FutureChurch

Steve Lewis posts a semi-apology about coming across a little cranky when he hears about the anticipation of Easter Sunday. Not because Sunday isn't important (and it really is!), but in our eagerness to celebrate the most important day in history, we can too easily skip over the challenging details of the Easter journey.

Many Christians focus on Easter Friday, on the cross of Jesus, the place where our sin is dealt with with. Their focus is on the unjust suffering of Jesus, who was bruised for our sins, and suffered for our transgressions. Easter Friday tells us that we are free, forgiven, and that a man (God!) died to accomplish this.

Other Christians focus on Easter Sunday, because it is our greatest hope - the promise that what God did with Jesus on that day, he promises to do with all of creation at the right time. The resurrection is why I remain a Christian, because it's the promise of justice, of new life, of new creation. It cannot be relegated to "It's a really powerful metaphor, but we know that Jesus didn't actually come back to life." N.T Wright says,

"People have been told so often that resurrection is just a metaphor. ...In other words, [Jesus] went to heaven, whatever that means. And they've never realized that the word 'resurrection' simply didn't mean that. If people [in the first century] had wanted to say that he died and went to heaven, they had perfectly good ways of saying that." The whole point of the Christian story is that the Resurrection really happened, Wright insists. The disciples rolled back the rock on the third day, and Jesus' body was gone.

Source: Newsweek: Far From Heaven

Very few Christians talk about Holy Saturday, perhaps because it's far too uncomfortable to dwell on, yet it's no less important than Good Friday or Easter Sunday. Perhaps it's the paradox of the death of God by God which makes it hard. God dies...by his own hand.

Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer - Isaiah 53:10

If we are to fully enter into the Easter journey, we cannot be satisfied with Friday's "sin is dealt with" or Sunday's "new creation has started". If we are to live Easter as the first disciples did, we must carry their expectations: that Jesus was going to become king of Israel, and rid the country of their oppressive occupiers (Rome). Palm Sunday celebrates Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem - as a king (another paradox there: a king who enters a city riding on a donkey). The first century expectation of Jesus' followers was immense, and the hope placed upon him cannot be understated. But then Jesus dies, and with him, that hope.

When Jesus appears to the disciples on the Emmaus road, what are they doing? They're heading back home, to their old lives. Their hope of something new, of freedom, has died with Jesus. What seemed so certain is no longer. What they'd given up their lives to believe in, was not true. Imagine this utter despair, of everything upon which your life was staked, to be false.

And what was worse, is we know that God did this. God removed the hope of the disciples. God killed God.

Most Christians skip over this disturbing truth, and so gloss over what seems to be a periodic part of life: times when hope seems lost, and everything worth living for is gone. When even God seems to have died, and we’re left with…nothing.

The gift of Holy Saturday is that it invites us to enter into this paradox, and meditate on its disturbing reality. Where is God? God is dead. What does that leave me with? What, indeed...

To frame this despair with, "Don't worry, Sunday is coming!" is to miss the point, and to miss out on this question that God poses to each of us: What do you do when God is dead, and when the death of God has been caused by God himself?

Far from finding this disturbing, I find comfort that this difficulty has been built into Christianity itself, by God. Too many times to count, I've had my theology stripped from me (perhaps in the same way that the Palm Sunday altar is stripped for Maundy Thursday), my relationship with God exposed to be something about which I can't tell what about it is real. God is silent so much of the time, and I cannot hear him. My world clamours with conflicting claims of God ("He's good", "He's angry", "He's impotent", "He doesn't exist") and what's worse, God doesn't step in to settle the argument.

In the middle of this, conversations happen which question the role of Christianity in the world, and what its relevance (if any) is. I wonder if the church really will survive another 50 years, and if it does, if it will have any impact on South African society.

This is not the Good Friday reality. This is not the Easter Sunday reality. This is Holy Saturday, where God withdraws from the world, the angels are silent, and we mourn.

The prayer goes,

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

On Holy Saturday it should be,

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

Or simply:

Christ has died.

This is what God invites us to contemplate.

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