Holy Saturday

Today is Holy Saturday; our Lord is in the tomb. The church calls this day the Blessed Sabbath. The title implicitly connects Holy Saturday to the seventh day of creation, the day on which God the Creator rested. Christ is in the grave, in a sense, resting from His work.

But this connection points to an even greater truth that Easter Sunday is the first day of New Creation. When Jesus raises from the dead, the beginning of the restoration of the world has begun. The Gospel of John portrays this through thick symbolism. When the women who come to the tomb on Sunday morning discover that Jesus is not there, they move quickly to a garden. And when the risen Jesus first appears, they mistake him for a gardener. The irony, of course, is that God has been about the business of planting gardens since the beginning.

But of all the days we commemorate in Holy Week, this is the least acknowledged. Often, we celebrate Good Friday and then move quickly to Easter. I think the reason for this is that our modern culture has little appreciation of the significance and meaning of suffering. We are a culture which places importance on comfort and success. A bit of this mindset has crept into the church. Thus, we want to move as quickly as possible to Easter morning, for this, after all, is the success! This is the day that death is conquered. But Holy Saturday reminds us that there was no conquering of death without first being conformed to death. For Christ to raise on Sunday morning, he first had to die. Holy Saturday confirms that Christ indeed conformed to our human nature and he conformed to it even to death.

Let us remember today that the way to resurrection and redemption had to pass first through the grave.