Today is known as “Holy Saturday.” It’s the day we remember when Jesus lay dead in the tomb. Or rather, when His body lay in the tomb while His spirit “descended to the dead.”

At least, we’re supposed to remember this time, but the truth is, we overlook it. We skip from Friday to Sunday. We focus on the cross and the resurrection as the two pivotal moments in redemption history, but we skip Holy Saturday.

From the apostles’ perspective, Holy Saturday is the time of bewildering defeat, when everything went as wrong as it could have. It is a time of confusion, fear, mourning, crumbling faith, silence from heaven, and questioning everything you thought was true.

Sound familiar?

And from Jesus’ side, it is His entering even more deeply into the experience of death, which means God Himself enters the experience of the grave.

A lot of our confusion comes from not really knowing God.

We have an idea of who God is—and we think He’s not the God of Holy Saturday—that such a day is beneath Him. After all, even the apostles were not expecting a dying Messiah. That did not make sense to them. They only knew a Messiah who was a “winner.” And because of that faulty view, when Saturday came, their faith crumbled. And it should have crumbled because it was wrong! Jesus came to die. That was the mission. When the disciples thought Jesus’ death was a defeat, they doubted their faith. And they should have doubted because that was the wrong way to look at things.

We talk about deconstructing faith as if it were a bad thing, but a lot of what passes for faith should be deconstructed because it is not true or because it is immature. Faith needs to be reformed and repatterned according to God as revealed in Christ, not God as we wish Him to be.

That is painful. But it has to happen.

So when Jesus died, the apostles thought they had been abandoned, when the truth was Jesus was still very with them, part of the human condition, still in union with humanity, which means God was with humanity.

Holy Saturday calls into question the folk belief that God is close to us when things are going well but must be far away when things are going badly.

Instead, God is the God who remains with us, though hidden, in our own Holy Saturday moments.

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