Holy Saturday

They did not know what day it was.

They knew the day of the week. They knew the Sabbath had begun and that the body had been taken down in haste and laid in a borrowed tomb before sundown closed the window for burial. They knew that the man they had followed for three years was dead — not disappeared, not absent, not gone in the ambiguous way that hope can sustain. Dead. They had watched it. Some of them had been close enough to hear it.

What they did not know was what was happening on the other side of the stone.

They sat in locked rooms and waited. The women planned to go to the tomb at first light Sunday to finish what the haste of Friday had left undone. The men did what men do when the thing they built their lives around has been publicly executed and the authorities who executed it know their faces — they stayed inside and did not make noise. Saturday passed. The world went about its business. The market opened. The Sabbath was observed. The religious authorities, having accomplished what they set out to accomplish, slept.

They did not know that Saturday was the main event.

Every grieving person who has ever sat in a locked room on the day after — the day after the funeral, the day after the diagnosis, the day after the thing that cannot be undone — has lived in some version of that Saturday. The Friday is over. The Sunday has not come. The stone is in place and the guards are posted and there is no visible reason to believe that the stone will ever not be there. That is what Saturday feels like from the inside. That is what Saturday has always felt like from the inside. The disciples were not uniquely without faith. They were accurately describing the phenomenology of being a finite soul inside time on the day the main event is happening in a realm the soul cannot see.

This chapter is about what was happening on the other side of the stone.