Finding Ourselves in Holy Week: Part 3
In my new book, When Every Space is Sacred, I make the case that Holy Saturday, the quiet space between Good Friday and Easter, is perhaps one of the most sacred spaces in the church calendar. This often overlooked and holy day provides a much needed space both for those who suffer from the ongoing trauma of Friday and for those who are disconnected from reality through an over-realized hope of Easter that we have not yet fully experienced in our everyday lives.
Over these few days from Maundy Thursday through Easter Sunday, I am sharing in parts the chapter on our need for Holy Saturday. May these reflections open you to a fresh awareness of God’s presence in each day of this Holy Week.
Catch up on parts 1 and 2 here:
Chapter 5 - Continued:
Life in the In-Between of Holy Saturday
The Holy Stillness of Saturday
Saturday is the day we remain haunted by the trauma of Friday. The shouting has quieted, the mobs have gone home, and the bodies are buried, but the world still doesn’t feel right. Yet, as Raleigh news anchor David Crabtree says, “I am hopeful because I am haunted. If I wasn’t haunted, I wouldn’t realize I need hope.”[i] Saturday is the day when we hope for Sunday to come, but we are not yet sure it will be any better. We don’t have the hindsight that everything will work out the way we want it. Yet being haunted by Friday drives us toward the hope of Sunday, whether we really believe such hope will be realized or not.
Entering the Mystery
Perhaps more than any other time in recent history, the entire world is trying to figure out together what it looks like to live on Saturday. Throughout the global pandemic, we assumed there was a light at the end of the tunnel, but we had no idea when. Many are still frightened by the long-term implications of the virus for individuals and for society. While the virus itself presented a scientific problem to be solved, the greater existential crisis raised by the reality of over six million deaths cannot be so easily fixed. As Samuel Wells notes, it is a mystery, not a problem.
A mystery I cannot stand outside. I have to enter it. A mystery is something I cannot just look at. It absorbs me into it. Someone else’s answer is unlikely to work for me. I have to discover my own…. The desire to translate something into a problem is likely to stem from a desire to resist its taking too large a presence in one’s life, too intractable a place in one’s imagination. When people talk of the problem of evil… they are usually on the way to degrading a mystery.[ii]
We attempt to control problems with our research, methods and strategies, but we cannot control a mystery. The COVID-19 outbreak raises a mystery for us in that it forces us to re-evaluate so much of who we are as individuals, as communities, as churches, and even as a nation and a world. What do we value the most and what can we live without? What defines us? Who are we when everything around us crumbles and our external distractions are no longer available?
These are the kinds of questions we must ask on Holy Saturday. We do not need to ask them on Easter because all is well. We are too filled with Hallelujah’s to worry about how our soul suffered in anguish only a day before. Neither can we ask these questions on Good Friday, because we cannot hear the inner whispers of the Holy Spirit, let alone our own heart and soul, amid the din of the mob and the wails of pain.
It is only on Saturday that everything we knew and everything we hoped for comes into question. God is dead and the universe grows cold.[iii] It is a desert place where we must truly consider what we believe and how those beliefs align with or shape our lived experience.[iv] The haunting stillness and silence of Saturday may be the crack in what James Smith calls our “immanent frame.” It is in this “cross-pressured space,” caught between the arid wasteland of Friday and the inexplicable transcendence of Sunday, that we begin to feel and be truly honest about who we are at the core of our being.[v]
Embracing the Silence
As we sit in this in-between space wrestling with the many existential crises of our day, words and reason fail to offer a satisfactory answer. There are no words to justify or explain away the crucifixion, just as there are no words to justify or explain away the horrors of genocide, slavery, terrorism, racism, war, or any other evil in our world. In his book, The End of Words, Richard Lischer says,
The multiple traumas of the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries have produced a sense of futility among those with a vocation in language. Violence has a way of making a mockery of words.[vi]
Words make a mockery of trauma. Evil is not rational. Healing our blindness does little good when we open our eyes to absolute darkness. The soul-crushing hopelessness of Saturday requires new ways to communicate because there simply are no words that will make things right. This is a space we must live through, not a space we can simply explain and fix so we can move on.
Saturday creates space for communicating through silence and stories. There is room for honest grief and lament alongside the beauty of holy imagination and hope. The absolute categories of Friday and Sunday begin to blur as we navigate the complex tensions between grief and joy, hatred and love, suffering and hope, death and resurrection. As we learn to hold these two extremes in tension, we bear a more faithful and effective witness to the Gospel. As we live into the fluid rhythms of Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we may discover redemptive possibilities for our everyday lives.
Jesus’ body was taken down and buried quickly on Friday because Sabbath was upon them. The women waited until the first day of the next week to prepare the body for a proper burial. The natural Sabbath rhythm of their lives created a space that so many do not have.
As a pastor I often get calls from church members asking about funeral arrangements and planning for bereavement meals on the day a person dies. On several occasions, I learned about the death from someone who wants to know how many family members we will need to feed and what day and time the meal will be. Part of my responsibility is to help people slow down and give the family some space.
Death happens on Friday and we are ready to skip straight to Sunday, when we can hold a “Celebration of Life” service where, among other things, we are reminded of the resurrection and eternal hope of Christ. The service brings a sense of “closure” to the tragic ordeal. Meals and cards may trickle in for a week or so, but after that, the world is ready to move on. But the family is left reeling. Everything that happened on Friday and Sunday was a blur. What those who are grieving really need is the silence of Saturday. Only in the silence can we embrace the mystery of death and the hope of eternity.
Resting in God’s Presence
I once spoke with a Jewish man named Moshe who ran a small shop in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City in Jerusalem. As I watched everyone preparing for Sabbath, smelling the fresh loaves of challah rolling by on carts, I asked him what specifically they celebrated when they gathered at the Western Wall on Friday evenings. He pointed me back to the Creation Story and God’s rest. He said that when God “rested” on the seventh day, God sat down in the middle of creation to be fully present with Adam and Eve. As the remnant of the Temple where God’s Spirit dwelt among the people of Israel, the Western Wall is the closest physical place the Jewish people can get to where God “sat down” and rested among the people. Saturday isn’t just about resting from work. It is about resting “with God.” More than anything, Saturday is about God’s presence.
One way we encounter the presence of God is by seeing the ways God is present in people’s lives. The pain and suffering of Friday turns us inward to a place of sorrow and self-examination. The joy of Sunday turns us upward as we give all glory, honor and praise to the risen Lord. But we need Saturday to turn outward toward one another.
I once served a church in which every room was organized in rows. Whenever I gathered for meetings, Bible Studies, prayer groups, etc. I worked hard to rearrange chairs in circles. On several occasions I shared how we are always looking at the back of each other’s heads, but we do not really see or know each other. We do not look each other in the eye. We do not gather face to face.
The implications of this corporate posturing are evident in the many assumptions people made about their fellow congregants, thinking everyone agrees with them on every issue even when members of the same family unknowingly held radically different and irreconcilable viewpoints. After three years, my teaching and modeling on this was still met with resistance and never really sunk in. Nevertheless, I hold firmly to the belief that while many congregations like to be together physically and socially, they do not always grasp what it means to be with one another in spirit, to be the Body of Christ. When the rhythm of our lives modulates back and forth between Friday and Sunday, it is no wonder we do not have the space to be present with Christ in and through one another…
For further reflection…
How do you respond to mystery and the unknown? Do you tend to embrace it with wonder and possibility or avoid it in fear? What role does mystery play in your spiritual life?
Describe a time when there were simply no words. How have you been hurt by the well-intentioned words of others in the midst of such pain or grief?
Put yourself in the shoes of the disciples on the day after the crucifixion. Where would you most want to be? How are you feeling? Where do you find God in the silence?
In what ways do you see Holy Saturday reflected in today’s reality? How might it be a helpful metaphor for coping with the collective trauma of our culture?
__________
For more on cultivating sacred space in your everyday life, check out my new book, When Every Space is Sacred, and open yourself to a deeper awareness of God’s presence in your life, in the church, and in every corner of this wondrous world.
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References
[i] David Crabtree, “D.Min 904: Communication, Inspiring and Guiding Change.” (Lecture, Duke Divinity School, January 8, 2020).
[ii] Samuel Wells, A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God. (Chichester, West Sussex ; Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2015), 129.
[iii] James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 78, 71.
[iv] Smith, 12.
[v] Smith, 139, 94.
[vi] Richard Lischer, The End of Words: The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 5.