It's Saturday
and Sunday is coming
I realise I have unintentionally created a habit of writing about Holy Saturday. Which I am quite okay with—if you want to read posts about Good Friday and Easter Sunday you can drown yourself in writing. Even Thursday has a healthy dose of writing. Saturday not so much.1
When we think about time, and sacred time, the celebration of Easter is an act of re-enactment. We re-enter the events of Holy Week, so that in some sense we walk alongside the first disciples, as Jesus shares the last meal, goes to the Mount of Olives, is betrayed by Jesus, held on trial, crucified, and raised on the third day.
In another sense, we can ask the question, “what time is it now?” I mean, if we take Friday, Saturday, Sunday as ‘types’ of time, is everyday life for believers more like Friday (the darkness of death), or more like Sunday (the joy of resurrection). That’s something of why S.M. Lockridge’s famous riff on It’s Friday, but Sunday’s comin’ is so effective.2 It places us ‘in’ Friday, and highlights the futurity, certainty, and imminence of Sunday.
There are other ways to ‘typologise’ biblical times. Is the experience of the church more map-able to the Exodus, the Desert, the time of the Kings, the time of the Judges, the Exile?
And so, why Saturday? What’s the meaning of Holy Saturday as we re-live it?
If Friday focuses on the acute suffering of Christ, and Sunday on the joy and hope of resurrection, Saturday sits between, with the disciples, as they mourn in uncertainty, questioning, wondering, doubting, daring(?), crying, waiting. It’s dark and gloomy and overcast.
Insofar as all our lives are lived in the now-but-not-yet, that Christ has come but is coming again, that the Kingdom began in a kernel at his first coming, but will become in its fulness at his second, then all of life is a macrocosm of what Holy Saturday is as a microcosm. A time of waiting, subject to suffering, in which hope is difficult.
What transforms Holy Saturday is faith.
I don’t know what the disciples were thinking or feeling on that first Saturday, long ago. I suspect it is a mix of hope and doubt, faith and certainty. I don’t think they fully grasped Jesus’ repeated teachings to them about his coming death and his resurrection. Certainly the New Testament suggests they didn’t truly understand these things until after his resurrection. They wait, all the same.
For us, the equation can be different. We know that Christ got up out of the grave on Sunday morning. We know he’s coming back again. The certainty that faith provides shades the night with the greys of a coming dawn.3
There are people in this world who are spending this Holy Saturday huddled in fear. Another bombing, another drone raid, explosions, war, violence. It is right and fit to think on such people at this time in particular. To sympathise, to pray for them, as an act of solidarity. Human history offers no certainty of dawn. But Easter does.
However long the night, however deep the darkness, Sunday is coming.
Fun fact, one Gaelic expression for Maundy Thursday is Diardaoin a’ Bhrochain Mhòir, which translates as “Thursday of the Big Porridge”. Puts a new spin on the Last Supper!
There are lots of other reasons it’s effective oratory, to be sure.
And, again, this is one more reason for Lockridge’s sermon to hit home. It’s the certainty of Sunday’s coming that brings home the power of that hope.