HOLY  SATURDAY: 

THE  SILENCE  OF 

SOME  SATURDAYS

The title of my reflection for this morning is, “Holy Saturday: The Silence of Some Saturdays.”

Saturdays are interesting days!

Some Saturdays we just want space, quiet, no interruptions.

Maybe to fix something - to  get a part for something that is broken.

Maybe to just relax, catch up, just be.

Or to break the day up: to do some shopping, some visiting, some different stuff. Then there are long weekends - like  the  Saturdays on Memorial Day or Labor Day or Presidents day weekends.

Then there is a Saturday with a wedding - or an anniversary.  Sometimes we look forward to those Saturdays; sometimes we don’t - depending on who’s getting married or whose celebrating their  25^th or 50^th anniversary. Feelings about time and money and others can be terribly subjective.

Then a funeral happens - and often it’s on a Saturday.

TITLE

The title of my reflection is, “Holy Saturday: The Silence of Some Saturdays.”

This day - Holy Saturday -  sort of mugs or dulls us - sort of like after a death in the family.

Funerals often make us more silent and more quiet - and often they are inconvenient - like  a funeral on a Saturday morning.

We do the whole funeral thing - with various types of emotions - and then people get moving back home - sometimes a good distance - and we’re all sort of alone - with post funeral feelings.

A funeral can be high energy, high maintenance, and then there’s the low after the high.

We met up with cousins, aunts, uncles, friends of our mom or dad or close friends of the one who died.

Or deaths remind us of other deaths - or selfie thoughts about our life.

If we were very close to the person who died - it’s then we need some private time, silence, space, to pull together what we just went through with a funeral of a close family member

This day, Holy Saturday, is just sitting there between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

And we Christians are reflecting on Jesus’ death.

The whole world of the apostles and the disciples had  caved in.

Their Lord, their savior, their Messiah, has just been arrested - put on trial and then railroaded to death on the cross on Calvary.

They weren’t ready for this - anymore than any of us are with a family death - especially when it’s too sudden, too quick, too much of a surprise.

The disciples had guilt - that they panicked and ran. The apostles had to deal not only with the death of Jesus - but also the death of Judas.

What about Mary? Yes. And yes about the other Mary and the other women who were much better about being present with Jesus - under the cross - than the apostles.

What about us?  The apostles still feared, “Are they going to come after us?”

They hid in the locked Upper Room as the scriptures tell us.

Thank God for Joseph of Arimathea. He was a secret follower of Jesus as well as a member of the council who condemned him to death: the Sanhedrin. Luke and Mark and Matthew tells us he went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Good move. He got Jesus’ body and put the dead body of Jesus in a tomb that was never used.

So thank God for Joseph and  John and the Holy Women - they are like soft background music on Calvary and the next day Saturday till Easter Sunday morning.

We need the rest of Friday P.M. - after Jesus’ death - and then all day Saturday to get us to Easter and Resurrection.

John and his gospel tells us that John was pondering all this - in this mulling time called Holy Saturday.

We need pausing time. We need space after tragedy. We need silence after the noise.

We need the brief words from Hosea which we heard in this morning’s short reading: He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up to live in his presence.

We need cryptic Old Testament prophetic words like that - to get us through post funeral type days when we’re quiet - when we need to make great acts of faith in Jesus - the Risen One - who can get us through the pain and the quiet - of Holy Saturday type days. Amen.