Waiting For The Dawn

“… as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end… God is faithful.” – 1 Corinthians 1:7-9

Many have remarked that living in this pandemic has made lent particularly meaningful as we’ve been forced to give so much up, but I think this year Holy Saturday encapsulates how I feel. There is great mystery in the fact that God did not raise Christ directly from the cross. There was a day in between. The day Jesus stayed dead. As the Westminster Larger Catechism states in its answer to question 50, “Christ’s humiliation after his death consisted in his being buried, and continuing in the state of the dead, and under the power of death till the third day.” As a reading for Holy Saturday inThe Liturgy of the Hours goes, “Something strange is happening on earth today—a great silence, and stillness.”

Holy Saturday was a Sabbath: a day Jesus’ followers grappled with confusion and grief while pinioned into inaction, unable to do anything but sit in inconsolable despair. Holy Saturday is a day of epic disappointment, of the bursting of grand hopes. We are held there in that despair, all our illusions and indulgences emptied. That is how the harder moments of this time have felt: held in place, unable to do anything to retrieve what is lost, unable to speed anything up, contending with monotony and grief and the strange still silence of the world. 

What happens when you are there in that place? We learn to hear words like the ones Paul writes here in 1 Corinthians: God is faithful. And so, we can wait, and even be present to the wait. In a way, Holy Saturday is symbolic of this pandemic which is symbolic of the entirety of my life: living in brokenness while waiting for the resurrection that will surely come. I am waiting for something. God sustains me in the waiting. And I have hope in what I wait for.

This is the first Easter I’ve had since reading N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, which I highly recommend. “What are we waiting for?” Wright asks in the preface. “And what are we going to do about it in the meantime? Most Christians don’t know what the ultimate Christian hope really is… the classic Christian answer to the question of death and beyond is not so much disbelieved as simply not known.” He describes in chapter 12 how salvation is not about the death of the body and the escape of the soul, not about “going to heaven when we die”—salvation is “being raised to life in God’s new heaven and new earth.” The present bodily life is not valueless because God will raise it to new life. What we do in the present will last into God’s future.

As Simone Weil wrote, “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” Our Holy Saturday is different from that first terrible one, because we know so much more about what we’re waiting for. All the same, part of the work that Jesus did somehow was in staying dead for this day in between, and as his followers there is meaning to us being in that space as well. There is value that will last. May God sustain us to the end.