Readings:
Wisdom 3:1-9; Psalm 143; John 19:38, 39

But the souls of the virtuous are in the hands of God, no torment shall ever touch them. In the eyes of the unwise, they did appear to die, their going looked like a disaster, their leaving us like annihilation; but they are in peace.
Wisdom 3:1,2

After this, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus —though a secret one because he was afraid of the Jews— asked Pilate to let him remove the body of Jesus. Pilate gave permission, so they came and took it away. Nicodemus came as well —the same one who had first come to Jesus at night-time— and he brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds. They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, following the Jewish burial custom. At the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in this garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been buried. Since it was the Jewish Day of Preparation and the tomb was near at hand, they laid Jesus there.
John 19:38-42

After his death on Good Friday, Jesus is laid in the tomb, so in most churches there are no services on Holy Saturday until evening, or before dawn on Easter Sunday, when the Easter Vigil is celebrated. In private prayer on Holy Saturday, it is good to contemplate the dead Jesus in the tomb, and so let the reality of his death, and of our own, sink more deeply into our consciousness.

In imagination, be with the dead Jesus, perhaps seeing him as Michelangelo depicts him in his Pieta, in the arms of his mother. Gaze on him as though you were present. See his face in death and the wounds of his body, speak to God as your heart prompts you.

‘…when we were baptised we went into the tomb with him and joined him in death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father’s glory, we, too might live a new life’ (Romans 6:41).

Because we know that he will rise again, we may tend to skip over the fact of Christ’s death and the tragedy of it, spend Holy Saturday in a state of religious inertia, and then find that our inner state remains inert and unable to experience the joy of Easter.

A young and wonderfully gifted man, who can draw together sworn enemies among his own people and bring a message of hope for all, men and women, Jews and Greeks, Barbarians and Scythians, a man of wonderful clarity of mind and tenderness of heart, who reveals a God who liberates the downtrodden, brings good news to the poor, gives sight to the blind, who identifies himself with every human being and tells us to love our enemies, is sentenced to the most brutal death in the name of religion, law and order.

He was a man of vision, of dreams and enthusiasm. ‘I have come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were blazing already’ (Luke 12:49). ‘There is a baptism I must still receive, and how great is my distress till it is over!’ (Luke 12:50). Did he feel a sense of total failure as he hung on the cross, experience disillusionment and hopelessness as he found himself condemned by the religious authorities to which he, as a Jew, was subject? Was his cry on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’, simply an excerpt from a psalm he happened to be praying, or was it a cry from the depths of his being?

For the believer there is no worse pain than to feel abandoned by God Himself. God, in Jesus, meets us in the depths of human suffering, in our sense of total hopelessness, failure and abandonment. We need to ponder this truth and pray to know the presence of God in the depths of our being, at a level beyond our conscious minds and feelings. God is always greater than our sinfulness, our failures, our feelings of disillusionment and despair.

Our consciousness, as we have seen, seems to consist in layers, and our inner journey is a journey through those layers, a journey of deaths and resurrections, until we experience, in the words of Newman’s Gerontius, ‘that strange and uttermost collapse of all that makes me man’. Today, it is good to think on our own death and to pray to know that it is in that moment of utmost collapse that we shall know the truth of things, that God is our rock, our refuge, our life and our salvation.

Prayer
God, you have brightened this night with the radiance of the risen Christ. May he Easter in us, bringing us his peace to sustain us in our conflicts, his joy to strengthen us in our weakness, and may his love for you and all creation invade our minds and hearts. We ask you this Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Amen.