God and man at cross purposes

Easter Saturday is the day that stands between that death on the cross and the empty tomb of the risen Christ. It is all too easy for us to skip over  the meaning of this day. Perhaps it is because we don’t want to accept the reality of death, much less this particular awful death. We can  celebrate Good Friday for what “Christ did for us” on the cross, but even while we do this we tend to ignore the utter Godlessness of the suffering of Jesus.

In his remarkable Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday Alan Lewis notes that the second day, Holy Saturday, “appears to be a no-man’s-land, an anonymous, counterfeit moment in the gospel story, which can boast no identity for itself, claim no meaning, and reflect only what light it can borrow from its predecessor and its sequel”. However, Lewis suggests that this Saturday could be a “significant zero, a pregnant emptiness, a silent nothing which says everything”.

But this day. This day stands for the hopelessness of a world without resurrection.

It’s where most of the world lives.

Even within the community of Jesus, some concentrate on the Good Friday aspect of life… And to be sure, there’s a hell of a lot of suffering. In this world, as Jesus said, you DO have trouble. 

Some, perhaps, would tear Good Friday from the Bible and just see Easter Sunday…. We could espousea hyper-optimism that simply refuses the fact of suffering, pain.

But today, at least, we live between two worlds… between suffering and glory, between death and life.

I guess that Easter Saturday reminds us that it is both/and rather than either/or.

That the glory of Christ can be seen in the suffering, that the meaning of life can be understood in death, that the cross is the action of both both man and God

God and man at cross purposes

The love of God meets the hate of man

The worst that man can do

The best that God can offer

The wrath of God against sin meets the high point of humanity in Jesus

The implacable fury of God against the damage sin does

The shining beauty of a life lived the way God intended in the man Christ Jesus

 

 

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