“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (Jn. 12: 24)

If we see Holy Saturday only in terms of chronological time, it is reduced merely to a series of hours that comprise the day between Good Friday and Easter. But the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, like all mysteries and like all rebirths, occurs not in chronological time, but rather in what the Greeks called kairotic time, not in quantifiable clock time that can be measured, but in qualitative or opportune time. Ancient Greece had two types of time. Whereas chronos referred to quantifiable time, kairos referred to the fullness of time, the immeasurable time of mystery, discovery, transformation, and new possibility. The enigmatic truth of Holy Saturday is that most if not all of “whatever is right, whatever is just, whatever is found to be excellent; whatever is pure, whatever is true, whatever is found to be worthy of praise” happens in the fullness of time, in kairotic time.1

Holy Saturday alludes to the fact that what is about to happen is happening now in secret, developing in the hiddenness of in-between time. What is taking place is imperceptible to the human eye and deeper than cognition. What is happening in secret is the seed for the fullness of time experienced as the victory of life over death. Compared to the dramatic events of Jesus’ life and death as commemorated on Holy Thursday and Good Friday and the grand hullabaloo of his Resurrection celebrated on Easter, Holy Saturday can seem incidental or unnecessary to the overall movement of the paschal mystery. To think this would be a gross mistake. In truth, the in-between time is essential. The time between conception and birth called pregnancy, between harvesting and planting called fallowness is vivifying. The essential time between the death of Jesus solemnized on Good Friday, and his resurrection celebrated on Easter Sunday called by some The Great Sabbath because on this day Jesus “rested” in the tomb, is essential and offers hope to anyone who is suffering, to anyone who can’t see their way clear, to those at the end of their rope, to those buried under the heavy load of loneliness, shame, worry, or pain, and to those who despair as did the friends and followers of Jesus after his execution.

In her 1985 book The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich writes of the vastness and emptiness of Wyoming and the West, suggesting that the settlers who came, struggled, and stayed saw the emptiness as a “geography of possibility.” She adds, “Space is life.” In the grand scheme of things, Holy Saturday symbolizes the “geography of possibility” disguised as empty space in the movement of the paschal mystery. In the magnificent reversal that culminates in the raising of Jesus from the dead, the tomb that holds death becomes the womb that holds new life and bodies forth new hope and new possibilities. Holy Saturday reminds us that the fullness of time takes time, almost always involves struggle and suffering, and requires spaciousness. It signals that visible, kairotic, resurrection moments are born from a multitude of invisible, seemingly impertinent moments.

Holy Saturday incarnates the truth that is seen in every song that waits for a writer to write it and a singer to sing it, in every Christmas that follows an Advent, in every Easter that needs a Lent, in every feast more appreciated because of the preceding fast whether intentional or inflicted, in every wheel broken by injustice that nevertheless rolls unevenly toward the commonweal of justice, in every allegro that is what it is because the adagio is what it is, in the intensity and impact of every emerging dawn that ends a seemingly endless dark night that bears its own intensity and power, and in every seed that falls into the ground and dies before the nurturing soil sends it up into the light and out toward fecundity.

Whether or not we participate in the liturgy of The Three Days, it would be unfortunate both to consider Holy Saturday merely a day in the liturgical calendar or to act as if it is incidental or extrinsic to the one movement of Divine Love and to our daily living. Overshadowed by evocative scenes recounted on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and at the Easter Vigil, Holy Saturday carries its own substantive symbolism and transformative wisdom, namely, that “all moments are key moments,” that new life is happening, humming beneath the surface of the earth like seedlings after a forest fire, that purposeful or prophetic action requires the stillness of contemplative prayer, that as Eliot said the still point enables the dance, like St. Benedict knew the vow of stability allows for and supports the vow of conversatio morum — the openness and commitment to ongoing transformation, that resurrection takes time and a space like a tomb that becomes a womb. The tomb of Holy Saturday holds Jesus the way the belly of the whale held Jonah before spitting him to shore in a foreshadowing of the light and life of Christ risen. It is the in-between time of Holy Saturday that transforms passion as suffering on Good Friday to passion as love on Easter Sunday. So, let us be still and let Christ easter in us.

♦ For another reflection on Holy Saturday CLICK Holy Saturday — The Fertile Darkness.