Easter Sunday/Saturday   O’Connor     8/4/23        John 20: 1-18

Rev Anne Ryan

I visited the Holy Land in 1993 and most of the famous churches are Orthodox. They are built on the site of some important part of Jesus’ life.  If you ask a priest there, how they know this is THE site, they’ll smile and admit they don’t but they think of it as not where it happened but where we celebrate or remember the event.

Dates of our festival days are a bit the same.  It seems we should be celebrating Easter at Passover – since the first Easter was at Passover, but only rarely do the 2 festivals coincide and to complicate matters neither are the same as Orthodox Christians dates.  (This year western Easter and Passover happen to coincide). The reasons for this are weird and complex. So it is probably better to think of  not when it happened but when our tradition has chosen that we celebrate.

What happens when you’re out of step with the church year?

A few years ago, I met a man, a Minister, as it happens.  I was at a workshop for preaching and worship which was held in the lead up to Easter.  His wife had died a few years previously and left him with children to raise on his own.  He told the group some of his experience and especially what Easter had been like for him over the last few years.  He’d had to stand in the pulpit on Easter Sunday and proclaim a resurrection he didn’t feel. 

Over Easter it looks like we celebrate 2 events – Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  But they are really one event in different parts or phases.   But even then, it looks like there are 2 phases to the Easter experience - death, followed by resurrection.  We can tend to look at Easter as Good Friday – experiencing the death of Christ, and then we can shut our eyes and hold our breath, if you like till Sunday comes and it's all OK again  Phew – we got thru another Easter!  However, in fact, if we look close we find there are in fact 3 parts to Easter:   

1. Good Friday: the extreme path of death, that indescribable wrenching that chokes off life. In crucifixion we can see mirrors of our own experience.  It may be the death of a loved one, or some less definable “death” – the loss of hopes and dreams, sickness, a disability, that deprives you of a real sense of living – temporarily or permanently.   The losses, the deaths we suffer are many and varied.   But the emotions are similar and there is the potential for us to experience it as a “death” of our self – or our sense that life is worth living.  We experience it as real as a physical death.
2. The second part of Easter is Easter Saturday. The time of limbo – feeling numb or stranded; death has left us barren and lifeless, automatically putting one foot in front of the other; going through the motions of life but not really feeling anything – except a great gaping hole inside you.
3. Easter Sunday is the time when life bursts out declaring God’s intentions for us. Death is never the end of the matter with God.  New life – new energy, a purpose and meaning in life are always possible in God’s world.   It is always a wonderful day of celebration for the whole of the Christian church. 

Despite the wonder of the Easter Day experience, I am tempted to think that Easter Saturday is actually the place where most of us will spend more time than we are prepared to admit.  Christian people proudly claim to be Easter people – the people of the resurrection.  But we all know that at times we feel out of step with Easter.  No matter how we think we ought to feel, sometimes it does no good, and it just doesn’t feel like Easter for us.  It’s more like we’re stuck in Easter Saturday.

Throughout history questions have been raised: What really happened on Saturday? Was Jesus really in the tomb? Was he sleeping? Was he really dead? Whatever happened on that day, it is clear that Saturday is part of the salvation process that God intended through the life of Jesus Christ. Easter Saturday, just like Good Friday and Easter Sunday, is not just one of the three days Jesus was dead and back to life again. Rather, personally, I would prefer to think of Saturday as symbolic of God’s time to expose our fragility and vulnerability. Our own personal pain and the vulnerability of our society and culture. Saturday is a time  to remind us that God’s willingness, through Jesus, to be in the tomb is a divine resolve to be in deep solidarity with those still trapped in dark depressing tombs ― whom Stanley Jedidiah Samartha, a theologian and philosopher of the Church of South India named in his poem “Saturday people”.

Squeezed between Good Friday and Easter

Ignored by preachers and painters and poets

Saturday lies cold and dark and silent

An unbearable pause between death and life

There are many Saturday people

To whom Easter does not come

There are no angels to roll the stones away

This stuckness can be really obvious, related to a great grief or pain or intractable problem that is current in your life.   Or it may be a more subtle being stuck – a gradual encroaching of insecurity and self-doubt.   Our “deaths” might be literal – the death of someone we love, or figurative – the death of dreams, our hope,  self-esteem, or a relationship.

And our society is stuck too – perhaps trapped might be a better word.

Most Saturday people are not strangers to us. Sometimes they are us.  Always these are the people who are unable to go any further, trapped in depressing tombs made by systems and economies that oppress and marginalise, that aim to remove all sense of humanity from them, and eliminate any hope for life now and in the future.

There are children who never grow to adulthood let alone old age because they die from the malnutrition and the scarcity of food and clean water.  In the midst of wars and crises refugees sail on crowded, poorly equipped dinghies ― never arriving on dry land to find the peaceful, normal place where they hope to raise their children. Climate displaced communities never have the chance to heal from one climate induced disaster, before the next is on them.  Vulnerable women, men, and children never see another day, due to constant beatings and family violence.  Detainees and immigrants never see a courtroom to fight for justice as they seek a home away from their troubled and war-torn homes. Many indigenous peoples are pushed not just to a margin, but to a margin of margins.  These are Saturday people that require our attention.

Saturday people are normally those who never reach resurrection, who suffer and die with Jesus “outside the city gates”. We need to be the people that dare to overturn the curse of these depressing tombs to invite the light of the hope of the resurrection to these people.  To stand with God to roll away the stone.

Resurrection should not be just something that happened 2000 years ago, that vaguely affects our lives, that we acknowledge only in worship nor should be about a supernatural otherworldly escape. Rather it should be about being in the world to make a difference.  The effect of the resurrection is to see the world as it is in all its stuckness and to allow it to change the way we live.

In Luke’s gospel, after the resurrection, Jesus hit the road again, ate and broke bread with disciples. In John’s gospel, Jesus went back to cooking fish and feeding people on the beach. Living in the resurrection starts with going back to deal with real stuff, real people, real issues, and the real world. It draws strength from the resolve to enter the darkest experiences of victims for the sake of liberation. For God to be in the tomb changes the whole meaning of following the resurrected Christ. It involves being part of the real struggle of real people to help dismantle the systems that prevent them from realizing the promise of an empty tomb.  

We are people of the resurrection, and we are also people of the crucifixion – Paul says I preach Christ and him Crucified, and we are the Saturday people In solidarity with the people living in tombs – trapped in limbo never knowing the reality of the resurrection life.  As we join them in their world, we can be the people of light to show, even if just the faintest glimmer of hope for new life within them and within the society.

This is who we are – this is our calling – as People of the Resurrection who proclaim our faith in Christ and Him crucified and who willingly stand in the tomb with the Saturday People.

Some of the ideas come from a reflection by Upolu Lumā Vaai from Pacific Theological College called “Easter for the Saturday People”.