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“About three in the afternoon, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” )” (Matthew 27:46, NIV).
It’s early Saturday morning. Jesus is buried in the tomb, and everything feels over. Your life. Your purpose. Your guidance and direction. You watched your King get massacred on that cross and can’t get the images out of your mind. The silence is too much to handle. The stillness makes you feel uneasy. The confusion swallows you whole. “How could it end like this?” you ask yourself.
To this day, I can’t imagine being one of Jesus’ Disciples or the women who followed Him. Yes, it would’ve been incredible to see Him face-to-face, but to see His body hang on that cross would be too much to bear.
For the past few weeks, I’ve gotten the closest I probably ever will to knowing what it would’ve been like to live back then. Participating in my Church’s Easter play, I get to be Hannah, a woman who had immense gratitude for Jesus and His miracles. As friends of Mary Magdalena, Joanna, Salome, and Mary, the Mother of Jesus, we spend our scenes mesmerized by Jesus of Nazerene. But we also see and mourn His death. Crying on the floor of the stage and looking at his mother’s grief, I’ve often thought one question: “Have you ever felt like God went quiet right when you needed Him most?”
When God didn’t appear on Saturday, you have to wonder if His followers thought He had disappeared. It had been prophesied to them that the Son of Man would die and be raised to life on the third day (Luke 9:22), but grief can deceive our vision. Thankfully, today, you and I know the full story. God didn’t disappear on Saturday; He was moving behind the scenes. He was defeating death and the grave. And yet, we will still face the courage and faith it takes to sit in these Saturday moments. Because His silence never means His absence.
While we’d rather skip over the full story from Friday to Sunday, waiting on silent Saturday is the sacred part of the story. We try to rush past it. To ignore that it exists. To throw it out with the uncomfortable and hard parts of the Resurrection story. But God uses it to grow us. To help us depend on Him more fully. To teach us to surrender, especially when it’s hard, scary, and unknown. Because without the waiting, the Easter story wouldn’t be complete.