. Mengele" and "Deliver Us From Evil," both dealt with the deepest darkness of the human soul, the former in regards to the Holocaust and the latter in regards to pedophilia within the Catholic priesthood.

From my experience in Nashville (as described in my last post), I have had the subject of forgiveness heavily on my mind. In the first documentary, a woman who was subjected to horrible experiments by Nazi doctors in Auschwitz speaks out of her conviction to forgive all the Nazis for their crimes. She is lauded by some, but interestingly not supported and even criticized by many of her fellow survivors. Lastly, she is convinced by a person she meets to put her ideal of forgiveness to the test again by meeting with a group of Palestinians in the West Bank (she lived in Israel for 10 years). While I don't want to ruin it, I will say that I was left with a sense of unease and a lack of resolution in the end. [Very important: I am making no comment on what victims/perpetrators in either case should do as I am merely a passing observer of these two films].

The moral ambiguity present in these cases, the deep and long lasting pain and lament described by the people in each case.... seems somehow fitting for Holy Saturday. There was not resolution or easy answers in either case and viewers of the two films are largely left to figure things out for themselves. After watching "Deliver Us From Evil," I wept at seeing the pain of the victims and their families. After speaking with a Catholic priest in Nashville convicted of molesting young boys, I was disturbed and compelled by his humanity. For me, this means that I can't watch that documentary with the same easy lines drawn in the sand. I am left unsettled, in the most visceral sense of the word.

Thus, while I long for Easter Sunday... I wonder if I didn't move too quickly through my own Holy Saturday.