The Staggering Significance of Holy Saturday

Witnessing Jesus’ Life in the Tomb
Tim A Dearborn

I’ve learned not to move too quickly from Good Friday to Easter. Holy Saturday is a profound invitation to encounter the breadth and depth of Jesus’ life for us. In the midst of an extended silent retreat, my spiritual director invited me to spend the day as if it was “Holy Saturday”—reflecting on the Scriptures related to Jesus’ burial in the tomb.

I offer here my reflections. This is excerpted from the book, Christ’s Heart Our Home

The Closed Door of Death
I thought of the experience of the women at the Tomb.
The Lord of Life killed.
The Creator of all things destroyed.
The Eternal Word silenced.
Love incarnate betrayed and destroyed.
The Hope of all ages shattered.

One more time injustice seemed to prevail.
Evil seemed more sovereign than goodness.
Death seemed more powerful than life.

I felt a taste of their grief, their loss. The closed Tomb loomed as a horrible barrier. The One who showed them love was now out of reach, inaccessible, gone.

Death scandalizes life. Now, the One who promised abundant life was lost behind death’s impenetrable barrier.

The stone of the Tomb expressed the unbreachable barrier of death:
no further contact,
no touch,
no final apology,
no comforting embrace.

There could be no reassuring word spoken through that door.
It was as if I saw the agony of millions of parents over lost children and dead infants.
I felt the deadness of:
irrecoverable betrayal,
endless suppression of hope,
insurmountable loneliness.
A sealed door.
A solid wall.
An unbridgeable chasm.
Silence that was without bounds.
The Living Word of God, the One who spoke all creation into existence, was now shut off from our hearing by death’s tomb.

But then I realized I was still on the outside of the Tomb. I’d never really thought about Jesus’ experience on the inside. He had invited me to come in.

I heard the invitation,
“I invite you to come with Me from the Cross into the Tomb.”

Immediately I thought of the few verses in Scripture that speak of those three days, such as 1 Peter 3:19 which describes Jesus proclaiming the good news to the spirits in prison.
“That’s true. But I invite you to linger in the Tomb.
What would you say if I wanted you to experience emptiness? Silence, aloneness, even forsakenness?

I don’t know if I can handle it Lord, but whatever comes from your hand I accept. Have your way.
“Everything that comes from My hand, everything found in My heart is held in love.
Receive everything, no matter how painful and grievous, as being held in My hands of love.”

Terrible Goodness
The Scriptural text from a chorus in Handel’s Messiah echoed in my heart: “Surely, surely, he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isa 53.5). Flowing from the Cross, through the Tomb, into the Light of the Resurrection is the river of mercy on which the Son and Spirit carry the groans of every living thing—human and all of creation—into the heart of God (Romans 8.22-26).

The cacophonous, disjointed grief and lament of all creation is swept into arms of love, made holy by God’s Presence, comforted, healed, death exchanged for life. But that was running ahead to when the Tomb was empty. The Spirit called me back into the Tomb.

Suddenly, scene after scene flashed before me of a terrible goodness. I thought of the hard emotions I saw during my first glimpse into Christ’s heart.

Image after image of pain swept past me. I don’t know how to describe them but, in the Tomb, I was in the presence of all pain that has shattered life from the beginning of time.

Held in the Tomb was all of creation’s pain.
desperation    despair     abuse      misogyny
violence      racism
cries of dereliction      depression and suicide
pleas for God’s intervention      addiction
anguish over miscarriages and dead children
soul-destroying fingers on guns and bombs
insurmountable walls of Alzheimer’s and mental illness
estranged marriages and families infidelity betrayal
people who feel friendless and unvalued
exploitation.    utter poverty
abused children and women people who are imprisoned refugees
despondent parents       diseases

This was not just borne by Jesus on the Cross. He carried it into the Tomb. And then, the stone was rolled over the entrance. The door was slammed shut. All sorrow, evil, injustice, and suffering were brought into the Tomb.

There’s no back door, no easy exit. The judgment of sin and evil has been given. The door is shut and sealed. All excuses are dismantled. All rationalizations and vain attempts at self-justification cease. All blaming is silenced. Our inability to fix our lives is fully exposed. There are no longer any places to divert attention toward others “who’ve done worse things” than we have.

Living Silence
To my surprise, the Tomb was filled with an utter silence. All groans and cries of agony were silenced.
This was not the “holding your breath in fear” kind of silence. It was not the silence commanded by captors, or the overpowering silence of terror.

I imagine it was similar to the vibrant silence of outer space—the dynamism of infinite galaxies with all sound absorbed into infinite space. However, in the Tomb, this dynamism was not absorbed by infinite emptiness but by infinite love.

Though a place of death, this wasn’t what I imagine is the silence of death. Rather, this was a living silence. It felt full and flooded with life. To my surprise, the inside of the Tomb was teeming with life—not death. There was power and energy to this silence. The Tomb was flooded with fullness, more fullness than I had ever before experienced in my life.

This silence was alive, for it was the all-embracing silence of God. Not silence as absence or indifference, not impotent silence as if God’s promises and purposes failed. This silence was triumphant.

No words were needed to prove God’s victory. Though this was the Tomb of the Incarnate Word, in this silence all words met their end. The time for words was over.

But it was not a calm silence. There were too many strong emotions, too many poured out tears and lament and terror and fear and frustration for stillness. This spacious silence was strong enough to hold all sorrow in God’s heart of love.

I heard a new form of justice in God’s silence—a right making way in silence.

The Fellowship of the Tomb
The Tomb was both a place of abandonment and of communion, of defeat and victory, of punishment and permission. Not permission to do as we please because all is now forgiven—but permission to join in the fellowship of Christ’s heart where all is made right.

Through the Tomb we are led to healing for it draws us deeper into Christ’s love.
The Tomb was filled, overflowing with love.
The Tomb is a place of holy communion. In a very real sense, I came to understand the Tomb as sacramental. The Tomb was flooded with grace—God’s right-making love at work.

After hours on this journey, I felt simultaneously exhausted and exhilarated. I was stunned by God’s grace but frankly, overwhelmed, at my limit, I didn’t feel like I could receive more. So, I asked God’s permission to write down what I retained of all I’d just encountered. I felt like I needed divine permission since I’d just encountered the end of words and God’s just silence. “I’ve more to show you but you’re not ready yet. This is enough for now.”

As I reflected on this experience, I sensed God saying that the call for my life is to bring every bit of me, all my desires, emotions, noise, tumult, fear, ambition, envy, vanity, and pride to the Cross, into the Tomb, and from the Tomb into Christ’s heart.

I now see the Tomb as the womb of God’s recreating love. God brings into Christ’s heart all cries, all fears, all longing, all failures, all disappointments—and all joy, beauty, and goodness. In the Tomb, God takes the raw—the very raw—materials of our human lives, embraces us, and refashions our lives into something beautiful.

On the outside of the Tomb, there is apparent failure and powerlessness. Defeat. Death.
On the inside, the Tomb is saturated with creativity. Overflowing life. The power to make all things right and new.

Even there, maybe especially there, we encounter the steadfast love and sovereign goodness of God. The silence in Christ’s Tomb holds all wounds in Christ’s heart. I sensed God inviting us, giving us permission, to join in the fellowship of God’s silence—the silence that draws us deeper into Christ’s soul healing heart.