Cul-de-sac of Holy Saturday ends in Easter Sunday

Today's Thinking Anew column in The Irish Times.

By Michael Commane
Today is not Easter Saturday, rather Holy Saturday. And it's interesting how the world of marketing has changed today's name from Holy Saturday to Easter Saturday.

Of course the world of branding and marketing wants to keep us all so upbeat and celebratory that we want to dance out to the shops and fill our baskets with produce and spend our money.

But in the Christian calendar today and the days of this week are filled with doom and gloom. The agony in the garden, betrayal, crucifixion. Today the world stands still. We are in a cul-de-sac and it seems as if there is no hope.

We have been duped, fooled and it has all ended in the brutal and mocking execution of a man who claimed crazy things, offering hope to the marginalised and freedom to the enslaved.

And then on Easter Sunday a woman, well worth noting that it was a woman, Mary of Magdala, first became aware of the enormity that had taken place.

The man who had been crucified some hours earlier was no longer in the tomb where he had been placed. The woman was so excited about what she experienced that she called Simon Peter and the one Jesus loved.

And then it dawned on them that something extraordinary had happened.
"Till this moment they had failed to understand the teaching of scripture, that he must rise from the dead. The disciples then went home again." (John 20: 9 - 10).
It was as extraordinary and as ordinary as that. Nothing is ever the same again.

For someone as ordinary as I, it is impossible to attempt to 'explain' or try to give an empirical or philosophical meaning to what resurrection means.

All I can say is that I am a child of my environment, a Christian who believes in my own fumbling way in resurrection. It is always made most manifest to me when I visit the grave of my parents, where I pray and believe that they share in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Surely my mother and father have not been annihilated. There is more to all this than nothing.

Anyone who has sat at the bedside of a gravely ill person knows something about the horror of pain and sickness. Clichéd and trite words are meaningless, even offensive. It's a time when the reality goes beyond our words.

The phenomenon of such illness is terribly bleak. One has every reason to say it is a cul-de-sac. There is no hope. It is the cruel reality we encounter in Holy Week.

Tomorrow we celebrate the most important feast in the Christian calendar - our hope and our belief, resurrection.
And this day today, Holy Saturday, is a great reminder for us to take some consolation in the reality that before our ultimate resurrection none of us avoids the pain and suffering, "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune".

Of course it is our mission, our project to do all in our power to alleviate pain and suffering in the world. It is simple cant to tell people to relax in their pain and suffering. But at the same time it would seem naive to try to hide ourselves from pain, to wish it away or to think that this world can be turned into a pain-free zone.

The present economic crisis gives us some hint of how close we are all the time to pain and suffering.

Maybe calling today Easter Saturday is not just a marketing technique but also signifies some wishful thinking that we can banish pain from the world. We believe all doom, all pain, all suffering end in resurrection. We all die. No one avoids that. But Christians believe that we are destined for resurrection.

We believe we have neither been fooled nor duped. There is more to it than a cul-de-sac. Holy Saturday leads to Easter Sunday.

Alleluia, alleluia, the Lord is risen.