I have always wondered what happened on Saturday, and the Scriptures tell us nothing, and its silence is not insignificant but speaks volumes of God’s activity.
The silence of God had been documented over the pages of the Bible, and in fact, there is a break, a silence break between the last book of the Old Testament and the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew.
I used to struggle with silence. I am used to the noise. I am writing this in a coffee shop, and there is someone behind me laughing, and it does not bother me. I find myself wondering about a sea of voices that somehow I am connected to. I would even say that it has a magical effect.
Sometimes silence is not as friendly as I wanted it to be, yet it is so good for the soul. Am I contracting myself? Yes, it is the dichotomy of the mystical and the reality, of the unknown and the familiar. Yet, I may get so used to the familiar that I lose sight of the inner voice, that voice that can only be found in silence.
I have found that on a day like today, the Saturday between Fridays and Resurrection Sunday, the worlds of Paul make sense to me of God’s apparent silence.
Paul wrote in Romans 8 that the Spirit intercedes for us with a language only known to the Spirit, that when we do not know how to pray, God’s Spirit is active and praying for us. On a Saturday like this, I know that God’s Spirit was involved in Jesus, that he descended to the lower regions of the earth to defeat forever the power of sin and death, to set many captives free. Saturday is when we let the Spirit work in us, where we are left powerless and only rely on Christ’s work on our behalf.
In the silence of God, God in Jesus speaks the loudest, pointing the way to Resurrection Sunday!