Disorientation & Holy Saturday

Scripture says very little about this day, other than it was the Sabbath, but if you use your imagination a bit, you can sense the Disciples’ disorientation. The Messiah they had followed, the God-man who had healed the sick and raised the dead, had been defeated by death. They had expected him to win, to be a great, victorious king. I imagine them dazedly wandering back to their homes to observe the Sabbath, entirely uncertain what to do next. Scripture speaks of their fear, how they locked themselves in for fear of what the religious leaders might do to them. Such intense grief, confusion, and fear are a disorienting cocktail. Who would they go to with their questions, with their grief, with their fear and confusion? Jesus was dead. They were left so very alone.

C.S. Lewis wrote his book, A Grief Observed, during his own season of disorientation. His wife had died, and he was left with deep grief, confusion, and anger. In his expression of pain, he was left disoriented by God’s silence, by His absence.

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. 

I don’t know about you, but I feel a bit disoriented today. I watch the news and hear about the mounting sickness and death tolls—some of them very close to our Advent family. I watch friends and family lose jobs and income, have to make hard choices to lay off beloved employees, or even lose their businesses. I struggle to ward off anxiety and depression, watching friends do the same, with more or less success. I watch all of this, disoriented, and cry out with the Psalmist, “How long, O LORD?” Pain and loss, fear and grief are utterly disorienting. They shake the ground we stand on—especially in these Holy Saturdays when we have not yet seen, might not even be able to imagine God’s victory over death and suffering.

So what do we do in these disorienting Holy Saturdays? What do we do with our confusion, our grief, our suffering? What do we do when God’s victory, or God Himself, might seem far away, or even uncaring? We join the lament of God’s people across time. In his article on Psalm 39, “Voice as Counter to Violence,” Walter Brueggemann compares the Psalmist to a distressed child. The child is angry at its mother, and yet, finds it has no one else to go to for comfort, but its mother, so the child crawls into his mother’s arms while still beating her chest in anger. In the Psalms we join the people of God expressing honestly their pain, anger, fear, confusion, and feelings of God’s absence or abandon in the midst of all these. And yet, the honest communication is always directed toward God. The psalmists don’t turn away and cease conversation with God. Instead, they press in further, raising their voices with greater earnestness and honesty, holding nothing back.

Some of you might find yourselves in a place of deep trust and sweet connection with God in this season of disorientation. But for those of you who find yourselves wrestling with God in the midst of your disorientation and pain, I want you to hear that your expression of lament displays no less faith. Lament is bold faith. It is faith like that of the little child-Psalmist. Faith that tenaciously approaches our Father, even with our anger, our confusion, and our pain. This bold faith holds firmly to the belief that our Father is still the one to go to with our questions, our doubt, our fears, and our sorrow—even when we find ourselves angry at Him or confused at His apparent lack of action or presence.

In his book, Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, Dietrich Bonhoeffer states:

[The lament psalms] do not deny [suffering] or try to deceive us about it with pious words. They allow it to stand as a severe attack on the faith…There is in the Psalms no quick and easy resignation to suffering. There is always struggle, anxiety, doubt. God’s righteousness which allows the pious to be met by misfortune but the godless to escape free, even God’s good and gracious will, is undermined…. His behavior is too difficult to grasp. But even in the deepest hopelessness, God alone remains the one addressed. Neither is help expected from men, nor does the distressed one in self-pity lose sight of the origin and the goal of all distress, namely God. He sets out to do battle against God for God. The wrathful God is confronted countless times with his promise, his previous blessings, the honor of his name among men.

 Michael Card says something similar in his book, A Sacred Lament:

[Prayers of lament] represent the last refusal to let go of the God who may seem to be absent or worse—uncaring. If this is true, then lament expresses one of the most intimate moments of faith—not a denial of it. It is supreme honesty before a God whom my faith tells me I can trust. He encourages me to bring everything as an act of worship, my disappointment, frustration, and even my hate.

 So I urge you, friends, in this time of waiting, in this time of fear or pain, in this disorienting Holy Saturday, raise your honest prayers to our Father. Whether you find yourselves at peace or in confusion, in resting trust or wrestling trust—crawl into your Father’s arms and trust Him with your honest speech. Lay before Him the contents of your heart. And when He might feel silent or distant, keep bringing your speech before Him, keep begging Him for the dawn to rise on Easter day. For He, alone, is the one we can go to. He alone brings Easter victory.

 In closing, I’ll share with you something I wrote on Holy Saturday last year—my own lament as we watched the sudden decline of our dear pastor and friend, Rob Paris. The words seem pertinent this Holy Saturday as well.

All I can do is rage against death (and I’ll rage!), against a God-dead, death-winning Saturday. I need Him to defeat. I need Him to win. I need Him to rise. I need Him to put death in its place.

Even with Easter Sunday, it feels a bit like we still live in Holy Saturday. Torn between the realities of both [Good Friday and Easter Sunday]. God has won, yet, death still wins—not the ultimate victory, but it takes its deep, vicious bite. Can we survive this pain? Can we walk again? Will we pretend we are competent, like we can walk without a limp, like we can provide the healing, the health only Christ brings? 

Or will we walk with a limp into Easter Sunday, desperate 

     for the One who won, 

     for the One who is near, 

     for the One who can heal?

God be with us in this dark Saturday! Show us a glimmer—or a sunburst—of your Easter victory in the despair of our here-and-now.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Stacey Cooper