[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Between Death and Dawn

We can manage the unmanageable -- standing with his mother in her agony by 
the cross, watching the tormented, bloody man as death mercifully releases 
him -- because we already know how the story turns out. We know that this 
defeat is only momentary. We know that it isn't even three whole days 
before he sits up, sets his feet on the cool stone floor, shrugs off the 
linen wrappings, and strides forth into the dawn, the pure air cool on 
flesh that has come out the other side of mystery. We know this, and it 
lets us bear the intolerable burden of knowing that he suffered *this* much 
for *us*, because there was no other way to turn us around to face God's 
love. And we've never done a fool thing to earn this extraordinary love, 
except to be human.

So Easter Saturday is quiet and ordinary, for us who were standing in 
spirit by the cross yesterday. It wouldn't have been that way for those 
who'd stood there in reality: his mother and the other women, in their 
despair.  His friends and followers scattered, suffocated by their grief 
and terrified of what might happen to them; who'd be next? They had no way 
of knowing what lay on the other side of that Sabbath day. Even if someone 
else had his own power to raise the dead, that someone had no way of 
getting near the body, not with the guard and the rock. He was dead, and 
their world was crashing around them.

Worlds crash around our ears too. Hopes collapse, marriages fail, careers 
implode, health crumbles, beloveds die: it happens. Sometimes it's our own 
fault; sometimes it's the fault of others; sometimes it's sheer bad luck. 
Often it's a mixture of causes. Each of us has his or her personal 
cross-time, and it feels endless. We see no possible peace, much less joy: 
only the suffering stretching out into time, indefinite. For him, those 
hours between dawn and death must have seemed eternal. But he'd accepted 
his job in this, trusting that if there would be agony between dawn and 
death, there would be hope between death and dawn.

We don't always follow his example of patience and hope. We don't want to 
spend cross-time; it *hurts*. Sometimes the letting-go seems so intolerable 
that we fight it with everything we've got, fight bitterly, even 
hysterically, to avoid our personal passions. We think that by sheer force 
of will, we can force the cup of suffering back into God's hands: "Here, 
God, my will, not yours, be done." But if we've taken the time to think 
about the Christian way, that's not it.  That's not what Christ showed us.

The Resurrection lies on the other side of Good Friday. If we can trust in 
that, we can stand by our own suffering as we stand by Christ's on the 
cross: not denying it, not fleeing from it, but bearing it patiently and 
expectantly, in trust that we will, in fact, move from death back into 
dawn. Maybe not in any way we can visualize now, any more than his friends 
and followers could expect that empty tomb. But maybe we could remember 
that God has God's ways, and we could have some faith in that.

And so Easter Saturday is quiet, but it's not the silence of the tomb; it's 
the silence of quiet breathing, renewed after it had stopped, but in ways 
that we can't begin to imagine. Not now, not till we get there -- until 
we've done the death and seen the dawn.