Holy Week | Saturday
The Saturday of Holy Week was a day of apparent defeat for the King.
50 Now there was a man named Joseph, from the Jewish town of Arimathea. He was a member of the council, a good and righteous man, 51 who had not consented to their decision and action; and he was looking for the kingdom of God. 52 This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. 53 Then he took it down and wrapped it in a linen shroud and laid him in a tomb cut in stone, where no one had ever yet been laid. 54 It was the day of Preparation, and the Sabbath was beginning. 55 The women who had come with him from Galilee followed and saw the tomb and how his body was laid. 56 Then they returned and prepared spices and ointments. On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.
Luke 23: 50-56
Unlike the other days of Holy Week, about which there is a wealth of material in the gospel accounts, we know virtually nothing about that Saturday. Yet we are certainly able to discern that it was a day of overwhelming grief, and even despair, by our Lord's disciples.
Of course, that Saturday was the Jewish Sabbath, and the coming of that day — and its requirements of rest and worship — were a motivating factor in some of the actions taken the night before. The Romans showed deference to Jewish scruples about executions on the Sabbath by hastening the deaths of the criminals on either side of Jesus (victims of crucifixion were known in some cases to live for days upon their crosses before expiring). This also explains the haste with which Joseph of Arimathea tended to the burial of our Lord, merely wrapping his body in a shroud before placing it in the tomb. With the Jewish sabbath beginning at sundown, the proper preparation of Jesus’ body for burial would have to wait until the first of the week.
Our text indicates that the women among Jesus’ disciples, after watching the transfer of his body from the cross to the tomb, had time only to prepare the spices and ointments for Jesus’ body, but that then “on the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.” Surely this was a Sabbath like no other they had known! What must it have been like for them and the other disciples to go about their Sabbath routines, including their visits to that bustling temple courtyard where Jesus had spent many hours the previous days of the week?
I think that hints of the grief that consumed these dear men and women on that Saturday are found in a couple of details recorded on either side of the day. For example, though Matthew’s account moves directly from Friday evening to Sunday morning, it includes these final, poignant words about the two “Marys” as the Sabbath approaches at sundown: “ Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb” (Matt. 27:61). I think that, after all these women had seen and experienced on that day, this note refers to the reality that they remained for a time fairly paralyzed by their sorrow, and only able to sit and stare at the sealed tomb of the Lord. Clearly for them, and for all the disciples, that next day — from their very waking experience of it, if they slept at all — would have brought an agony of bereavement.
But there would have been deeper pain than this. We are given another glimpse of what would have been a prevailing state of mind for the disciples on that sad Sabbath by the words of two of them the next day, as they traveled to Emmaus. Their comment, spoken to a mysterious companion that joins them, reveals the conclusion they had been coming to since Jesus’ death: “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). This is an unbearably sad expression of shattered hope in Jesus as the promised Messiah. These disciples could not fathom how Jesus could be the long-awaited king, and yet die at the hands of his enemies.
So, despite the clear assurances of our Lord that after suffering and being killed he would nonetheless be raised to life on the third day (Matt. 16:21), apparently none of his disciples spent that Saturday in a state of hopeful expectation of a coming reunion with their master and friend. Their sheer astonishment on the following day at seeing the Lord again makes clear that this was not their expectation. Thomas was surely not alone when he expressed incredulity: “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe” (John 20: 25).
All this points us to the conclusion that the Saturday of Holy Week was a day of deepest disillusionment and despair for Jesus’ disciples as a whole. Either Jesus had never truly been the promised Messiah, or as King he had been utterly defeated by his enemies, and his kingdom had been overthrown. All their hopes in Jesus now appeared to have been but folly. They as his disciples were those most to be pitied, for he was dead.
For Discussion and Meditation:
It is hard for us today, looking back to that Saturday of Holy Week, to enter into these sorrows — rightly so, of course, because we know what the next day would bring!
But I think that there is something very strengthening to our faith to reflect on the despair of our spiritual ancestors on that sad Sabbath. Their sorrows and doubts and crisis of faith — though fully understandable — were, in retrospect, utterly unfounded. That they construed all the desperately tragic events of the day before as defeat for the King was due only to the fact that they were those, as Jesus had observed before, “of little faith.” Faith in our Lord’s words would have allowed them to see beyond all appearances, and would have provided hope in this darkest hour.
And so it is for us, who are prone to be of such little faith in our day. We see setbacks in the advance of the kingdom, and even apparent defeats for the cause of righteousness, and we are quick to be discouraged, and even to lose hope. Yet we too have been assured by Christ that he has already overcome the world (John 16:33), that all authority in heaven and earth has been given to him (Matt. 28:18), and that he will reign victoriously from heaven until all his enemies are put under his feet (1 Cor. 15:25). Nonetheless, the sheer visible and tangible evidence of evil in the world can be overwhelming to our faith, like the unforgettable sight of the bloodied and lifeless body of Jesus was for his disciples. We indulge in feelings of general discouragement about the present, and pessimism about the future. Yet, brothers and sisters, from the vantage point of the day of final triumph that is coming for us, such despondency will appear as utterly unfounded for us as it was for our Lord’s first disciples on that Saturday of Holy Week. Truly we have no good reason to be afraid or to despair.
So as we remember that day before Easter long ago, let’s “bid our sorrows cease” as dear Charles Wesley would put it, in remembrance of what those doubting disciples heard on that first day of the week: “He has risen, as he said!”
