Suggested Readings: Job 14:1-14 or Lamentations 3:1-9; 19-24, Psalms 31:1-4, 15-16, I Peter 4:1-8 Matthew 27:57-66, or John 19:38-42
“I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.’” (Lamentations 3:19-24)
Holy Saturday. Jesus Christ was dead.
Consider that for a moment. Let it sink in. Contemplate its strangeness.
The second person of the Holy Trinity, the Word made flesh, was dead.
God, who cannot die, became human and died.
How can that be? What could that mean?
What kind of God are we talking about here?
When we say God, is that the one we mean: the one who was dead?
If we were God, would we have created a world and then died in it?
God created through love and for love. God didn’t create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances.
If God were not love, there would only be God, but God is love, so there is the world, and there is us.
The category unloved does not exist. There is no such thing.
That or Christianity is false.
But you can experience yourself as unloved. You can live most of your life in that experience. Many people do.
It was Saturday, and Jesus was dead.
To say God was dead is to say God, who became human, received into himself, into God’s own life, the human experience of death.
And not just any death: death in isolation, confusion, weakness, and affliction.
God experienced that. Not theoretically or in the abstract–personally, as an event within God’s own life.
Why?
Weil continues:
Because no one else could do it, God himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed. This tearing apart, over which supreme love places the bond of supreme union, echoes perpetually across the universe in the midst of the silence, like two notes, separate yet melting into one, like pure and heart-rending harmony. This is the Word of God.
Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday are revelation.
They reframe experience. They invite us to imagine ourselves in a wider context.
Our life is hidden with Christ in God.
We exist within a love stronger than death.
God is nearer than we feel.
“Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.”
Amen.
Adam Neder
