The Emptiness of the Sealed Filled Tomb

Photo by TC Perch at Pixabay

Holy Saturday is hard.  It’s the hurry-up wait point of this holy season, where we don’t quite know what to do.  That confusion mirrors what the apostles must have felt; the emptiness of knowing that the body of Jesus lay in that cave, wrapped, dead, and as far as they knew, gone forever.  The world says, when we die, there is no more.  We should know by now, that whatever the world insists, is wrong.   We know how the story does not end.

Knowing the ending that isn’t the end, makes it difficult to weather this time when we see the empty open tabernacle.  It does not make sense to our Catholic understanding of the world.  We know Christ is risen, and we are an Easter people, so this time from Good Friday to the Easter Vigil is a reminder of how it was before Christ’s resurrection.

It’s a good day for making bread because it must rest hidden, veiled and waiting until it is risen.   Making dough requires hope.  One has to believe the dough will rise.  One has to trust the dough will rise.  One cannot prematurely take away the cloth or remove the dough from the prooving drawer or it will fall.  But if we wait, we will have bread.

Photo by Rudy and Peter Skitterian from Pixabay

These days, we need Easter in all things, because our lives and our society is suffering.  Every day there is news of shootings, of hate, of unaddressed rage, of unforgiven, of need, of pain upon pain upon pain.   Life without hope, without healing, without forgiveness, without mercy, without justice, without peace, without light, is an existence filled with despair, hurt, cruelty upon cruelty, revenge, injustice, and filled with endless war.  Life without love, without hope, without faith, is littered with fragments of what Hell is.

The good news is, we can be the means by which many of these fragments are cleaned up, filed down, and rendered less potent.  We will never clear the world of all of its sins.  We cannot save it.  We can only participate in its salvation by our own imitation of our Lord.    We must be witnesses of Christ to a joy-starved world.  If we live as willing disciples, there will be leftovers from our actions, brimming enough to feed five thousand where we only had five loaves and two fish and fill twelve baskets besides.

This is the promise of Easter, He is risen!

All that the world can throw at God, God willingly embraces and makes holy, even this:

Image by Falco of Pixabay.

Even what seems beyond all, is not beyond God.    And so, we wait, these precious few hours and remember, He is risen, even as we stare at the more empty than we can comprehend, filled sealed tomb.

Happy Holy Saturday.