Holy Saturday, forwards and backwards

We can reflect on Holy Saturday, the day the Lord Jesus spent in the tomb, in two different directions.  Both are instructive, and each brings out a different emphasis.

Firstly, we can think our way into the story, and work forwards in time through the events.  Friday has happened.  The Lord is crucified.  Everything about Friday screamed finality.  Jesus breathed his last, gave up his Spirit.  "It is finished" - think about how you might have interpreted that on the Friday, before you knew what was going to follow.  The spear, the blood, the water.  And then the dead body laid out in the tomb, the heavy stone rolled across the doorway.  The last light disappears.  That's the end.

Reading the final verses of Lamentations at Evening Prayer yesterday, I was struck by the fact that it might really have been the end:

Lord, bring us back to yourself, so we may return;
renew our days as in former times,
unless you have completely rejected us
and are intensely angry with us.

It might be all over.  The mercy of God is new every morning - but...  Karl Barth asks at one point whether the mercy of God might not have taken the form of making a final end to us.  Would it not have been mercy for Christ to bear away our sin - remove the threat of eternal judgement - and yet just draw a line under the whole existence of humanity?  Like the mercy of expelling Adam from the garden, so that he would not eat from the tree of life and become an eternal sinner...

Thinking forwards from Friday into Saturday, we hold our breath.  Is it all over?

But second, we think backwards, from our position after Resurrection Day.  We know that Saturday is not the end.  Thinking forwards has taught us not to take the resurrection for granted, but thinking backwards we nevertheless know that it is coming.  Tomorrow will be Easter Sunday.  The Lord Jesus is alive, and reigns with the Father and the Spirit in the unity of the One God.  Though he was dead, he lives.

And yet he really was dead.  That needs to be remembered.  The one who lives for us really died for us.  That is gloriously good news!  He died bearing my sin; he died to put my old self to death.  And he really did.  There is no doubt about it.  His body lay still in the tomb.  My sin - my liability to judgement, my corruption, my uncleanness - is dead with him.  I can live now free of that, by the Spirit of the living Lord Jesus.  The stone that rolled across the door of the tomb is the final goodbye to my old sinful self.

Thinking back from Sunday to Saturday, we say: yes, it is all over.  And now everything is new.