Good Friday, Holy Saturday: The absence of God

"... for those who enjoy a degree of certainty in their faith, it may be that the blankness of Holy Saturday doesn't really 'bite': it may simply be a day of anticipation of the joy that is to come. But that first Saturday was a day of utter devastation. Not only had the disciples witnessed the shocking, violent death of their friend and beloved leader; there was also the fact that while following Jesus, they had dreamed of a different future--a future when they would no longer live under Roman occupation, a future when their religious structures would loosen up and encompass the poor, the sick and the marginalized, a future when the hungry would be fed and the land of promise would again be a land that would ring with the praises of God. They had lost not only their friend and leader but their dreams as well.

It may seem maudlin to reflect too deeply on such things but, without wishing to dwell gratuitously on the violence, it is surely healthy to keep a day and a half a year when we acknowledge the awful impact of Jesus' death. To turn immediately to the resurrection is like a denial of reality, but to contemplate the sense of God's absence that the disciples must have felt may have a spiritual value for us.

For those who have lived with a fragmented faith, a faith that has had too many holes punctured in it by circumstances, too much damage ever to return to a simplistic certainty, there is something healing about living through the rise and fall of the Church seasons. It's a relief to acknowledge the disappearance of God on Holy Saturday and the uncertainty of the outcome. That's not to say we have to remove ourselves from the hope of the resurrection, but we admit that hope doesn't prevent the bleakness of God's apparent absence descending even upon those with the strongest faith. C.S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed that when you are happy and feel no particular need of God, he seems to be there and welcoming you with open arms:

"But go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence."

As their hope for a new future evaporated overnight, the disciples faced instead a chasm of grief as God vanished from sight with no promise that he would ever return...

...This is what Holy Saturday is: the absence of God, and the uncertainty and emptiness of dreams uprooted. Easter faith was born in the darkness, and, like the the disciples, sometimes we just have to wait in the shadows until eventually a glimmer of light appears on the horizon."

an excerpt from  Giving it Up: Daily Bible Readings from Ash Wednesday to Easter Day