Why isn’t there a word for Saturday?
As early as AD 100, Christians gathered to commemorate the acts of the cross. Bede records Easter Sunday being called such in his 725 writing The Reckoning of Time, connecting the word to the month of Eostre, named for the deity of the indigenous religion of Northumbria.
Later in 1300, we find a first recorded mention of ‘goude/gode friday’ ascribed to either John the Evangelist, or Brendan the Navigator.
These words have moved from description to definition amongst participants in the western church, and subsequently in wider post-Christendom society. You would scarce find someone referring to the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox as its alternate name “Resurrection Sunday”, nor Friday as “Crucifixion Day”. Instead, the multi-day feast conjures images of eggs and even amongst those of faith, a victory final over death, with muted reflection on Friday followed by a triumphal celebration on Sunday. And rightly so.
But where does Saturday fit into this? The difficult middle child at the centre of the holy calendar — an in-between day, that feels like just another Saturday.
For the disciples and contemporary adherents of Jesus, their experience of Holy Saturday is lost to time. Scripture provides us with no narrative of how the followers filled their time as the city around them celebrated Passover. Mark 15 ends with Marys Magdelene and the Mother of Jesus watching the stone rolled across the tomb, and Mark 16 begins with “When the Sabbath was over” [NIV]. Matthew 26 and 27 follow a similar pattern of guard placement before the Sabbath, and the narrative continuing after it is over. Luke 23 and 24, and John 19 and 20, similarly bridge from the embalming before the Sabbath, and the women’s return to the tomb on Sunday morning both beginning “On the first day of the week” after the Sabbath was completed.
So we are abandoned to speculation on what the Sabbath day held for Christ’s children. This year, on the very Saturday, I find myself perhaps feeling some of the emotion they felt.
Confusion, anger and hopelessness have been the watchwords of my faith for much of the last twelve months. Not so much toward the suffering of the pandemic itself, but instead more basic reactions toward the sheer existential scale of faith in Christ and what that means for my life. I would never have said I had taken my faith for granted in the past, my passion and fervour for the love of the Risen King have always been genuine, but despite this, I find myself distant and critical of the truth I have relied upon my whole life.
Separating the hurt and challenge of my experience of growing up as an evangelical Christian, which is innately intertwined with my understanding of who God is and what he is calling me to, is an unenviable challenge.
In Catholic tradition, the alter is left blank on Saturday, with the dressings of Good Friday removed and the Easter Sunday decoration not yet arrived. In the same way, this painting by Dali has fascinated art historians: the crucified body of Christ hanging over creation — but not a drop of blood can be found.
It is this emptiness that fascinates me. Whether Mary, who had wailed uncontrollably at the foot of the cross as her son was tortured, or Peter who had denied Christ thrice, or one of the several nameless disciples who had fled the scene of Jesus’ arrest, it is hard to imagine the all-consuming numbness which would have invaded their minds on that Saturday morning.
To feel so aggressively betrayed by your radical revolutionary leader, betrayed by your friend in that his professed power had so easily been overturned by a kangaroo court and some nails. Jesus’ friend's heart would have been torn asunder that Passover.
What had they done to deserve this level of heartbreak? How could they move on from the devotion and love they had seen, felt and believed while learning at the elbow of some man now dead and buried?
For the most faithful though, perhaps they were able to cling to what Jesus had told them, and simply sit in the incomparable pain and wait, hope, beg, for Sunday to come.
It’s this emotion that I find myself identifying with so closely.
We know the writers of the New Testament did not write their gospels concurrently to the life of Christ, so we can view the omission of Saturday as intentional. Perhaps out of embarrassment, guilt, or shame, that day has been scratched from the narrative of history.
And I get it.
The feeling of knowing what has come and waiting for what is to come, filled with scepticism so large you ask yourself if you truly do believe it is coming, is a terrifying thing. You find yourself wrestling, as Abraham wrestled with God, with the very foundations of your life. These late-night thoughts and absent-minded internal dialogues are not things I would want to be recorded for the future.
If this were a good spiritual essay, this would be the part where I explain how my internal dialogue has come to the conclusion of absolute confidence in the victory of Christ, ready for Sunday morning’s loud music and processions. This is not a good spiritual essay.
Instead, I am trying to be honest about what this fleeting, empty, silent Saturday is. It’s a biblical depiction of where I feel trapped on my spiritual journey — a nameless, lonely time feeling isolated from God and from my own identity. Truly my flesh is weak, so weak, that I am left wondering if my spirit is even willing. In the silence, I hope with all hope that tomorrow brings the joy which I have always been promised, and have always believed in, but in doing so struggle deeply. The absence of this day from this pivotal scriptural moment is encouragement in its own right: my spiritual forebears suffered these moments too.
I suppose I understand why this day has no name.
Happy Easter. But first, Saturday.
