Waiting for the Dawn

Whatever else we do on this Holy Saturday, let us beware the “refusal to be silent, the obsessive avoidance of emptiness.”

Or, to put it positively, let us pursue the ability to do nothing but wait.

In his memoir, The Pastor, Eugene Peterson recounts a memorable lesson he learned about Holy Saturday when he was a boy. His father, a devout Scandinavian Christian, raising his family in Montana, owned a small butcher shop in their small cowboy town, and the Saturday before Easter was their heaviest work day of the year. 

Peterson remembers assisting his father by taking orders, making deliveries, and sorting out the Easter rush. And every year, in the back alley of the Pastime Bar, there was a group of town drunks passing around a jug of Thunderbird wine. He’d run past them as he checked off one delivery after another. 

The group would drink all day, drowning their sorrows and “remembering the despair of a world disappointed in its grandest hopes, entering into the emptiness of death by deliberately emptying the self of illusion and indulgence and self-importance.” They’d either pass out in the alley or catch a ride home, but each one would stumble into consciousness later the next day, on Easter. Peterson notes the juxtaposition of their behavior to his own.

And, sadly, their despair missed it. But so did Peterson’s busyness. He recounts:

I grew up in a religious home that believed devoutly in the saving benefits of the death of Jesus and the glorious life of resurrection. But between these two polar events of the faith, we worked a long and lucrative day. Holiness was put on hold till Sunday. Saturday was for working hard and making money. It was a day when the evidence of hard work and its consequence — money — became publicly apparent. (42)

Peterson admits that his activity on Holy Saturday, his refusal to be silent, shaped a rhythm he had to unlearn years later.

Not only was the Good Friday Crucifixion bridged to the Easter Resurrection by this day furious with energy and lucrative with reward, but all the gospel truths were likewise set as either introductions or conclusions to the human action that displayed our prowess and our virtue every week of the year. God was background to our business. Every gospel truth was maintained intact, and all the human energy was wholly admirable, but the rhythms were off. (44)

He had wiped the sense of waiting from his consciousness. 

But if there were ever a time for waiting, for our remembering the holiness of waiting, isn’t it on Holy Saturday?

We do not pretend today as if Jesus isn’t raised — he is! At the same time, though, today we can remember the despair of the disciples as they huddled together, in grief and expectation, on that first Saturday before Easter. We can take note of how badly we want to experience more of Jesus’s resurrection life in our own and in this world. Jesus is raised, but there is more waiting yet to do for us who call him Lord.  

And today, in one way or another, let us not refuse that silence. But let us press in, a vigil of slowing down, waiting for the dawn of Easter morning.