“…much of the Old testament experience of faith is having stuff taken away from us. What’s so interesting is that, in the institutional church with the lectionary and the liturgies, the whole business of lamentations has been screened out.” – Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament scholar
It seems that we basically ignore Holy Saturday, the day between Jesus’s death and resurrection. Our churches have Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services to commemorate the Last Supper and Jesus’s arrest, trial, and crucifixion. But then we hurry past the day that His body lay in the tomb. In our rush to get to the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection on Easter, we miss the important experience of loss and grief that precedes it.
Can you imagine the disciples’ experience that first Holy Saturday? They had followed Jesus for three years, their hope building as they listened to His teachings and witnessed His miracles. Jesus inaugurated His ministry with the proclamation that He came to bring good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight to the blind. To set the oppressed free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18-19).
Now suddenly, all hope of that seemed lost. Jesus had died a terrible death at the hands of the religious leaders who aligned themselves with the brutal Roman occupiers. I imagine the disciples raising a fearful cry from the locked room where they were huddled. A lament of grief and despair.
And I find a sense of belonging there with them. This Holy Saturday, I also want to raise a lamentation for those suffering from poverty, isolation, and oppression caused by the divisiveness and inequality of our world. The situation appears hopeless to me now, as I’m sure it did for the disciples who crouched in that room two thousand years ago.
When Jesus proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:19), it echoed the Old Testament practice of Jubilee, in which ancestral lands were to be returned to their original owners every fifty years. Every generation was to be given a fresh economic start at least once in their lifetime, in order to prevent systemic poverty from taking root. Sadly, the year of Jubilee seems to have hardly, if ever, been practiced. Instead, human history has been a constant repetition of persecution and oppression of the poor and vulnerable by the rich and powerful. And our generation’s history looks like it will be no different. We will simply write our own version of the same story.
Or not…
Because here’s the thing: Holy Saturday has as much to do with hope as lamentation. Tomorrow we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who conquered death itself. Just as He’d promised.
How long can poverty and oppression possibly hold out against Him?
