Faith from the Silence
4-5-2022
Where was Jesus, on
Saturday? In the Apostles creed worshipers recite, in the fifth line, “He descended
into Hell.” But did he? We Baptists don’t generally recite traditional creeds
of the church. We don’t feel bound by them. ‘Descending into Hell,’ seems to
say Hell is a place that is reached by descent (stairs, a downward climb or
something else?). That understanding of a three-tiered universe, which requires
a flat earth, by the way, is incompatible with our present day understanding of
space-time.
First Peter 3:19, which
tells us that Christ was put to death but then preached to “spirits in prison,”
evokes images of Christ’s Saturday work without locking the story into a
first century worldview. If prison = souls cut off from God because of sin and
Christ, as 1 Peter says, preaches as a spirit, then this passage can account
for his activity. Still, it is not a concrete, specific explanation.
Holy Week is a big deal. Palm
Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday each have special
names. Monday through Wednesday seem appropriately pregnant with anticipation.
But Saturday is just silent. I think that’s where we live our faith lives, on
Silent Saturday.
We live after the crucifixion,
the ascension, and Pentecost, but before the second coming of Christ. We live
in that in-between time, and it’s a long time: two thousand years and counting.
The silence of it, the waiting, the want for tangible, measurable certainty can
be the soil in which our faith grows. We have to take on faith that the stories
of the Bible happened and that the promises of scripture can be trusted. We
have to believe that the Holy Spirit is active in the world and in us.
The Spirit cannot be weighed,
fingerprinted, or tested for DNA. God acts in our world, but exists beyond it.
God transcends our experience of reality. As we sing the anticipation of Palm
Sunday, walk in the heavy sorry of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and rejoice
in the piercing, life-giving light of Easter, we do well to pause on Saturday.
We sit still. We listen. God may speak. God may not. Either way, because of faith,
we live the only possible reality we know: God is with us, loves us, and will
guide and bless our lives. We bank our very existence on the faith we have, a
faith that spend most of its time growing on Silent Saturday.
