Each year when we enter into the season of Easter and tell the story of Jesus journey to the cross and beyond, there’s always a detail that calls me to pay attention to it. In doing so, I usually come to a new or richer understanding. This year it is Holy Saturday.

Holy Saturday is the day in between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the threshold, the gap, the ‘great sabbath’, the day I have only recently learnt is different from Easter Saturday – which occurs at the end of the first week of Easter.

In one church I was part of, Holy Saturday was the day for the church working bee – perhaps this was a way of marking ‘the day of preparation’. In another, it didn’t seem to hold anything of significance – it just allowed the three days to pass before Jesus said he would rise again (Matt 16:21). It is easy to overlook a day where not a lot happens and even easier to fill it with tasks. But experience tells me that when I resist the urge to do that, a time of waiting can allow things to move and transform in me. When I allow myself that rest, that’s when the new insights come.

In John’s version of the story, it is Nicodemus who comes to attend to Jesus’ body when it is taken from the cross (John 19:39). He had first come to Jesus at night and struggled to accept the invitation to transformation that Jesus was offering. And now he comes in the day bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes weighing about a hundred pounds – an abundant offering, a measure normally reserved for royal burials.  Maybe with time, something has shifted in Nicodemus after all.

According to the Apostle’s Creed, Holy Saturday is the time when Jesus descended into hell. What does it mean for Jesus to descend into hell? This has been a detail that I have not really known what to do with – until this year. This year we celebrate Easter in a time of war, of oil shortages, of global instability, of ongoing human suffering and the increasing effects of climate change. Some of us have lost loved ones here and some grieve from afar. Like all times, there is sadness, grief, as well as hope and as always we wonder how to respond. The link between Easter and Christmas is not always obvious, but this year it seems important.

At both times, God comes close to us, to be one with us in the person of Jesus. God comes in birth and in death, at the beginning and the end of our earthly lives as well as beyond and between. In birth and death there is irreversible change, often pain and grief and the celebration of life; one beginning and one ending.  In the Easter story, Jesus shows us he is willing to enter into all that with us, including the hellish parts of our lives and the state of the world. Jesus not only enters, but stays with us there like he stays in the garden of Gethsemane.  If we too are willing to stay awake in that uncomfortable place and be attentive to God, that seems to be when something new can emerge. This new life often starts quietly at first, emerging like the slow spread of dawn light; it can be hard to pick the point when the sun actually rises, but eventually we know the day has come.

My hope and prayer is that we can enter more fully into this powerful story in the season of Easter this year, and discover new life together.

Rev Cath James
Minister of the Word