For All the Days In Between

Today is unusual. It is the Saturday of what Christians celebrate as Holy Week.

To be particular about today here in SoCal, we are having warmth and sunshine, a relief from the clouds, rain, and cold my wife and I faced this week when we traveled to Seattle. Spring is here in abundance. Yet this Saturday is one that I usually think of in the way I think of myself. It is a day “caught in-between.” Today, this one Saturday, is the between time, for it falls between Good Friday, the day of the death of Jesus, and Easter Sunday and His resurrection. It is a day when nothing seems to happen. It is a day between days. 

In a way, it is a unique day, a day of deep sorrow, a day of shocked grief and fear of the end. For Christians all over the world, it is also a day of waiting, mainly because the day is shot through with the light of Easter. But in another way, perhaps because of the feeling of living in the after effects of loss, it reminds me of so many days I experience during the rest of the year.

Growing up Catholic, I learned to think of the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter as a time for silence, but a silence that does not necessarily lead to meditation. It seemed as close as I might get to the Zen idea of nothing. 

Throughout the world-wide church, many people try to re-enact the events that have come to shape this week. In their re-enactments, they try to experience the profound sense of hope, expectation, fear, and loss that the first followers of Jesus must have felt after the arrest, trial, torture, and death of their leader. This is admirable, and some years I have tried to do this. The trouble for me is that I always catch myself faking it too much, and I just have to stop and admit that I now live in what I call the “happy after time,” the time of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. The result is that now, even trying to celebrate the “in-between” of Saturday, after death and before resurrection, seems enlightened and infiltrated with what I now understand is the next part of the story.

The best I can do is a kind of silent reflection on what it must have been like to suffer so much in a world that saw that suffering, the kind that Christ suffered, as the ultimate scandal. If you were there and you were a Greek, you would have considered it the worst shame, something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemies. .

I guess, though, that I also see one more lesson to be gained from this “in-between” time as I reflect and write about it, and that is this:

Though it is true that the church is living year around in the Easter belief that Christ has overcome sin and conquered death, and Easter itself is a time of celebration, it is also true that the story is not finished yet. In a sense, we are all still living in the time before the coming resurrection of the dead. In a sense, we are still waiting and wondering, and no one really knows for certain how long we will do this. We rejoice, but we also suffer. We overcome battles with our own sin, but we also still fail. The Scottish writer and preacher George MacDonald once wrote that “Christ suffered and died not that we wouldn’t have to, but so that our suffering would be more like his.” That is the difference that I see today—between the way I used to suffer before Easter and the way I suffer now, in light of it.

The difference seems to be the presence now of hope.

Try as I might, that is what I sense today, in between. May you have this the rest of the year.