Saturday is the day we desperately get ready for Sunday. When I consider the weekend, I always internally groan when I look at Saturday because it comes with a big long list of things I’d rather not do–like clean and write email. Whatever work you did during the week, thinking you might be ahead of the game, is always shown to be fading and inconsequential by Saturday morning. It all has to be done over again.
Since we’ve moved to this house, we’ve been spending Saturday in particular mending things. A tragic number of items require mending. There are things we broke before we moved, things we broke while moving, and things we’ve broken as we’ve settled in–like the beautiful big step up to the front door, and the strings on the blind in the stairwell–I won’t go on lest I depress you.
Peter writes to Christians, so long ago, “According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” 1 Peter 1:3-5
I always trip up over words like imperishable, unfading, undefiled. Housekeeping is all about dealing with the perishable, the broken, the dirty, the defiled, the ruined top, the foul stench, the threadbare kitchen towel, the shoes that are too tight and full of holes, the broken china. Every day we clean and try to have order. And every day the dirt comes in and threatens to overtake us. That is the substance and measure of every day, but on Saturday it ramps up.
Largely because Sunday is supposed to be all about resting and trusting in the unfading, imperishable, undefiled person of Jesus, which takes a lot of work if you’re really going to do it, even for one morning and part of an afternoon.
You work really hard on Saturday so that you can sit down on Sunday. You clean the house and bathe the children and mend and fix and strive so that on Sunday you can “rest”–the rest of struggling in a pew with a lot of little children who spilled chocolate milk on their clean clothes, and then running out to the store because you forgot coffee hour milk, and then rushing home because you invited someone over but didn’t turn on the oven, or didn’t turn it off, either way the pork is ruined and you have run back to the store to buy a precooked chicken. You collapse at the end of the day just like you did the day before. The day of “rest” looked and felt a lot like the day of “work”. You lean back and wonder if there is any difference, or even any point. Why mend and fix and clean? Why go and sit in the pew? Why stand around afterwards talking to other people who have the same list and worries and piles of work?
According to his great mercy, writes Peter about God. All the business of church suffering and coffee hour mingling and mission group going and after church luncheon–all of it is God’s mercy preparing us for an inheritance kept safe in heaven, an inheritance that can’t be ruined or broken or had bleach spilled on it so that it’s not worth anything any more.
But what is this great inheritance? What is the great and wonderful thing that we hope for that can’t be spoiled? Skip past the trials of various kinds bit and you get to this, “Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” 1 Peter 1:8-9
You get…wait for it…Jesus. You get to be saved by Jesus and get to be with him forever. And that’s probably why the way is narrow and there aren’t very many people on it. What? I work and strive and try and fail and work and strive and try and fail for my whole life and then I die and I get…Jesus? What about the golden roads and the mansion and the stuff that doesn’t perish and fade? I’ve been struggling along with my stuff. Isn’t my struggle so that I can get new and better stuff? Or something?
But all the work with the stuff is for the people. And Jesus is the best person. It’s worth it all, getting to laze about in eternity with just Him, who, though you don’t see him, is strangely present in the strivings and concerns of the pew and the laundry. And salvation is worth it too. To be saved by the one who holds the cosmos together in himself, and who doesn’t ever break anything–that’s a marvelously good hope.
So, off I go to church; you should go too.
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