Silent Saturday is my favorite day of Holy Week.
In all honesty, this year Easter and I haven’t gotten along.
I can’t seem to shake the image of a man getting murdered by a colonial state and how current times have minimized, misused, and weaponized his murder.
I know this week is complex, especially as someone who grew up believing in an angry God who needed someone to absorb his wrath. I no longer believe this, but it makes me sad that all over the U.S and so many parts of the world this is what will be presented as victorious on Sunday morning.
Enter Silent Saturday though, and I feel at home there.
I live most of my life in the space of Silent Saturday. I imagine what that day must’ve been like for Jesus’ friends. I wonder if for a split second when Mary woke up she thought the day before was all a nightmare, yet it only took one blink for her body to remember the tremendous pain she wanted to run away from.
I imagine she remembered the raspy, gentle voice of Jesus saying resurrection was coming, but how could she ever be sure? Desperately she needed to believe him, she needed to remember his voice, and what if she couldn’t remember his voice?
Yet the day goes by and his body is still in a tomb.
The silence grows to be the loudest moment she’s ever experienced.
I sit here. In the silence.
Continuously waiting for resurrection.
In so many ways displacement has been a kind of death. Like David, I ask, “who can praise you from the grave?”.
And I don’t mind sitting here.
I don’t know when resurrection will come, and even in the moments when I don’t know if Jesus will keep his word, a still small voice tells me this man has never lied to me.
The silence doesn’t disappear and I am afraid of forgetting the sound of His voice. My urgency for resurrection becomes outrageous.
And in this liminal space I await the day when justice runs like a river. I await the day Black folks are loved and cared for. I await the day prisons become obsolete. I await the day my Asian-American siblings no longer fear walking down the street. I await the day Black and brown refugees are not stripped away of their dignity. I await the day I get to hold my mami’s hand again.
I await Resurrection.