Jesus really died and was buried. There is nothing more certain. It was not a ‘pretend’ moment. Grief overwhelmed his disciples’ hearts.
The wonderful priest poet Malcom Guite movingly reflects on the first disciples’ soul shattering experience of laying the body of the dead Jesus in the borrowed tomb:
Here at the centre everything is still
Before the stir and movement of our grief
Which bears its pain with rhythm, ritual,
Beautiful useless gestures of relief.
So they anoint the skin that cannot feel
Soothing his ruined flesh with tender care,
Kissing the wounds they know they cannot heal,
With incense scenting only empty air.
He blesses every love that weeps and grieves
And makes our grief the pangs of a new birth.
The love that’s poured in silence at old graves
Renewing flowers, tending the bare earth,
Is never lost. In him all love is found
And sown with him, a seed in the rich ground.
(used with permission: Sounding the Seasons Poetry for the Christian Year, Malcolm Guite, Canterbury Press, Norwich, 2012)
That bleak day when God literally lay entombed and dead, hope seemed to have extinguished forever. Death and nothingness seemed to be in total control. In the apostolic witness, the first ‘Holy Saturday’ is saturated with the divine absence.
What Jesus experienced during that time we can only imagine. He had suffered humiliation, brutal physical abuse and even physical death. All this after having had the most extraordinary success as a teacher and healer, with such a large following of disciples and others who believed that he was ‘the chosen one of God’ whom the Jewish community had expected.
What a reversal! And in the tomb, what then, on Holy Saturday? How did the mysterious transformation occur? We are not told. Only silence.
Some aspects of our own personal transitions in life also remain rather mysterious, even to us.
Mostly, it seems to me, our lives are lived precisely in this type of ‘Holy Saturday’, where joy and sorrow, bondage and liberation, life and death tangle; a day that unfolds forever between the cross and the rising Son.
Holy Saturday is simply the day when nothing happens. Holy Saturday, that in-between day, is perhaps the day we know best, if we are honest.
When we are going through our own internal Holy Saturday experiences, we know we need to be still and to trust in the Spirit to get us through to the other side of whatever is happening. Remembering the mystery of Holy Saturday, remembering that somehow, beneath the surface of what we know or can imagine, hidden from our ego’s sight, miracles can happen. We can be transformed.
We all have ‘seasons’ in our lives when there is nothing we can ‘do’ except choose to lie ourselves down in the tomb next to Jesus and trust, however blindly, that something mysterious, beyond our current capacity to describe or define, will bring about a new future.
We follow the way of Jesus when we choose to become his disciples, and this means we follow him through the grave.
‘There is nothing in this world that resembles God as much as silence,’ wrote Meister Eckhart.
Holy Saturday is a day of rest, of silence. Even God—or especially God, it seems—was silent that day.
We live in a noisy world where mercy and tenderness are in short supply. A conflict-driven and sensationalist social media culture bombards us with a cacophony of distracting voices. Our spirits are so easily perturbed.
That is why, more than ever, we Catholics need enter into the mystery that God in Jesus really died and was buried.
We are called to live with the holy silence of our God, whose Spirit will never abandon us. For: The love that’s poured in silence at old graves, Renewing flowers, tending the bare earth, Is never lost. In him all love is found.
This article was originally published in the 2025 Lent & Easter | Autumn edition of the Catholic Outlook Magazine. You can read the digital version here or pick up a copy in your local parish.
