The Longest Saturday

The Greeks have a wonderful little adjective, kairos, which describes time in a qualitative sense. Not the kind of time that your watch measures, but the kind of time that is characterized by a feeling such as "this is a good time", it is time for a beer, or, as the ancient poet remarked: there is a time to weep and a time to laugh. Have you ever thought about how absurd it is for us to attempt to describe God, who is outside of time, with language that exists only within time?

Consider this: in between the days of Christ's death and his resurrection there was Saturday, the day when nothing happened at all. Christ was dead, and that was that. The Gospels have little to say about it, the Disciples themselves simply rested as they were commanded. But imagine such rest, they were most likely scared out of their skins and doing more of cowering in the dark corner of their flat than resting with a good drink and a pleasant book. And waiting, for what they were not even sure.

So too for us, Saturday is the day that we know best. We too are waiting, waiting for God knows what. Maybe we are waiting as a pessimist for the government to finally fail, maybe we are waiting as the typical American Evangelical for that supposed thousand years of peace, or maybe we wait as the good humanist for human kind to finally reach a perfected state of being. This is certainly one way to wait. It makes us feel brave as we laugh in the face of the dark night; it also tempting because as Buechner says; "despair is often easier than faith."

The other way however, is to say "to hell with the dark." The other way is to say "thanks be to God" because the darkness is not the end. Sunday morning came, and with it life. Life everlasting. As sure as the light has already broken into the darkness and will break through again, so will our Sunday morning come and put an end to our Saturday.