Holy Saturday

I find myself identifying with the disciples right now. They had just spent all that time with Jesus, eating the Last Supper, and fully expecting that he would deliver them. Probably in a big, loud, mighty way. As he was being beaten and crucified, I wonder if they were thinking, "So when are you going to save us? What are you doing?" And then he died.

Silence.

Jesus was gone.

What happened to all those promises he made to them? What about all the hope and joy he said they would have? Where was that? To the disciples, it seemed as though he had failed. He didn't come through for them. He was dead.

And then, Saturday. An entire day of dreadful nothingness. No word from God. No sight of the Messiah. Melissa from the LPM blog puts it this way:

Faith and hope are non-existent from dawn to dusk. As Alan Lewis says poignantly in regard to Holy Saturday: “death is given time and space to be itself, in all its coldness and helplessness” (Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday, 37). A disquieting thought, right? You know, God could have willed from eternity past that Jesus would be resurrected a fragment of a second after he died on the cross. But He didn’t. Holy Saturday: an entire day when God was presumably absent from the scene and no answers were offered but a mocking, chilling silence. We’re talking here about humankind having literally no hope and no confidence of redemption secured or battles won.

That's where I am in my life right now. No answers. No end in sight to this depression. God's not coming through for me like I expected. But I have to desperately hold on to hope. The hope that maybe God is doing something. The hope that maybe there's more to this story than I can see with my eyes. I don't know that for sure. But I'm clinging to it for dear life. I'm clinging to Jesus for dear life, waiting on the resurrection.