In the Waiting

In my faith tradition, today is observed as “Holy Saturday”, often billed as a time of silence with Jesus resting peacefully in a tomb. Here’s how Holy Saturday speaks to me: The narrative has Jesus coming into the city of Jerusalem, hailed as King (with much hope and expectation from Jews wanting to get out from under oppressive Roman rule), and within the week, he was arrested and brutally executed like any other criminal. This was probably not at all what his family, friends and followers had in mind (“Wait. He was supposed to be our king. Now what?”). Can you imagine what they might have been going through? This was NOT how it was supposed to be, and odds are good they were lost in a chaos of emotion wondering what to make of it all, as we might have been too, had that been our story.

Yet in many ways, it is our story.

What happens in us when our own future takes a sudden unexpected turn in a really bad direction? How do we make sense of it all? Is that even possible? Holy Saturday embodies this tension, and invites us to hold it as well. Can we let the tug-of-war between fear and hope - the struggle of not knowing - be as it is? It’s tempting to want to sanitize it, wrap it up with a neat bow, and rush on with our lives, but what if we resisted doing that, just for today?

There can be something rich and worthwhile about sitting in discomfort and not knowing. It can be brave, gut-wrenching work. I get it. Yet some things can only be discovered if we wait. If we stay. If we allow all that is Mystery this particular kind of space to create something new in us. Will we?

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Image: Christopher Sardegna, for Unsplash