Holy Saturday

I haven't really observed Holy Week this year. I mean, sure, I went to the Palm Sunday service, and Maundy Thursday, but in the middle I went to classes and drove back and forth from Virginia for an interview, and spent what little time I had left unwinding with my friends. After all, when else am I going to get to be with them in these casual ways? When else will I get to run errands and cook and dye Easter eggs with these amazing people who have shaped my life for the last three years? But I digress. I haven't been in the spirit of Lent much and I certainly haven't been in the mindset of Holy Week.

But this afternoon, on this quiet, lonely, drizzly Holy Saturday, I've been thinking about Lent. I wonder if the disciples knew, in the forty days leading up to their leader's execution, what was coming? Somewhere in their hearts, in the back of their minds, did their intuition tip them off? Did they feel the growing dread in the pit of their stomachs as they approached Jerusalem? Did they see the discomfort in Jesus' eyes as he listened to the shouts of Hosanna from the mouths of the same people who, he knew, would be shouting, "Crucify him!" only a few days later?

Could they fathom the meaning in Jesus' actions in the upper room? Did they realize that, when he said he would not eat and drink with them again until they were together in heaven, that I was warning them about his imminent death? When they fell asleep in the Garden, did they understand that they were slumbering away their last moments with God on earth?

I frequently wonder about the disciples. What made them follow? Did they believe that Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, God incarnate with them? Or did they think that Jesus' words about being the Son of God were somehow metaphorical or hyperbolic? It seems so often that they misunderstood. Even after he revealed his identity, did they really understand?

And, if they did, what must they have thought on Friday, when they watched the Messiah, their hope, be crucified as a criminal? What must they have thought when the man they expected to be king, to liberate them from Roman occupation, to save them from persecution and death, was killed by the government?

But most of all, I've been thinking about Saturday. What did Christ's followers think and do the day after their leader, their friend, their hope had died? The Bible doesn't talk about what happened on Saturday. It skips straight from the momentous events of Friday's death and burial to the women's discovery of the empty tomb. No one recorded Peter's guilt after he denied Christ. No one talks about how the disciples reacted when one of their own, Judas, was found hanged outside the city gate. Mary Magdalene's tears and grief were not expressed with ink on paper. Did they have any hope left? Or did they see only that the one who had guided them for three years, who had conquered disease, temptation, and death, who had taught them so lovingly and given them hope, was gone from their lives, seemingly forever? Did they have any hope in what they did not, and could not, see?

Confusion, pain, grief... where is the hope in that? When your loved one is gone, what then? When everything you believe in is washed away, what is left? I do not know. Now we know that Easter will follow, but the disciples did not. And on Holy Saturday, resurrection seems like a weak, amorphous, dreadfully tantalizing impossibility. At that point, there is no hope yet, there is only continuing to exist; inhale and exhale, and live.