Holy Saturday: What We Do in the Dark
RESIST: A HOLY WEEK SERIES
What We Do in the Dark
Holy Saturday
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Holy Saturday is the day nobody knows what to do with.
Jesus is dead. The tomb is sealed. The disciples are scattered, hiding, terrified. Everything they believed — everything they gave up jobs and families and safety for — is over. The movement is finished. The dream is done.
And there's nothing to do but wait in the dark.
We skip this day. We rush from the cross to the empty tomb because we know how the story ends. We've read ahead. But the disciples hadn't. For them, Saturday was just the day after the worst day of their lives, and they had no reason to believe Sunday was coming.
This is the most honest day of Holy Week. And I think it's the one our moment most needs.
Because a lot of us are living in Holy Saturday right now.
We see what's happening — the erosion of democratic norms, the weaponization of Christian identity, the cruelty dressed up as policy, the fear that what we've believed about justice and human dignity might just be losing. And we don't know what comes next. The tomb is sealed. The people we counted on are hiding. It feels like the story is over.
Holy Saturday doesn't offer a solution. It doesn't promise that everything works out. It just sits with you in the dark and says: this is real. The loss is real. The fear is real. Stay.
That's not nothing. Staying is not nothing.
The disciples who stayed closest to the cross on Friday were the women. And the women who came to the tomb on Sunday — the ones who first witnessed the resurrection — were the same ones who didn't run. They went through Saturday. They sat in the grief. They showed up again at dawn with burial spices, planning to do the last thing they could do for someone they loved.
That's the posture of Holy Saturday: you keep showing up, even when you don't know why. You stay close to the thing you love, even when it looks like it's over. You do the next right thing in the dark.
Resistance requires this. Not just the fire of Friday's prophetic clarity — but the long, quiet faithfulness of Saturday. The willingness to stay when staying costs something. To keep your hands on the work even when the outcome is uncertain.
Sunday is coming. But you have to get through Saturday first.
Stay.
Reflection: What does faithfulness look like for you right now, in this moment of uncertainty — before you can see what comes next?
