Hello friends,
This is Mark Ludman,
Also known as Brother Frederick James,
Your friendly neighbourhood monk in dogs.
Welcoming you to day 46 of our continual journey from Lent and now through the Easter week in the wilderness,
Still held.
And today,
A very difficult day,
Easter Saturday,
Holy Saturday.
A day I believe is probably one of the most important in our Christian calendar.
So as we come to settle into this moment,
I invite you just to still yourself,
To bring together into one space,
Place and moment,
Your mind,
Your body and your heart.
Allow yourself to fully settle into where we are,
As we open our ears,
Our minds and our heart to what the Spirit might whisper to us today.
And our reading for reflection today comes from John's Gospel chapter 19 verses 40 to 42.
John writes,
Taking Jesus' body,
Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus wrapped it with the spices in strips of linen.
This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs.
At the place where Jesus was crucified,
There was a garden and in the garden,
A new tomb in which no one had ever been laid.
Because it was the Jewish day of preparation and since the tomb was nearby,
They laid Jesus there.
Holy Saturday sits in a very quiet place in the Christian story.
The cross has already happened,
But the resurrection hasn't yet been revealed.
Everything seems finished.
Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus take the body of Jesus,
Wrap it carefully with spices and place it in the tomb.
There's something beautifully human and tender about this moment and about this day.
There's no miracles,
There's no preaching,
There's no crowds.
All we have is care.
They honour the body of the one they loved.
This is tenderness as they tend to him in his burial.
It reminds me that human beings have always understood that when something precious is lost,
We slow down.
We become careful.
We handle things gently.
We create rituals of honour and remembrance because burial is in and of itself an act of love.
Joseph and Nicodemus obviously aren't working here out of some sort of triumph or confidence.
They don't know the resurrection is coming.
From their perspective,
The whole story of Jesus has ended in tragedy.
The teacher they believed has been executed.
The hope that they carried seems to have collapsed and yet they still show up.
They still care for his body.
They still offer it honour and dignity.
And sometimes faith looks exactly like this.
There's no certainty inside.
There's no clarity in place.
It's just quiet faithfulness on a dark evening.
Holy Saturday reminds us that the disciples didn't live the story the way we read it.
We read the gospel knowing the ending and they didn't.
For them,
This was a day of grief,
A day of confusion,
A day when God seemed silent.
And I think all of us know the days that can be like that.
Moments when something we loved appears to have died.
It might have been a dream or an aspiration,
A relationship.
Might have even been something like a sense of purpose or a season of life.
And in those moments,
We often ask the same question that the disciples must have felt in their hearts.
That wonderful two-word exclamation,
What now?
And Holy Saturday gives us a really surprising answer.
Sometimes the faithful thing to do is simply to honour what's been lost.
To sit with it.
To acknowledge the love that was there.
To care for the memory rather than rushing to explain or problem solve or try and fix.
Joseph and Nicodemus don't try to solve the mystery of what's happened.
They just act with reverence.
And that's faith.
Because faith isn't always about knowing what God's doing.
Sometimes faith's about trusting that God's still present even when the story seems unfinished.
Holy Saturday teaches us to hold the mystery with patience.
It reminds us that God often works in ways that we can't yet see.
Between Good Friday and Easter Sunday,
There is always this space.
Quiet,
Unresolved moments where nothing appears to be happening.
But the silence of God,
My friend,
The silence of God is not the absence of God.
Something's unfolding beneath the surface.
The tomb that looks like the end of the story becomes the place where resurrection will emerge.
And that's often how God works in our lives as well.
In seasons where we feel like we're only burying what's been lost.
God may already be preparing something new.
But the disciples didn't know that yet.
So on this day,
The church does something very human.
We wait.
We honour what seems lost,
We sit in the silence and we just trust the mystery.
Because the God we follow is a God who brings life out of tombs.
But on Holy Saturday we learn something just as important.
That before resurrection comes,
There is the quiet faithfulness of those who still show love in the dark.
And sometimes that's exactly where real faith begins.
So as you sit and wait,
May you know the faith,
Hope and love that comes from the presence that's never lost and is always there today and every day.
Amen.
Until tomorrow my friend,
Peace be with you.
