HOLY SATURDAY DEVOTIONAL
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I believe one of the greatest challenges of the human life is the experience of sitting inside pain and grief. I find that when I am entombed in my suffering, my prayers take the form of questions as I ask God to offer me the compassion, tenderness, and deliverance I thought I could count on when I first believed. There is something about that middle place, the place where my faith and my reality feel deeply at odds, where I am forced to wrestle with doubt knowing that the tussle won’t tear me from my belief, but instead that it will somehow join me to a God who can survive the fight. The remembrance that my love for God and God’s love for me can survive the conflict is, in and of itself, a form of belief, as it means that instead of disappearing from God entirely I stay connected, because even when my prayers are questions they are passionate, as they are born out of my desire to be connected to God, to feel the love of God, not to leave God and my faith.
Inside this tussle I always experience during my suffering, one of the great comforts to me is my belief that Jesus Christ himself experienced the same doubt, the same questions of God, the same big ask that God would spare him suffering and instead offer him the compassion, tenderness, and deliverance he thought he could count on when he dipped toes into the river Jordan. My grief over the entombed Jesus calls to mind his prayer: My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want (Matthew 26:39b). Even Jesus knew the tussle, the conflict of desiring to follow in belief and also escape suffering. And yet today, we behold him in the tomb, his prayer in the garden only delivering him into another garden, this time the garden where his body is laid in death.
Holy Saturday invites us to be honest about the reality of our suffering, the prayers we pray out of conflict, the ways we tussle with the tension between our faith and the reality of life before us. The gift of Holy Saturday is that we are able to behold the dead body of Jesus and know that, against all odds, there is a way out of the tomb. When we are in our own sufferings, feeling so covered in the reality of death and suffering that we can almost smell the spices that promise we are given into decay, we can remember that this day is not the last day. There is a tomorrow that will greet us at dawn with the compassion, tenderness, and deliverance of God.
