Today is awkward. It is the day after. Yesterday Jesus was mocked, killed, nailed to a cross of wood, and left to die like a common criminal – while we watched. The evidence of our crime, of our sinful humanity is a broken and lifeless body. Our fingerprints are all over it. It is the day of desolation. Yesterday as nails pounded flesh in wood, as each breath became more labored, as a heart stop beating, all our dreams were shattered. The hopes we once had have been wrapped in linen, their memory lingers in the perfume and spices we have prepared.
The day after death. God is dead and yet we live. Without God, we have become the living dead. Living only to wait for death. As we roll the stone over the tomb of Jesus, we feel the weight of the stone before our own future. Our days are numbered. Our time is short. Holy Saturday, Easter Eve – the day has an empty feel about it.
Jesus’ absence from this physical space today confronts us directly. It forces us to ask ourselves many questions as we seek to discern God’s will for us and struggle on with life’s uncertainties. On this day, we consider the possibility that our faith can lose its meaning, that we can “lose Christ” through our own faulty choices. Today, we realize our limits, the questions for which we do not have an answer, the problems for which we have no solution. Here is the aftermath we finally stop and reflect on the meaning of it all.
A bloody cross. A lifeless body. The stillness of death. We are spent. He has paid it all but we are spent. He has carried the weight of our anger and our sorrow. He has confined himself to the limits of our logic and creativity. We have exhausted all possibilities. We have put it all on him. We have nailed all of it to the cross. And we have nothing left.
We have nothing left—but to wait. Today is the Sabbath. There is no work to be done. There is only waiting. We hope in the face of hopelessness. We long for meaning before that which appears to be meaningless. God is dead. His eyes are closed. He is not breathing. He is not here. Today is the Sabbath. We rest even though we feel restless.
We sit suspended between the tragedy of Good Friday and the triumph of Easter Sunday. We rest in the crucible of faith. In the midst of our puzzlement, we believe that today is a pregnant pause and not an epilogue. We hope because we dare to believe that the death of God in Jesus Christ, God’s revelation of his uncompromising solidarity with us is the most certain evidence that all is not lost, that there is more to the story. We may have nothing left but the riches of God’s grace are inexhaustible. We may not have an answer but the foolishness of God is wiser than our greatest wisdom.
And so we wait. We wait through the failure of Friday, through the silence of Saturday, for the answer of Sunday. We are right where God wants us to be--with nothing left to lose. Maybe now that we’ve lost everything we can gain a full understanding of all that Jesus truly was, of all that life and death truly meant. Maybe now that God has died for us—the idol we try to make God into, maybe now we can perceive the God who is infinitely greater and more than we dare allow God to be. Maybe now that we’ve lost our voice, now that all the screaming and shouting is over, the demands for proof, we can hear God in the whisper of an empty tomb, we will see God in the risen Christ.
We close with the verse of T. S. Eliot:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing…
In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
-Excerpt from Four Quartets, “East Coker”
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