I played around with the idea of leaving a blank post.  Get it?  Absence…I decided that doing that would be perhaps a little too cryptic/existentialist.

Yesterday we dealt with one of the problems of Good Friday, the day God died.  The day we remember the tragedy and triumph of Jesus’s death by crucifixion.  This happens on the first day.  On the third day, Jesus was raised from the dead.  But in between, we have Saturday.

One of my favorite things about the gospels is that none of them attempt to deal with Saturday.  Each covers events at which none of the disciples could have participated.  There are moments in which Jesus is completely alone, and yet we get words on Jesus’s lips.  There are other times in which the only witnesses to the events are people that would be less than charitable to Jesus (Herod, Pilate, for instance).  The evangelists show little restraint in portraying these events.  And yet, nothing but restraint is shown toward what happens on Saturday.  Further compelling is that there is no gospel agreement for what happens on Sunday, taking place in different cities and under different circumstances.

The church has historically attempted to deal with Saturday in a variety of ways.  In the Apostle’s Creed, Jesus “descended to the dead”.  Many medieval stories were told about Jesus going to hell to liberate the Jewish ancestors, leading them out of eternal damnation into salvation in heaven like a metaphysical Moses.

I have been deeply influenced by Peter Rollins and his book, How (Not) to Speak of God.  In it, he deals with the nature of faith and doubt.  The basic tenor of his argument is that Holy Saturday is our moment of greatest faith, as it is only in doubt that we can demonstrate the depth of our faith.  We’ve all heard the saying that the opposite of faith isn’t doubt, but fear.  Rollins argues that it is only in our confronting fear and the prospect that we could actually lose faith, that not only is faith tested, it is actually revealed.  Through doubt, we discover faith.  And if we have faith, we can discover doubt—the great discoverer of faith.

I could go on, but I trust you get the point.  What these attempts to get a handle on Holy Saturday show us is the conflict and confusion we feel for what this day means for us.  Growing up, Good Friday was a big deal and Easter was a big deal.  But when I tried to find out what happened on Saturday, I couldn’t get a straight answer.  When I asked why we didn’t go to church that day (after going on Thursday, Friday, and then Sunday), I couldn’t get a straight answer for that, either.  Holy Saturday seemed to be a day of silence.  We don’t know what happened—what happens—so we don’t even speak of it.  Saturday doesn’t get anything out of the deal.

Our silence demonstrates my cryptic joke.  In our silence, Saturday becomes absence.  The donut hole, if you will.  The day that only marks the time between the first and third days.

But what if it actually is about absence: God’s absence.  We are reeling from the death of Jesus and the loss of our Messiah and in our grief and pain, we get nothing from God.  Like Jesus, we might wonder why we are forsaken.  We might ask for mercy on those that are confused and conflicted.  We might help establish relationships between a chosen pair, accepting roles lost: mother and son.  But it is the day after God has died and it is the day that God is gone.

And while we’re at it, Saturday is the Sabbath.  From sundown Friday to sundown Saturday evening.  Hours after the crucifixion, Jesus’s body is taken down and put into the tomb for the Sabbath.  The notion that the disciples lost contact with Jesus, that we might lose contact with God for a day gives something for us to lose.  Remember, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

Years after the death of Jesus, followers of the disciples began celebrating not on the Sabbath, but on Sunday; perhaps pairing their sense of faith with the first day of the week, of Easter, and of the spirit of resurrection.  Perhaps it is time to reclaim loss and the separation that comes in death.  Perhaps it is time to reconcile our new life with the old that has passed before.  This is the work of Saturday.