Lent and Easter are the most significant time of year for me. Together they draw me into a journey of reflection on my faith, my humanity, how I act in the world and how I relate to God. When I come out the other side of them I feel like I’ve started again and re-entered new life. It’s my real new year time.
Allow me to be honest though, I’m not great at the journey. I always, without fail, stuff up whatever my lent commitment is, which is always frivolous and often decided at the last minute the day before lent begins. Then during lent I find myself getting more out of the reflections I create for the public via the internet and radio than I do out of anything I commit to specifically for my own, personal journey. As I bad as I am at it, it still gives me plenty of space to think about the Easter story before Easter arrives.
I also admit to liking the chocolate and delighting in my daughter’s love of the Easter Bunny and the games she plays because of it. I know that would annoy a lot of purists, but what the heck, it’s all an added bit of fun and I’m not high minded enough to frown upon it. I can live with it because it doesn’t carry the same stress, overdone consumerism and blatant extravagance of Christmas.
All that aside, thinking through the days of Easter, the superstars are Friday and Sunday – the Crucifixion and Resurrection – and they should be, they’re the point. But they’re not what I want to dwell on right now because today is the day that I think is the unsung hero, the quiet achiever if we want to reflect on the story of life… it’s the day for the rest of us – the Saturday in Easter: Black Saturday – that nebulous day between the superstars. It’s the desert day. It has become one of my favourite days to reflect on.
Many, when thinking about what happened between the Crucifixion and Resurrection consider the burial and what Jesus might have been up to, but there’s another story there for the rest of us – the story of the disciples and it’s full of more questions than answers – much like a desert. Black Saturday is apophatic.
Think about it, the disciples have gone from the heights of walking with Jesus daily for a few years. They’ve seen his miracles, they’ve seen him shake the foundations of the religious elite, they’ve watched him touch lepers, eat with prostitutes and tax collectors and heard his deeply rich parables. They’ve seen him in his glory in the Transfiguration.They’ve watched others adore him and they’ve declared him to be the promised Saviour while standing in the middle of a stronghold of pagan worship at Caesarea Philippi. Metaphorically speaking they had been to the top of the mountain with him.
On Good Friday that all came crashing down. They clearly hadn’t understood all that he had said. They went so low that Peter, the one who declared him to be the Saviour, denied him three times as Jesus was sentenced, tortured, mocked and hung on a cross. I’m with Peter – caught in the middle of that I think I would have been shaken, scared and would have denied him as well. It’s too easy to say we wouldn’t have when we have the hindsight of the Resurrection.
Jesus was crucified and buried. The person they believed to be the promised Saviour was dead. Their hopes for liberation were smashed against the rocks. The sun set on that horrific day and dawned on a new one (the Sabbath). In our commemoration, that new dawn is our Easter Saturday. From the perspective of the disciples they didn’t have Easter Sunday to look forward to so when they rose on that new day, what did they have? Nothing – a desert.
In the account of the Resurrection in Mark the report of the empty tomb is given to the disciples who were mourning and weeping. In Luke they don’t believe he has risen and in John we hear that they didn’t understand that he had to rise so that time between the Crucifixion and Resurrection must have been a low time.
How often is life like that? Like a desert? How often do we hope for something only to see that hope torn away? How often does life seem to drag on with nothing out there in front drawing us forward? How often does doubt creep in and take over? How often does God seem distant, unreal or uncaring? How often do the stories we shape our lives by seem like nothing but a flight of fancy? How often do we look back only to see those things that have felt heavy and all we can see when we look forward is more of the same, nothing but the endless plod of life?
That’s Black Saturday. It’s the desert, the doubt, the low times. It’s the day where the carpet has been ripped out from under us. It’s the day that reflects not the highest times in life or even the lowest times. It’s those times in between where we can’t see the mountain peaks because of the fog, but we can see the valley floor because that’s where we’ve been but we aren’t there now.
The temptation now would be to offer the hope of Easter Sunday, but I’m not going to. I’m going to leave us sitting with today, the day of the desert because today is where faith really dwells and we get to make a decision in the silence. Do we keep moving forward in trust, or do we stop and throw the towel in? That’s the question of Black Saturday… what now?