Today is Holy Saturday, the final day of Lent, and the eve of the greatest gift humanity has ever received. But for Jesus’ disciples, it was a crushing time of defeat and sorrow. They couldn’t see that this was the day before all days, the day before their broken hearts and muddled minds would awaken to see a brand-new thing. Their pre-conceived Messianic viewpoint held their minds captive in a darkened place, hindering them from moving past what they ‘knew’ and out into the sunshine of what truly was. Two millennia later, we still struggle to press beyond what’s stuffed into our gray matter and emerge into the new-ancient reality of what is. It’s an open secret, a gripping idea but a mostly ‘other’ reality. We comfortably amass lots of cool, efficient, data but remain a tad leery of emotions and all things touchy-feely.
It’s telling that, for the disciples, yesterday was many things, but good was certainly not among them. They may have called it Hideous Friday, or Nightmare Friday, or Heartbreaking Friday, but no way was it a Good Friday. Not in a million years! The three-hour solar eclipse was likely a great match for the content of their thoughts. Oh! If only they could have seen! If only they could have heard! If only they could have let go of what they ‘knew’ and exercised eyes of faith, however blearily.
For us, in 2025, the term Good Friday feels like an awkward descriptor, a misnomer, too. We recoil at the brutality, the rawness, the mocking, the humiliation, the injustice. There had to be more to the story for it to be considered anything close to being good. For that to be so, Jesus’ last words on the cross couldn’t possibly be his last, last words. Surely there was a sequel, an encore, a Part II. And boy, was there a Part II included in God’s Plan ‘A’!
A detail that shows God’s thoughts being higher than our thoughts is the intimacy, the hiddenness both of Jesus’ birth and his resurrection. For his birth, only Joseph and Mary. For his resurrection, not a witness, not a sound! Maybe it’s because both were to be incontrovertible, living truths, lighting up hearts, filling souls and not a fireworks spectacle to elicit oohs and aahs from the casual onlooker. So much to ‘see’ but there was so much blindness, both physical and spiritual. Looking forward to seeing all you saints tomorrow with Resurrection joy flooding your souls, expressing confidence in Jesus alone, faces set like flint on our journey to the Father’s heart – 10 AM, 3 PM UK, 4 PM ES. PD
