Please don’t forget Saturday!
We should be like Joseph of Arimathea and embrace the day between Good Friday and Easter Monday, argues Eric Gaudion
Eric Gaudion
“It’s Friday – but thank God Sunday’s coming!” is an approach to Easter that I understand. Good Friday followed by Easter Day have a familiar resonance to them for any who recall the rhythm of earlier Elim paschal celebrations.
But Saturday seems to have fallen off the Christian radar screens. To a casual observer it might even appear as an irrelevant day. Jesus died on Friday – so that dreadful day becomes precious for all who realise that he died for our salvation, the forgiveness of our sins.
Sunday is self-evidently the highlight of the Easter story. Jesus rose again and destroyed the power of death. In so much of the stirring music of Easter we are either moved with the pathos of Friday or thrilled by the victory of Sunday morning. But hey – please don’t forget Saturday!
At the heart of the amazing accomplishments of the first Easter was a day of disappointment, tears, and loss. The great teacher and prophet was dead. His disciples were in hiding, fearing for their lives, too. Hope lay discarded in a Middle Eastern tomb.
Despair and sorrow were the emotions filling the hearts of those who loved Jesus. Except perhaps for one, Joseph of Arimathea, who late on Friday, asked Pilate for the broken body of the Lord. It was he who pulled out those cruel nails and laid Christ’s frail frame down, wrapping him in a clean linen cloth.
Then he, or his servants, carried the bloodstained mess to his own garden and laid it in the grave that he had prepared beforehand for himself and his family. God’s rescue plan was well disguised, but underway. I reckon that Joseph had heard and understood the prophecies Jesus made about his coming death and resurrection. Yet, he embraced Saturday as a vital part of the Easter story. He knew that for the power of Easter to work there had to be a pit of despair and death before anything good could come of it.
I wonder if he thought about that as he ordered the preparation of a tomb in a beautiful garden near to a place of public execution. In a miracle much more profound than Christmas, Joseph carried the Lord of Glory as a broken corpse and welcomed mystery into the heart of his faith. If your experience of Easter is shaped more by a grave than by chocolate eggs, then Saturday is your day. God knows how you feel. There is darkness, pain, and loss at the heart of the story of salvation.
If a disciple of Jesus had not been intimidated by the setting of a Roman guard, he might have been tempted to scrawl on the stone blocking the mouth of the tomb, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” having heard Jesus pray that prayer. Have you prayed it too? Are you praying it now?
I endured more than 20 Easters in the appalling pain of acute pancreatitis. I found comfort waiting in the garden belonging to Joseph of Arimathea. I discovered that the “now, but not yet” message of the kingdom of God became clearer there.
Jesus is Lord of Easter Saturday with all its pain and disappointment, even if it does not look like it or feel like it. In the words of a well-known worship song, ‘Way Maker’, “Even when you don’t feel it, he’s working”.
Christ’s broken body did not stay that way for long, but the fact that it was once laid in a cold stone tomb gives me hope. My own frame will one day be like his resurrected body, and until that day I choose to embrace the mystery of as-yet unanswered prayer, and trust that God knows what he is doing.
“It’s Saturday – but thank God Sunday’s coming!”
Eric Gaudion is a retired Elim pastor and author of ‘Through the Storms’ and other books
This article first appeared in Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.
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