It’s Saturday.  A spring Saturday, so: yard work?  Chores?  Kids’ school or sporting events?  Normal, typical “Saturday stuff.”

But this is also the “silent day” of Holy Week.  Jesus has been opposed, accused and betrayed; deserted, denied and abandoned; arrested, tried, sentenced, tortured and put to death in the most shame-filled, degrading and dehumanizing way possible; buried.  What possible place could such events, especially that final; one – “buried”—have on a spring Saturday in April 2022?

In a sin-sickened world, death touches everything and everyone.  Even us, in ways small and so large we cannot even talk about them.

Jesus died around three o’clock that Friday afternoon.  The Jewish Sabbath would begin Friday at sundown.  That Saturday was therefore both the day of rest for Jesus’s followers.  There was nothing to do but to sit with the terrible reality that Jesus was and (hurriedly) buried.

So on this spring Saturday, allow some time for silence … for sitting with the ways death has touched your life, the lives of those you love, the life of the whole world … for awaiting the dawning of the First Day of new creation.