Holy Saturday

 

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.