Jesus had died

Excerpt from Joan Chittister, The Liturgical Year, from Holy Saturday chapter. So good, thought I'd share with you. Read it slowly, read it again. Read it and recall Jesus' followers on that Sabbath day after he died, how they must've felt and what they've lost.

What is hope when there is no one left now in whom hope can be guaranteed?

No doubt about it: this is the day of the going down into the tomb - our own as well as Jesus'. It is now the time for us to die to false hope. But it is also time for us to die to faithless despair.

Hope, you see, is a slippery thing, often confused with certainty, seldom understood as the spiritual discipline that makes us certain of only one thing: in the end, whatever happens will be resolve only by the doing of the will of God, however much we attempt to wrench it to our own ends. We have seen, for instance, how often what is dark leads nevertheless to the light. For some, there is no commitment to good until they have really experienced evil. For others, faith cannot flower until they realize that despair has not triumphed. So there is hope here, too, surely.

There is the hope that we will learn the meaning of hope, that we will give ourselves to the certainty that in the end God will work God's will, despite how much anyone tries to subvert it.

There is the hope that God is in the twilight parts of life as well as in its lucent ones, in the night of the soul as well as in the dawn of life, since both light and dark, night and dawn belong to God.

There is hope that we will eventually cease calling only what we ourselves want as "good" and begin to recognize that good can come in strange guises, in shepherds and maidens, in fishermen and tax collectors, in presumptuous thieves and cowardly ones. We can hope to stop painting our world in our own colors alone.

There is the hope that we can finally find security in the fact of God's understanding of weakness: "Go and sin no more" (John 8:11 KJV), we hear again. "Today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43), we remember said to a thief on a cross. This is the hope that comes out of the icon of mercy as well as in what the world call strength.

There is the hope that we can begin, finally, to see the world as God sees the world and so trust that God is indeed everywhere in everything at all times-- in the abstruse as well as the luminous, whether we ourselves can see the hand of God in this moment or not.

To be able to come to that point before the beginning of the Easter Vigil, before the cantor sings the Exultet into the darkness, is what Holy Saturday is really all about. Then loss is gain, and silence is a very clear message from God.