Holy Saturday
Saturday, April 4
Read: Job 14:1-14 or Lamentations 3:1-9, 19-24; Psalm 31:1-4, 15-16; 1 Peter 4:1-8; Matthew 27:57-66
The Day God Is Silent
Holy Saturday is the day we are tempted to skip.
We move quickly from the agony of the cross to the joy of the empty tomb, eager for resolution, allergic to waiting. But Scripture refuses to let us rush past this day. While the gospel writers don’t mention this day, there is plenty to ponder from other parts of the Bible today. Holy Saturday is the long pause of the story—the day when Jesus is in the tomb, the stone is sealed, and nothing appears to be happening at all.
Matthew tells us that after Jesus is buried, the authorities secure the grave. Guards are posted. A stone is sealed. Death is declared final. The world does what it always does when it believes it has won: it fortifies security and trusts in its own strength of soldier and weapon.
And God is silent.
Lamentations names this experience honestly: affliction, bitterness, despair, the feeling of being walled in with no way out. Job, too, speaks of human life as fleeting and fragile, asking whether there is any hope beyond the grave. Holy Saturday gives voice to all those moments when God seems absent, when prayers go unanswered, when grief seemingly has the final word.
Yet Holy Saturday is not empty time.
Though unseen, God is still at work, like the roots of a tree in winter. The silence of the tomb is not the absence of God, but the deep mystery of God’s hidden labor. As the early church would come to proclaim, Christ descends fully into death itself—not skirting suffering and despair, but entering it completely. There is no place, not even the grave, where God refuses to go. As St. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote, “That which is not assumed is not healed.” What this means for us is that Holy Saturday is very good news for us.
This day teaches us that waiting is not failure. Even when all hope seems lost, God is not finished. The sealed stone is not the end of the story.
Holy Saturday is for all who live between promise and fulfillment: for those grieving losses that have not yet healed, for those longing for justice that has not yet come, for those who trust God’s love but cannot yet see how it will prevail. It assures us that even when the world declares death victorious, God is already preparing resurrection.
The guards do not know it. The disciples cannot yet imagine it. But even now—especially now—God is faithful.
So we wait. We lament. We hope against hope.
And we trust that the God who raised Jesus from the dead is already at work in places we cannot see.
Prayer:
God of the silent tomb, meet us in our waiting, hold us in our grief, and teach us to trust that even now, you are bringing life out of death. Amen.
The Reverend Emily Kincaid ’06 is Executive Pastor of First United Methodist Church of Pensacola and serves on the Huntington College Board of Trustees.
