Holy Saturday – Pastor Ellen Mills

Holy Saturday

     It has a name, but it is rarely observed in our tradition.  A number of years ago, I read an essay that made me see it differently.  And those thoughts about the experience of Holy Saturday seem very fitting today.  Our practice of it may well be just busyness, doing all of the preparations for observing Easter the next day.  But it was not like that for those women who had to wait to go to the tomb.  It was their Sabbath, something that they would strictly observe.  No work could be done.  They had just gone through a time of severe trauma.  They may well have still been in shock.  Their hopes, based on the words and actions of their Messiah, had come to an abrupt end.  Jesus, whom they loved, and who loved and listened to them, had been turned over by the religious authorities, and crucified by the Roman authorities.  Not only were they powerless, they had no idea what was next.  They had heard what Jesus had said about being put to death and being raised from the dead.  But how do you understand something that has never happened before?  How could those words make sense?

     And for these women, the Sabbath prevented them from performing a very essential ritual.  Jesus’ body had been taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb so late that they could not anoint the body or begin the full ritual of mourning.  Sabbath said stop.  And so not only were they powerless to prevent what had happened to Jesus, they could not do any practical acts for him either.  For this day, this long day, they could only be.  They were in a liminal time, a threshold between two times: the horror of the day of his death, and the first day after Sabbath when they would have to go on without him.  Liminal time.  Time of waiting without knowing.  Time of waiting without having the power to change what now is.

     We are given no sense of what they might have thought or said on that long day.  But we are given one clue.  In each of the gospel accounts, we have at least one woman going to the tomb very early the next morning.  Whether going to the tomb was to anoint the body, or whether it was to actively wail and mourn Jesus’ death, the focus was still on death.  A body.  An ending.  It isn’t necessarily that they had no hope.  But it does imply the limitations of any hope they might have had.  Their time with Jesus had ended.  What would be next?  They would have the memories of those three years together.  Memories are about the past.  On the next morning they would be facing a new world, a world that they could not predict.

     And I go back to Psalm 22, a psalm of lament.  Lament was a deep part of their faith.  They were empowered to call out to God in pain, and describe the depth of their trouble, their grief, even their anger.  Then they would move to remembrance of what God had done in their lives, and the lives of their ancestors, in the past.  It would move to who God was, faithful and merciful, abounding in steadfast love.  And it would end by calling on God to act, to act because of who God was and is and will always be.  Amen.