The day after Jesus’ crucifixion must, in some ways, have been the hardest day of the disciples’ lives. For the rest of Jerusalem, the world was back to normal after the commotion of the three crucifixions; their fellow Jews would be getting up and going to the synagogue to observe the Sabbath, some of them probably with a sense of satisfaction that that Galilean gadfly was out of the way. For Jesus’ disciples, however, the reality and enormity of their loss was just beginning to sink in, and the world would never be back to normal; it would never be right again. Oh, they would adjust in time, learn to go on—but life would never be the same. Saturday was an empty day, all the color in life faded to a drab, dingy, depressing grey.
As such, I think Holy Saturday is a particularly important holiday for our culture, whether we pay any attention to it or not, because this is where many people in this country live. Why else is depression reaching epidemic status in America, especially among those of the younger generations? Why else could Elizabeth Wurtzel call her memoir Prozac Nation—and why else would that book have been a bestseller? Why else are our suicide rates so high? We live in a world that’s just getting by, most of the time, a world of people trying to cope with broken marriages, abusive parents, drug-addicted children, broken dreams, evaporated hopes, one failure after another . . .
I used to believe that most people sailed through life with no major hurts or disappointments, but three decades have taught me that’s an illusion; there are very few people like that, and most of those are fakes. Rather, there are a great many people in this world this morning who are standing exactly where Peter stood that Saturday: someone just pulled the rug out from under them, and they aren’t sure there’s a floor beneath their feet.
And it’s at this point, into this moment, that Easter comes. After the darkest nights in human history, in the dirty grey light of not-quite-morning, the Son of God, lying dead on a stone slab, got up; and as the Christian singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson put it, “the sound of the fiery blast of Death exploding shook the firmament.” The entire world, all of creation, lurched sideways, and the chains holding it down snapped; the grey of the day shattered in a million pieces as the Light of God blazed forth from that tomb. Hope conquered hopelessness; life overcame death; love broke the power of sin; God had the last word; and indeed, nothing would ever be the same again.
But if Easter is a light to crack the sky and blind the very stars, it’s still a light that far too many people don’t see. Perhaps they haven’t heard the message; perhaps they have only heard a distorted version of it that hides the light; but whatever the reason, they walk on in shadow. C. S. Lewis described Narnia under the reign of the White Witch as a land where it was always winter and never Christmas; for many in this world, it’s always Saturday and never Easter.
And so we see people carrying on as best they can, seeking out scraps of meaning to paper over their doubts, snaring bits of hope to give themselves a reason to keep going, snatching fragments of answers to ward off the questions that haunt and torment them; and from our cities and our towns we hear the wail of grief and the shriek of rage, the moan of pain and the cry of fear, and running through them all the sad whisper of loneliness, isolation, and alienation.
As human beings, at some deep level we need answers to the questions of why we are here and what our lives are worth, and we need the promise that someone loves us no matter what; and apart from God, this world can’t provide those. It can’t offer any resolution to the discordant voices of grief and pain, rage and fear. But over and above the discord, the thunder unleashed that first Easter continues to sound, the blast front of that explosion continues to roll over us; as Peterson says, “Throughout the wail and shudder, over the shriek and moan of man, the thunder has sounded and sung, and it is both the answer and the promise. It sings still, and you can hear what it says if you listen: love never dies.”