Part One Point Five: The Waiting

People often forget about the period in between the Friday and the Sunday. (As an aside, people sometimes say it was three days - wrong. Sunday was the third day, but there were not three days in between the death and resurrection. The Bible puts his death somewhere on Friday afternoon, and the women saw the empty tomb at around sunrise on Sunday. That's no even two days!) But for the disciples, this would have been the longest day. The longest time. And for many of them - probably all of them - they thought that it was all over. They didn't get all of what Jesus had been saying before about dying and coming back. All they knew is that they had been following this guy for three years - and the powers that be had killed him. Brutally. They had bet everything on Jesus - put all of their lives into him - and he was dead.
There would have been a lot of fear. Fear for their own lives, that they would be next. That before two long, there would be eleven more crosses on that hill, carrying their bloody corpses.

We know very little about what actually would have happened on this Saturday. It was a special Sabbath, the day of Passover; but there is nothing in any of the Gospels about what happened on this day, apart from the Sanhedrin asking Pilate to put a guard on the tomb. It is a period of silence. Of absence. And it seems so strange to us. Of course, looking back, we know that it was only one day - but for the disciples then, they didn't know that. They thought it was all over. That it was gone, and their lives would soon end.

So perhaps Saturday, for us, is a reminder. That there are going to be times of silence, of nothingness. That there are going to be times when everything seems to have fallen down. When nothing can be done, and it's all over.

But remember, folks....Sunday's coming. It's only the second day.