Day 48

Holy Saturday

from the reading plan


Matthew 27:62-66, Luke 23:54-56, Isaiah 53:8-12


Holy Saturday is the lost day between Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday. Scripture doesn’t tell us much about what took place that day, though it’s not hard to imagine the mood among the disciples.

They had followed Jesus for three years, only to abandon Him in His time of need, and now He was gone. They had seen Him perform incredible signs and miracles—calming the waves, healing the sick, and even raising others from the dead. But if He was so powerful, the Son of God even, how could He let them arrest Him like a common crook? How could He let them flay the skin of His back with a cruelly fashioned whip? How could He let them nail His frail frame to a Roman cross? It was all too much to take in.

Holy Saturday is a day of questions and discomfort, of sadness and searching. It is the day that lies between what has come before and what is yet to come. It belongs neither to Jesus’s earthly life, nor to His resurrected glory. Like I said, it feels like a lost day. And in that, I feel very much at home.

As followers of Christ, we live between the already and the not yet. Jesus’s earthly life is behind us. We were not there to see the miracles for ourselves. We did not witness Him walking on water or healing the lepers. We weren’t there the moment He called Lazarus from the tomb. And Jesus’s triumphant return is still ahead of us. We can only imagine what it will be like to see Him face-to-face, to watch as He puts an end to the curse of sin and the machinations of the devil, once and for all. Until then, We’re caught in the middle, in a lifetime’s worth of Holy Saturdays.

But even for all our waiting, we are in a place the disciples of Jesus could only have dreamed about on Holy Saturday. We have Christ with us. His Spirit—the Holy Spirit—dwells inside every believer. Jesus had promised as much:

“I will not leave you as orphans; I am coming to you” (John 14:18).

Because this is true, Holy Saturday has been transformed into a reminder to aim our longings at heaven. We have been given the gift of constant and continual fellowship with the Son of God. He’s with us, no matter what. So we don’t need to give discouragement and fear the last word when the world gets us down. We can share our burdens with Jesus.

Written by John Greco

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