Lamentations 1:1-22, John 19:28-42
It’s hard to be glum on Holy Saturday, because we are getting so close to Resurrection Sunday. We know what happened, but it is good to remember the shock and awe of Jesus’ family and friends as they wondered how everything went so very wrong.
Wright takes us to the topic of waiting in hope, one we must live in daily as Christians. He refers us to Jeremiah’s words in Lamentations, “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow…” (1:12a) It is the sheer awful pointlessness, the hopelessness of it all, that should overwhelm us at this time, like the prophet looking around Jerusalem, which had been full of people going about normal life, a thriving town in all directions, and seeing instead devastation, ruin, families torn apart, utter hopelessness.”
But the first Easter has passed, and we do have the whole story, so we see more than just sorrow. Even Jeremiah saw more: “…he insists that God is in this too. You have done this, he says. You have brought us to this point. You have allowed all this to come upon us. Now you might think that this is a pretty dark view of God, and in a sense it is. But the point is that only by clinging on to the sovereignty of God is there still hope. If you say that God has no idea what’s going on either, and is just as helpless as we feel, then things are bleak indeed.”
In the story of the first Holy Saturday, we can find our own stories in certain seasons of our lives. With the disciples on the road to Emmaus, we may at times say, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel’ — with the sense of, ‘But he can’t have been because they have killed him.’ Our sentences will fit our stories, though, “We had hoped that God was going to bring our lost child home, that God was going to give us a baby this time, that God was going to cure the illness this time…” Wright says, “We have expressed our sorrow and anger, and we have brought it to the cross and will leave it there. Now we must wait quietly to see what God will do.”
Most of us have such seasons of waiting for resurrection in particular stories. Wright says, “Holy Saturday is the moment when everything stops and waits.
“And waits — for a different kind of answer. If you want God’s hope instead of yours; if you want God’s love instead of yours; if you want God’s thoughts instead of yours – then you will need to go through a time of silence, of resting, of ignorance and dispossession….Only when, in days and years and decades to come, people look back and see the new things that God will have done, things we can’t at the moment imagine or plan for, we will say, ‘Yes: we needed to let go of that anger and grief, to leave it on the cross of Jesus, to see it buried in his tomb; because God’s new creation is God’s new creation, always a surprise, always a shock.”
For reflection: What about you? Where does this Holy Saturday find you? Do you have stories of disappointed hope, of dreams deconstructed today? What might it mean to wait on God in the midst of these stories?
Do you have stories of seeing the new things that God has done in previous stories of dashed hopes? Write them, remember them, ponder how God worked redemption and resurrection in those places.
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