Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and burst their bonds apart. Let them give thanks to the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of men! For He shatters the doors of bronze and cuts in two the bars of iron.
Father, help us to see Jesus, the Crucified and Living One, by His Spirit open our eyes and remove the stops from our ears that we may see the beauty of his new creation and hear the song of his love for us. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
For the disciples, Holy Saturday began as a day of deep of darkness. It was a day of disappointment, a day of shattered dreams, a day of confusion; and all because it was a day of silence. Jesus had called them to follow Him, His words were a comfort to their fear and confusion, He had spoken to the storm and the wind and the waves obeyed him, when He spoke tenderly to the sick and demon possessed, spirits fled and bodies were made whole, he spoke in riddles and parables that no one understood, and his words flashed flames of fire when he spoke against the rulers of Israel. But He had stopped speaking to them. With one loud cry all of his words had come to an end in silence. Jesus was dead. What had begun with the electric thrill of dreams and hope had spun so badly out of control that it must have seemed like a walking into a nightmare from which they couldn’t awake. I think we are prone to miss the heaviness of this moment because it is easy to assume that the disciples understood what Jesus’ death was all about, as we do. But the Gospel accounts are manifestly clearly that they didn’t; Jesus’ death plunged them into a roiling sea of confusion that appeared to be the end of all that they had hoped for.
Only week ago Jesus had entered Jerusalem on a donkey to the cries of “Hosanna! Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” The crowds and the disciples had placed their cloaks on the ground in a coronation that recalled the king-making of Jehu and Solomon. Jesus was the King who would scatter God’s enemies like Jehu and who, like Solomon, would reign over His people in wisdom and glory. And all of this, Matthew says, was done to fulfill the word of Zechariah who foresaw that this King would “speak peace to the nations” and who would rule from “sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.”
Yet it was this same king who had been betrayed by one of his own and who had allowed himself to be arrested without a fight. Then in his mock-trials before the Sanhedrin and Pilot, he was humiliated, mocked, beaten and condemned to be crucified as a common criminal. And on the cross, under the now mocking title “king of the Jews” Jesus had cried out as one forsaken by God and he had died, defeated at the hands of his enemies.
All that the disciples had hoped for had found their end in a silent tomb. Matthew tells us, “And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had cut in the rock. And he rolled a great stone to the entrance of the tomb and went away.”
Imagine the desolation of that day. The disciples had left everything to follow Jesus and now He had left them, alone. All that was left was a sealed tomb. Death, it seemed, had swallowed their Messiah up and they were left peering into a shadowy future.
Historically, this is why the Holy Saturday liturgy begins in darkness. We gather with the disciples. We sit in the darkness to remember the greatest tension the world has ever known. The impossible it seemed had happened, the one on whom the Spirit had descended and upon whom the Father had pronounced, “this is my beloved Son,” the one who had healed the sick and had raised the dead, and the one who Peter had hailed as “the Christ, the son of the living God”: This same one had died and was now buried. If there was ever the death of a vision, this was it.
But the other side of the tension of Holy Saturday is that the silence of the tomb is not the end. It is rather just the beginning. This day is also a day of dawning light. Light that comes from the deepest darkness; the death and burial of God’s only Son. It is a proclamation that death is not ultimate, but even more powerfully, it proclaims that it is from the hopelessness of the sealed tomb that the life of the new creation bursts forth. Not only is the finality of death upended, but death itself becomes the doorway to a new beginning. It becomes the frame for God’s masterpiece; notes that form a great new symphony of creation music. The comic reality of Holy Saturday is that darkness isn’t strong enough to extinguish the light of Christ. Suddenly the cross and the open tomb become markers of a great cosmic surprise, a surprise that turns stillness into motion, into the blurring motion of feet racing to publish unexpected good news. N. T. Wright captures this beautifully:
Easter is supposed to be a surprise, supposed to get us up too early and running about when other people are still asleep. That is the foundation of the church, of Christian faith, of Christian life and hope and love and laughter and witness. It isn’t supposed to be the sort of claim that people can look at and say, Well, I suppose that might be true; a little unlikely perhaps but quite possible; maybe I’ll consider it. Anyone who said that hadn’t got the point. Easter is not just unlikely, it’s impossible, but it happened. Easter isn’t just difficult to believe, it is unbelievable, because it doesn’t fit into any other categories. To believe in the Easter gospel is to have your mind and your heart torn open in quite a new way so that the new day can come flooding in despite the fact that you thought it was time to go to bed, and so that you can be set off running to see what it’s all about. There’s no time to lose. Easter is about running when you thought you’d still be sleeping. It’s about believing what you thought you’d never imagine. It’s about living in a way you’d never have dreamed possible. It’s about Jesus returning from the dead and launching the new creation in which all is forgiven, all is remade, all is reborn.
But in another sense, God has been doing this since the beginning of time. As soon as we see the empty grave, suddenly the whole scope of biblical revelation comes sharply into view. We know this story. We’ve seen it again and again. We see it when the Spirit hovers over the “darkness of the deep” just before God says, “Let there be light” and the first creation springs into existence. We see it in Adam’s deathly sleep from which God fashions a helper to give Adam a new life. We see it in the tomb of the ark, sailing from a world swallowed up in death, into a new creation. We see it in Abraham and Sara’s bodies, good as dead, raised up to give birth to the son of promise. And in the knife poised on the mountain, ready to strike the son down and yet he rises, alive again. And in the Passover, as the Angel of death passes by, and Israel is set free from death in Egypt. And that’s just the beginning, the examples are everywhere: Ruth, Job, Hannah, David in the wilderness, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and dry bones, and in the drama of the exile.
All of this reminds us that God loves to take the darkness of death, and in a powerful act of his creative word, turn it into the beauty of new life, new creation, new hearts, new hopes and a new vision for the future. And the same tomb, which was about the end, full of death and sealed up with an enormous stone, now stands as a memorial of new life. It has become a womb through which all of us are born again into a new world that has been transformed by the resurrected life of Jesus. Egypt has given birth to the Promised Land.
But it doesn’t stop there. Here is the amazing thing: the New Testament shows us that just as we have been incorporated into Jesus’ own body, so now his life becomes the pattern for our own. Now life-from-death characterizes our life as the people of God. Think of Romans six where Paul asks, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life.” Or again in his exhortation to the Philippians: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
But perhaps no passage reflects this life-from-death pattern better than the words we read from II Corinthians on Ash Wednesday. “But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.”
This is the demonstration of the surpassing power of God: everything we have been given or are promised in these passages, whether the freedom of walking in newness of life, or exultation in the presence of our enemies, or the life of Jesus manifested in our mortal bodies, comes from following Jesus into the tomb and out the other side. This is God’s promise to you. He promises that if you belong to Jesus, death cannot hurt you. But even more than that, He promises to take the death that is in your life: all of the sin, heartbreak, disappointments, confusion, sickness, and sorrow and turn it into a garden that displays the beauty and power of his resurrected life. So that we can say with Paul, “Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore, I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong.
If you are weak, if your faith trembles at the power of evil and taunts of Satan, if pain and distress have come on you like a flood, or if you doubt that you can be delivered from the darkness of sin, listen carefully to this: Jesus’ death and resurrection means that God has not only taken the curse of our sin upon Himself, but he has fully exhausted its power. And now the curse serves a new master so that death itself manifests the glory of resurrected life. Now, because the power of Jesus’ resurrected life lives in us, the glory of His loveliness shines through the shameful cracks and broken pieces of our lives, transforming them into glorious battle scars, things of beauty. This is not a theory, a philosopher’s dream, or an optimist’s illusion: it’s the truth. And experiencing it is like walking into a dream come true.
This is what we celebrate this evening, this is why we shout and sing, why we hug and kiss, why we light bonfires, drink wine and make merry: because the darkness and the silence of the grave, the wiles of Satan, the wrath of men, the humiliation and pain of the cross, and the cursed power of sin and death could not overthrow the Father’s plan to glorify the Son and to create from his own body a bride to love in the morning of a new creation. And, beloved, we are that bride. So, let the halleluiahs ring out, for the silence of the tomb has burst into shouts of joy. For our God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, the God of the living again. In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Our Father, thank you for making the dead to live. Thank you for Jesus, and for making us to share in the power of His resurrected life. Fill us with the life of His Spirit as we go from this place with great joy and thanksgiving. In Jesus’ name. Amen.