Luke 23:50-56
Chris Tweitmann
God is dead.
Eons before
Nietzche declared
it to be so, God died.
But Nietzche got it wrong when he claimed
we killed God.
For yesterday,
on the Friday we call Good,
Jesus offered
his life for ours.
We did not execute him
as much as Jesus
lovingly gave up
his life for us.
Willingly, he took the blame for a crime he didn’t commit
and embraced a death
he didn’t deserve.
Hanging up there
on the cross,
Jesus bore the total weight of the world’s sin
—all the ugliness, the hatred, and cancer that results
from our
narcissistic indifference
and willful rebellion
– Jesus bore it all
until it killed him.
The Son of God,
the One through whom
all things were made
and without whom
nothing was made,
surrendered to death.
His breathing ceasing.
His heart stopped beating.
His side was pierced
by the centurion’s spear, and blood and water poured out.
Jesus, the Word made flesh, became a corpse.
His lifeless body,
caked with
blood, sweat, and tears,
was taken down,
cradled in his mother’s arms,
and then, hastily,
wrapped up and
placed in the tomb.
On Good Friday,
we still had the crucified man to look at.
But today is Holy Saturday, the day God was buried.
It’s all over.
Holy Saturday is empty;
the heavy stone of
the new tomb is
covering a dead man;
it’s all over.
And that brings us here—
before an even greater
and weightier obstacle
of a world without God.
Holy Saturday is
the hollow space
between Good Friday
and Easter Sunday.
Good Friday is Christ dying.
Easter is Christ risen.
But Holy Saturday is just Christ dead and entombed.
Sitting here
awkwardly between
the unbearable pain
and suffering of the Cross
and the exuberant joy
and celebration of
the Resurrection,
today can feel like
nothing more than
a placeholder.
Because of this,
we might be tempted
to regard Holy Saturday
as not very important.
After more than
two thousand years of
telling and remembering
this story,
there’s not much suspense between Friday
and Sunday anymore.
We all know how
the story ends
and so we view the middle as boring and unimportant.
The day after
the death of a dream,
as the spectacle of crucifixion is over,
as the tattered and torn body comes back down to earth
after a corpse is
treated more gently,
more respectfully than
the soul of the person
who once inhabited
that flesh
—when it is
all said and done
—the vast majority of us
go on with business as usual in our lives on Holy Saturday.
Truth to be told,
most of us will just
skip directly to
the end of the story
because that’s
the “happily ever after”
—that’s the part
we like the most.
But we should remember there was none of this
over-familiarity,
no such overconfidence
for Jesus’ first followers.
For these men and women,
Saturday dawned
eerily quiet and still.
On that first Holy Saturday,
it appeared that
evil had triumphed.
The disciples are
huddled together in grief
– not resting
but lamenting
on the Sabbath.
It’s not hard to imagine
the disciples were
descending into
their own kind of hell.
All the hopes they had
for the Messiah to come
and liberate them
have failed.
Jesus is gone.
What they witnessed in
the darkness of Friday night was terrible,
but the morning after, Saturday,
probably seemed
even worse.
Jesus has left them alone
to face their future.
Their collective mourning
for their fallen friend,
their Master,
was certainly laced
with fearing for
their own lives.
What do you live for
when the One
you believed was the Way, the Truth and the Life
is dead?
What kind of future is there for any of us
when the One
who is the Light and Life
of all humanity,
breathes no more?
When the Creator has fallen,
from whence can inspiration,
does creativity, arise?
And how do you go back when you’ve come so far?
When you’ve
tasted and seen
the goodness of God
– the inklings of his Kingdom,
how can you now
be satisfied with
anything less than
a glimpse of
the glory of Heaven?
But now
the stillness and quiet
of the earth are matched
by an eerie silence
from heaven.
How do we pray
when God is dead?
What is there to say
when the Word
– the Word of Life,
the Word made flesh
– is now muted?
There is a void, a hole
—a huge vacancy
without Jesus’ presence
—an emptiness that
cannot be filled.
Days like today
seem endless.
They wear on slowly mired by sorrow and uncertainty.
On days like this,
we do anything
to occupy the space,
to fill the silence.
Perhaps some
among the disciples
reminded the others
that Jesus said
he would rise from the dead.
He had promised them
he would come back and take them to be where he is,
didn’t he?
Maybe, all is not lost.
Maybe, this isn’t the end.
But then again,
dead is dead.
Death is final.
Sure Jesus brought
others back from the grave.
But who is going to raise him from the dead?
Jesus saved others
but if he could not save himself from the Cross…
We can imagine
the disciples
wrestling together
in this sacred space
between faith and doubt.
And from what
the gospels all share
about how things
initially went down,
doubt quickly gained
the upper hand.
Doubt tends to
overshadow belief
when the shadow of death hangs over us.
It’s hard to see anything
past a dead-end.
The deeper
we find ourselves
in the darkness,
the more challenging
it becomes to perceive
any light at all.
As doubt began to increase,
the disciples locked
their doors from the inside.
Hiding from the authorities
whom they expected
would be knocking
anytime soon,
did any of them
suggest leaving town?
Getting out of the city
as quickly as possible.
We often convince ourselves
that distancing ourselves from our pain,
our suffering
is a good solution.
We bury our grief
along with our dead.
Should we expect
the disciples to
have been any different?
But rather than cut and run,
the disciples stand pat.
There is unfinished work
to be done.
If nothing else,
they owe their former Master a decent send-off.
And so,
a decision is made
to go to the tomb
tomorrow morning,
after the Sabbath,
to anoint
Jesus’ body properly.
When we don’t know
what comes next,
sometimes the next step
we can take
is all that we have.
Resolved together,
at least in this next move,
the disciples pile into
various corners of the room and eventually fall asleep.
It was likely
a restless
rather than peaceful slumber
– a sleep disturbed
by the lingering uncertainty of their safety
as well as their future.
Perhaps
we might be thinking.
That was then,
but this is now.
They didn’t know
what we know.
They didn’t have
what we have.
An empty tomb.
A resurrection.
So why bother
hanging around here
when we know
Sunday is coming?
The answer is simple
but not what
we want to hear.
And it’s because
we don’t want to hear it
that most Christians
don’t observe
or pay much attention
to Holy Saturday.
This is ironic
because the simple answer we don’t want to hear is
Holy Saturday is
the space we occupy
for most of our lives
– the space in-between.
Call it liminal space.
Transitional time.
The pregnant pause.
Holy Saturday is
that interval,
that season,
that long agonizing gap between what has been
– all we have known
— and the resolution
to the question of
“What happens next?
It’s a stretch of time
when our faith is tested
far more than
at any other moment
exactly because
the way forward is
unclear and uncertain.
Facing the future
is decidedly easier
when we know
what happens tomorrow.
But when we can’t
see around the corner,
when we don’t know
how things are going to go
— if they are going
to go at all
— we are living in
Holy Saturday space.
The last twelve months
have been a prolonged
Holy Saturday space for us
individually
as well as collectively.
So much has been lost.
So much is still changing.
And yet,
with vaccinations
being rolled out
we’re all willing ourselves
to believe a global pandemic is now behind us.
With a contested election finally over,
we’re all convincing
each other
that partisan politics
will become
a thing of the past.
Despite continued acts
of injustice and violence,
we keep insisting
attitudes and structures borne of racial discrimination
are past history
rather than
our very present reality.
We all want everything
to go back to normal
even though no one
knows what normal is
any more.
We all long for
the way things were,
despite the fact
that has become
painfully obvious
after being tried and tested over the last twelve months,
things weren’t always
the way they were
cracked up to be.
Rather than face the loss and the failure of
this past year,
rather than
uncomfortably sitting
in the grief,
we are clamoring
to move on, to move forward
– even though
we have no idea
where we are going.
For so, so many,
the perceived absence
or silence of God
has been deafening
in this prolonged season
of sickness and death.
Many within the Church,
in their fear of
the death of Jesus,
through the temporary loss
of being able to
physically gather together
for worship,
have sought to force
the resurrection of
Christ’s Body
by taking matters
into their own hands.
But all that has emerged
in our inability
to wait on the Lord’s timing
— for a resurrection
only God can deliver
– is the dark
and disturbing attempt
to animate something
that looks and sounds nothing like Jesus.
In our refusal to sit
in the difficulty
and awkwardness
of Holy Saturday,
we avoid the revelation
that comes from
this seemingly
insignificant space.
That God had to die for us
so that He could
truly live in us.
The disciples thought
they knew who Jesus was.
They had their expectations,
their vision for Jesus
as their Messiah.
Before and certainly
during the Cross,
the disciples
struggled to believe
and to follow Jesus
because they kept trying
to get Jesus to fit into
their box
— the expectations
and vision they had for him.
They had to come to grips with the death of
their expectations,
of their vision,
of their dreams of Jesus
in order to finally begin
to perceive who Christ is
– in order to become reoriented to
Christ’s expectations,
Christ’s vision,
Jesus’ dreams for them.
Likewise,
for we who follow Jesus,
God has to die for us
so that God can truly live
in and through us in Christ.
Holy Saturday is that space
when our initial fire for Jesus
borne of our expectations,
our vision, our dreams
for Christ
— when that fire goes out.
Holy Saturday is the moment
when the image
we’ve formed of Jesus
— that ends up looking
more like us than
God’s character
and purposes
— when that false image
is irrevocably shattered.
Holy Saturday is
when the voice
we try to impose on Christ,
what we want to hear
rather than what Jesus
is actually saying
— can no longer speak.
On Holy Saturday,
we aren’t merely dwelling upon the death of Jesus.
In contemplating
Jesus’ body,
there in that tomb,
we are staring
our own death in the face.
Holy Saturday reminds us,
everything else we fear,
every struggle we have,
is an awareness of,
some adverse reaction to
the threat of losing our life.
For it is our fear of dying
that is responsible
for so much of
our lust and greed,
so much of
our denial and arrogance,
so much of all
our grasping for
and clinging to power,
so much of our frantic, anxiety-driven activity.
We unceasingly strive
to do and to be.
But Holy Saturday forces us to realize
that despite
all our doing and being,
on our own,
left to our own devices,
we still end up
at the same place – DOA.
Dead on arrival.
Today soberly reminds us
that death cannot be circumvented or avoided.
But on Holy Saturday,
while we, of course,
confront the inevitability
of our physical death,
we also come to terms with our need to die to self.
After all,
Jesus doesn’t just die for us;
Jesus, in dying for us,
calls us to follow Him
in dying to ourselves.
And the starting point of that
— arguably harder
and more painful death
— is facing the reality
that Jesus doesn’t live for us
– to meet our expectations,
to line up with our vision,
to fulfill our dreams.
Jesus doesn’t live for us;
Christ dies for us
so that we can live for Him.
Christ dies for us
— to transform
our expectations,
to align our vision with His,
to fulfill His dreams
for all creation.
Holy Saturday,
on the other side
of the Resurrection,
is not about grieving
the loss of Jesus;
it is grieving the loss
of the Jesus of
our own making.
Unless we put to rest
that Jesus,
we will end up
worshipping and becoming
a decomposing
and lifeless corpse
rather than
the living Body of Christ.
We need Holy Saturday
because it is only through
the rubble of the house
we try to build on the sand
that we finally see the sky,
the Son who remains greater,
whose purpose and plans
for us are always
infinitely greater
than we can ever imagine
or hope for ourselves.
Let us then
not move too quickly
from this dead space.
Here and now,
as the dust
continues to settle,
let us grieve
all the ways
we’ve attempted
to make Jesus
into something He is not.
Let us recognize
Christ has died
to negate
all our false presumptions about Him
and mistaken attempts
to control Him.
In this moment of clarity,
let us then humbly confess
all those parts of ourselves
– our pride
and sense of entitlement,
our desire for reckoning
and vengeance,
our apathy and
our indifference,
our guilt and shame
– let us humbly confess
all those parts of ourselves
that need to be buried
with Jesus
rather than being allowed
to continue to breathe.
As we die with Christ,
let us remember
what he taught us
as we let go
and yield our fears,
our failures,
our shattered hopes,
and long-forgotten dreams.
It is only as we humble
and empty ourselves
that we can be exalted.
Giving up
the last breath of the life
we once knew,
let us cling to
the promise that
death will never have
the last word in our lives
— physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually.
In our families,
in our friendships,
in our neighborhoods,
in this world,
there is nothing so dead
in our lives
that it is beyond
the power of
what Jesus will do next.
The dryness of bones
can have flesh
put back on them.
The emptiest of hearts
is never so deep
that it is impossible
to pump them
full of fresh blood and life.
There is no pain too intense,
no depression too dark,
no weakness too complete
that cannot be healed.
But until
we’ve walked through
the depth of
the darkness night,
we can’t understand
how glorious it is
to be bathed in
the dawning light
of a new day.
There has to be death
before there
can be resurrection.
Today is a good day to die
— to die to ourselves
in Christ
— because tomorrow,
Jesus rises.
And
“this is a trustworthy saying, if we die with him,
we will also live with him.”
(2 Timothy 2:11)
Amen.