“Silent Saturday” Day by Day of Holy Week Saturday

Holy Saturday

​In the church, the three final days of Holy Week are called the triduum-Friday, Saturday, Sunday.  Friday of course is the death of Jesus.  It’s the worst day in history.  Sunday is the resurrection-the best day in history. But what about Saturday?  John Ortberg says:

“This is Saturday. The day after this but the day before that. The day after a prayer gets prayed but before it gets answered. The day after a soul gets crushed way down but before it gets at all lifted up. It’s this kind of strange day, this Saturday. It’s the in-between day. Not Friday. Not Sunday. In between despair and joy. In between utter confusion and blinding clarity. In between bad news and good news. In between darkness and light. In between hate and love. In between death and life. It’s the in-between day.”

---

​The scriptures are full of three day stories.  Jonah comes out of the whale in three days, etc.  Every Bible student knows that the third day is going to be the day of God’s intervention.  However, the disciples don’t know this is a three day story.  For all they know, they just wasted their last three years.  It would have been better to have never left their fishing nets than to be given false hope only to have it all blown away.  They wake up on Saturday and they are still alive, but they don’t know why.  Their lives are empty of purpose.  Is the rest of my life destined for meaningless?  That is a Saturday question.

And so we wait on Saturday.  What was this Jesus thing all about?  Will this pain ever end?  Today we bury our dreams and contemplate life without meaning-life without Jesus.