Thoughts on Easter Saturday

I can't get the word "redemption" off my mind. I know, it's Easter, so no surprise, but I think that word means more than we often use it for. It’s not just an event or moment.

While Good Friday is grief stricken and Sunday is unparalleled joy, it strikes me that true redemption’s work is done today, on the Saturday. That awful moment between the unspeakable tragedy and the inexpressible joy of Sunday. Because on that Saturday in between there’s this terrible question of WHY. Literally in this case: WHAT THE HELL?

And what is faith if it isn’t belief while you’re sitting there with some level of the question “why” remaining unsatisfyingly, painfully unanswered?

Yesterday, I read the story of Mary Magdalene going to the tomb after Jesus was gone. I read about her grief and resonated with it in a way that I wasn’t prepared for—and then there’s the moment when Jesus turns her own question on her and asks her “why are you crying?” And then He calls her by name. Wow, just wow. She’s grieving because of “why”. She’s grieving for the man that saved her, and for not understanding why He’s gone or why it had to happen the terrible way that it did.

I think that full Redemption happens in those tears, or rather in the perseverance through those tears.

James, Jesus’s own brother knew this: “…for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” So, tragedy hits and we rightfully mourn all Good Friday, and then Saturday comes and the “whys” just get louder, deeper, more painful.

But that’s the funny thing. Sometimes I think we tend to treat redemption as a moment, as Sunday if you will, and in a sense it is—but it’s also a process. Redemption needs Good Friday and the awful Saturday in between. Redemption needs pain because it’s a process and sometimes there’s no comfort but Jesus himself in that process.

What’s more is that to seek any other comfort in that process is to truly cheat Redemption of its fullness. To cheat Redemption of the pain that gives it birth is cheating it of its very essence, and it becomes redemption no more. The more I dwell on this, I see this principle reverberate all throughout Creation. We appreciate seasons because they’re seasons, we know what day is because half of the time it isn’t, I could go on: process, cycle, redemption is everywhere.

One of my favorite lines of poetry is in William Blake’s opening lines of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.”

I think he’s on to something there. Maybe this principle is the very “Knowledge of Good and Evil” that we were told to stay away from at the beginning.

But, we didn’t stay away from it. And now we’re living in the Saturday of all Eternity, where Creation is weeping, asking why, sometimes in Faith, and sometimes not. And the day will come when Jesus will come up behind us, call us by name, and ask us why we’re weeping. Even though He knows. And He’ll know because he lived and bore the Why for all of us, and walked with us through the ugliest things that Creation could ever conspire so He could come back and answer that question once and for all: the goodness and grace of God is more clear in the scope of all Eternity for the pain; God let it happen because that’s how Redemption works. Redemption doesn’t erase the ugly, it takes it, makes new rules about it, and creates something new that is more beautiful than it ever could have been had the ugly never existed.

And He thought that the beauty of the Eventual would be worth this awful Earth of a Saturday.

How’s that for a cosmic cost-benefit analysis?