Mike's musings

Holy Saturday

I'm never quite at ease on this day, each year. There is, for me, an edginess, a not-quite-rightness about the day, however beautiful the weather, however good the company: I cannot settle. This is the time between the death of Jesus and his resurrection, where you can't quite believe that it's going to be all right: the news hasn't quite filtered through, there's a waiting: it's the "stillness between the heaves of storm" in Emily Dickinson's poem which I quoted earlier this week.

The world seems to wait with baited breath around me - it reminds me of a time-lapse film where you've seen the plants grow, and the buds ripen, but you just can't be sure that they will burst open, filling the world with a riot of colour and life. Now is the devil's time, in one theology: this is when he thinks he's won. He may not be stalking the earth, maybe because he's celebrating his victory, secure in the knowledge that Christ has been defeated by death, but there's a certain pause while creation takes a shocked breath and holds it for tomorrow. Will it happen? Will Christ rise?

I was wondering to myself if that means that I feel deserted by God, today. It doesn't. In some ways, I feel closer to Him. God the Father feels, maybe, more human to me today that at any other time, because He's lost a son. God feels the pain of loss and suffering in a way maybe more human than He could ever have expected. That jolt, that stops your heart for a second, when you hear bad news: that's what I imagine God feeling, when He saw and felt and heard Jesus dying. It's a time when I can almost decapitalise God's pronoun, and refer to him, not "Him". I wondered whether to refer to God a female in this post - I often do, and the reality of the human experience of motherhood is desperately important in this context, I think. But when it came down to it, it is the God who is closest to me that I identify with today, and that's a "He", because I, too, am a "he".

And the man who, before, had called him "Abba" - "Father", "Daddy" - now called out to him "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani" - "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?". God could have reached out and stopped it. He knows that. And He knows that for our sakes, and for Jesus' sake, he must not. And so God loses a son. And we lose the Son.

My heart is set towards tomorrow.

Labels: theology