Laid to Rest

What to do in the land of Holy Saturday

Some days, I don’t believe in the resurrection.

This isn’t some sort of faith crisis or shifting theology. It’s just the truth of life, and if I’m going to be really honest, if we are going to be honest, some days you don’t believe either.

We spend this life in between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. We live with our families, our friendships, and our faith in a Silent Saturday, a day of waiting. We have been wrecked with grief, knowing the brokenness of the world and the death of God. We have known what it is to see our only hope die and be buried. We know what it is to wait.

Waiting is all we do these days. We wait for our savior to come back and be with us. We wait to see death swallowed up by life. We wait for the kingdom of this world to become the kingdom of our Lord and his Messiah. We wait and wait and wait, and that waiting eats at us, making us ask, “O Jesus, have you forgotten?” It may not be every day that we ask, but we do ask. We all ask. We all wait. We all live in the silence of Saturday between Good Friday and Easter morning.

This is where we faith, where we live. This is where we are asked to believe in the resurrection, and this is the place that belief falters and fails. We grow weary of waiting, weary of hoping. We get consumed with the immediateness of our days and lose a cosmic perspective. It is here that the waiting seems forever, death feels so real, the resurrection just a story, and the coming again is just a vague thing that may happen someday.

This is where we don’t believe the resurrection.

Descended to the Dead