From Friday to Sunday: Hopeful Expectation

Good Friday was filled with torture, hatred and death.

Easter Sunday is joy, love and Resurrection.

And Saturday?  I've heard few things said about the Saturday that sits in between those days.

I'm not a Bible scholar.  I've never taken a seminary class (though I've entertained the idea), and I have no formal training when it comes to the life of Christ.  But I can tell you that the idea of Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday sits heavy with me.

Saturday was the day of enduring loss.

The Disciples had placed their faith in a Jesus who was dead.  They didn't even stick around to watch Him die.  Instead, they scattered--presumably to avoid association with the "criminal" who was beaten beyond recognition.

I don't know what they did in those hours (with the exception of Peter).  I don't know where they went.  I can only imagine how they reacted when everything they had believed was torn down.

I don't know those men.  But I do know despair; it is the complete loss of hope.  And in that day that Jesus was taken off the cross and in the tomb, I imagine despair hit all of them.

But Sunday.

This morning, Beth Moore posted that Jesus was up before the first sun rays met the horizon.  I cried when I read her words, because she completely understood the absence of hope in Mary's heart when she went to the tomb.  Jesus was dead.  Hope was gone.  The world was a different place than it had been the week before.

And yet, that tomb had already been changed.  The stone was rolled away.  Christ renewed hope--first in the life of Mary Magadalene, then in the hearts of all those who heard about the miracle.

We've seen Friday.  And I'd venture to say a lot of us live in Saturday.  We don't know what to do with ourselves when hope has been decimated--often before our eyes. 

Like the disciples, I abandon what I know.  I crumble in a heap, cry bitter tears and attempt to put the pieces back together--even when I don't know the pattern.

And just when it seems like things can't get any darker, I find myself at an empty tomb and hear the quiet statement, "Wait for Me with hopeful expectation.  I AM alive."

Today, we have the privilege to know that Friday will bring Sunday.  We know that Christ wins.  But the difficulty comes in remembering Easter is the answer to every Friday.  Every Saturday.  Every waiting period in which hope seems to have disappeared entirely.

We look to the cross--not to see Him hanging there, but to know that love didn't pull a vanishing act on that hill.  His sacrifice became our answer--the hope that fills despair to bursting.