What is the significance of the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday? While not of interest to the Protestant tradition, this question has been thoroughly investigated in the Catholic tradition. Scripture doesn’t say a whole lot about that day other than the placement of soldiers at the tomb (Matt 27:63-64) and that the disciples practiced Sabbath (Lk 23:56).
Some theologians argue for the probability that “Jesus’ followers were doing on Saturday what they were doing on Sunday when Jesus appeared in their midst: meeting together behind closed doors for fear of the Jewish leaders.”[1] This is a safe deduction. Catholic theologians pick up on this and argue that Holy Saturday was a day of great consternation and disillusionment, an agonizing moment in time.
This one day in the holy week is an invitation to sit in the in-between, to not have answers, to be shaken, to be uncertain, to hurt. Some scholars have leveraged Holy Saturday for its “potential to testify to events and experiences of radical suffering [as] Holy Saturday signifies a way of honoring and acknowledging the impact of death by refusing to claim newness before its time.”[2] Holy Saturday affirms that much of life is lived between death and resurrection, despair and hope.
One scholar suggests that Holy Saturday is the “overlooked day between the ‘bad news’ and the ‘good news,’ between death and resurrection. Holy Saturday is a necessary site from which to acknowledge the impossibility of life ahead. Holy Saturday refuses the triumphalism of Christian resurrection that…elides the impact of death.”[3]
Saturday must precede Sunday; while painful, this truth is also liberating as it normalizes the disciple’s agony behind closed doors. At the same time, it provides hope; Sunday is always coming—it’s absolutely certain.
[1]Andreas Köstenberger and Justin Taylor, The Final Days of Jesus: The Most Important Week of the Most Important Person Who Ever Lived (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), 169–71.
[2]Shelly Rambo, “Saturday in New Orleans: Rethinking the Holy Spirit in the Aftermath of Trauma,” Review and Expositor, 105 (Spring, 2008), 233.
[3]Ibid, 234.