“May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts
be acceptable to You, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer.”

It’s easy for us perhaps, looking back from this side of Jesus’ Resurrection, to be a little dismissive of Holy Saturday. By comparison with the accounts of Jesus’ Passion, on one side, and the empty tomb and Resurrection appearances, on the other, the Gospel writers spill almost no ink at all on Saturday. The writer of John’s Gospel gives us this morning’s account of Jesus’ burial, to be sure, but it’s a Friday evening event. And only heightening this lack of attention Saturday, to a period of really more than 24 hours, is how the next section in John begins: “Early on the first day of the week . . .,” referring, of course, to Sunday.

Just to recap a bit, Jesus dies before sundown on a Friday. Remember the reading from yesterday, emphasizing how the Jewish authorities did not want Jesus and those crucified with him to remain hanging there on their crosses on the Sabbath? Even in their drive to condemn and be rid of Jesus’ alleged threat to good order, there were certain religious formalities to be observed, certain rules of propriety to be followed, it seems, even if that meant hastening the death of the victim by breaking his legs, making it impossible – because of the pain – for the victiom to straighten up and take a breath. Suffocation became inevitable. But Jesus had already died, it was discovered, and so quickly the story moves on. He is taken down from the cross and placed, as we just heard, in a nearby tomb. That’s Friday.

But what about Saturday, the Sabbath? In John’s Gospel the next we hear of Jesus is in the verse from which I just quoted: the story of Mary Magdalene’s arrival at the tomb on the first day of the week, on Sunday. What of this day in between? What of Holy Saturday? Only Matthew’s account, of the four, has anything happening at all on Saturday:  namely, the Jewish authorities ask for and receive a contingent of Roman soldiers to guard the tomb. Interestingly, they feared a ruse by Jesus’ followers to remove his body and proclaim his resurrection as a rallying cry for their cause. Now we could probably go a few places with the fact that resurrection was even conceivable to these folks. Perhaps they intuitively knew more of the power of God than John’s Gospel gives them credit for. But that’s another sermon. So as for Saturday, that’s it – the only recounting the Gospels offer to 2000 years of faithful Christians for what might have transpired on that Holiest of Saturdays.

We can, of course, use the imaginations God gave us to consider what that Saturday must have been like. My thoughts turn not so much to the diligent and conscientious men in today’s story, Joseph and Nicodemus – the  last ones’ to lay eyes on Jesus that Friday night, before rolling the stone across the tomb’s entrance – no, my thoughts turn to the apparently sizeable group of women who had watched Jesus suffer and die on the cross. What of their Saturday, their Passover Sabbath? Surely this was no ordinary Passover for them. No, it must have been unique among the many they’d celebrated in all their years. In fact, this, the most high and holy commemoration and remembrance of God’s action in the life of Israel, must have been almost devoid of life for these followers of Jesus: the lingering bitterness and deep anger at the leaders in Jerusalem and the Roman state for the callous treatment and execution of Jesus, a man of peace; the dull heartache and accompanying tears of pain at the loss of not only their charismatic leader, but their beloved friend; and finally, the utter emptiness, the dread, the fear that always accompanies the loss of those so close and so important to us.

This is the kind of Saturday we can imagine for some of Jesus closest followers, those with him there in Jerusalem at the bitter end. But what of us? What of the Church now, in this time and place? Let us not forget that we do have, within our tradition, an account of Holy Saturday. Listen to the words of the Apostle’s Creed with reference to Jesus: “He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again.” Three sentences, three days. So on Saturday, the middle day of the Great Three Days, the Triduum, we, the Church through the ages, proclaim that Jesus “descended to the dead.”

So, however tempting it may be in anticipation of the outcome we know to expect, our tradition in fact does NOT dismiss or look past Jesus there in the tomb, lifeless, seemingly helpless. We DON’T skip from Christ’s bitter Passion and dying on the cross to his glorius Resurrection. What we do is stand in awe – here, today, on this dark, quiet Holy Saturday – we stand in awe at the God who loved the world not just as it was, but as it had been from the beginning of time. Those saints who had gone before could not be left out of such love.

We stand in awe at the God who emptied Godself so fully, so completely, as to descend not just to Earth and to us, the living, but who’s self-giving reached all the way through the very gates of Hell. As the epistle writer says, “…the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead, so that, though they had been judged in the flesh as everyone is judged, they might live in the spirit as God does.” Some theologians use a term I find particularly helpful: solidarity. For the world to be redeemed from the sin of rejecting God and God’s image in us, God came to us, to all and for all time: “For all redemptive light,” one theologian says, “comes uniquely from the one who was in solidarity until the end.”

And, of course, on this side of the Resurrection we can look back and see how the solidarity that brought Christ right down into the heart of death, as far from the Father as, well, as humanly possible – we can look back and proclaim the mystery of death’s destruction in that act. The Proper Preface we will use for Eucharist in the season of Easter reminds us that Jesus “… was sacrificed for us, and has taken away the sin of the world. By his death he has destroyed death …” By his death, he has destroyed death. God has confronted death and will prevail.

But for now, as we encounter Holy Saturday once again, with Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary Magdalene, Mary his mother, and the other women from Galilee, and indeed with all the disciples and with all the saints ever since, we watch and wait from afar: fearful, devastated at the suffering and death we have witnessed, our guts wrenched and empty – not realizing the reach of God’s solidarity with us; not realizing the depths to which God has descended for us; not realizing the mysterious work that is yet being done for us by our Saviour.

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