Are you tempted to rush forward from Good Friday to Easter Sunday? To get all that talk of death out of the way? The Christian calendar seems to facilitate this. Not many traditions linger on what has been described as the long hiatus of Holy Saturday. And yet, to make sense of faith and life in our world now we need to be able to talk about death, not only physical death but also ecological catastrophe, and the death of optimism and certainty.
Alan Lewis wrote about this in his book, Between Cross and Resurrection (Eerdmans, 2001). This is one of the books still sitting snugly in my Gorbal’s study, but I found an extended quote on the Methodist hymnary website:
‘…if we believe that God lived in and through Jesus Christ then it’s important for us to think not only about what was happening to Jesus, dead and buried, but what was happening to God . . . also dead and buried. It’s a tough idea to get your head round – that God, too, experiences death on the cross and “knows how to die”.
Alan came to understand that God’s aloneness and despair on Holy Saturday is precisely that part of the Easter story that most closely mirrors so much of our own human experience. Three events of the last century, he suggests, bring into focus the sense of despair we so often feel about our world:
Auschwitz
Hiroshima
Chernobyl. . .
. . . three events that represent the possibility of soulless inhumanity, a nuclear winter and, at Chernobyl, “the terrible possibility of planetary death . . . the ultimate eco-catastrophe”.
Alan asks: “Who and where is God if God’s power and love can sustain such losses and accede to such defeats?” Is God uninterested, absent or dead?’
The 21st century, sadly, has examples of its own of inhumanity and ecological disaster
War in Syria, Yemen and Ukraine; crisis in Afghanistan; global hunger; the proposed UK deal with Rwanda to relocate asylum seekers; plastic in oceans and global warming. And here in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories the consequences of a failure to find ways to honour the human rights of all citizens of this small, contested country.
For Alan, Holy Saturday points to a new way of being. On Holy Saturday, the cold presence of the tomb (Jesus and all he stood for trapped behind an immoveable rock) speaks of collapsed confidence and abolished optimism. This was the experience of the disciples – wherever it was they’d fled to.
But the bleakness of their situation and the cruel insinuations of the tomb open us, as it would eventually open them, to the possibility of a different way of looking at tomorrow: a way not of fragile, shattered optimism but of strong un-killable hope.
“For hope, finding space to flourish in the very absence of optimism, is the courage not to be swallowed by despair but, in frank acknowledgement of rampant evil and negation, to trust in the possibility for life and creativity amid and beyond that malign [super-power], though assuredly not in its denial or avoidance. The very realities which banish confidence and legitimise despair also invite a hopeful embrace of love’s living power to prevail in history.”[1]
Powerless God
Entombed in our indifference
Help us to wait with you
Through the long hours of Holy Saturday
Awaiting ‘Love’s living power to prevail’.
For this and not our own strength
Will birth true hope.
Amen.
[1] https://www.methodist.org.uk/our-faith/worship/singing-the-faith-plus/posts/avoiding-holy-saturday/ accessed 16.04.22
Stepping out of the boat... 