Sermon — Holy Saturday, March 30, 2024
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble,
comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow
and does not last. Do you fix your eyes on such a one?”
(Job 14:1–2)
The Book of Job is an arcane, almost archaic poetic text. Its Hebrew vocabulary and terminology are so obscure at times, its meaning so unclear, that Biblical scholars will plumb the depths of their knowledge of ancient languages trying to determine the meaning of some of its phrases. They pull out the latest work in comparative North-West Semitic linguistics and Old Babylonian philology, trying to determine what a particular word means and come up short. Ironically, though, the book as a whole is simple in its meaning. And of all the books in the Bible, you might say that it’s among the most modern in its concerns. The Book of Job opens with a short fable about Job’s misfortune and suffering, and closes with a tidy little chapter in which he lives happily ever after. But in between, we just get readings like this: chapter after chapter and verse after verse in which Job cries out to God, begging for an explanation—and listening to the less-than-helpful speeches of his friends.
“There’s hope for a tree!” Job says. “If it’s cut down, it can sprout again.” And Job is right. If you walk down to the back side of the Doherty Playground over Bunker Hill right now you can see the proof. There’s a gnarled old stump there that Murray has decided is a troll. It’s four feet wide, grizzled, and mossy, but out of it is growing, this spring, a sprout.
“There’s hope for a tree,” Job says, “But mortals die and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they?” We have all seen perennials come up, year after year, to bloom. We have all seen shoots growing out of the stump of a tree. But we do not see human beings rising from the dead.
On Holy Saturday we read these words of Job at a service that serves as Jesus’ funeral. This service has none of the pomp and parades of Palm Sunday. It has none of the agony and suffering of Good Friday. We don’t get the candlelight and chanting of the Easter Vigil, or the bells and fancy hats of Easter Sunday. Instead, we lay Jesus to rest. We hear the Gospel story of his burial in the tomb, and we offer prayers taken from our burial service: the same prayers that could be said at a funeral service for you or I, we’ll say today for Jesus.
On Holy Saturday, Jesus rests in the tomb. And we rest, too, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for God to answer Job out of the whirlwind. Waiting for God to answer us: Because Job’s questions really are modern questions. So often, in human life, these are questions we share. Why, God, are things not the way they ought to be? Why do the people we love become sick and die, long before they reach old age? Why are bombs still falling, all around the world? Mortal human beings like us suffer in a thousand ways, large and small, and then we die.
In medieval times, we would have wondered where to place the blame. We would’ve assumed that God must be punishing us, and people do still sometimes think this way. But by and large the question modern people ask is more like Job’s: Do you fix your eyes on such a one, God? In other words: Is there anyone out there watching? Is there a God who cares? Or is the universe, after all, nothing but atoms and void?
And the almost-unbelievable good news of the Christian faith is that God’s answer to Job’s question—“Do you fix your eyes on such a one?”—is “Yes.” And so much more. God is keeping an eye on us, God does care for us, so much that God became one of us, and suffered like one of us, and died for all of us—so that God might make us like those trees, from which new life can grow, long after they are reduced to stumps. And when we read these words of mourning and despair from Job on Holy Saturday, there’s a kind of dramatic irony. We know something that Job doesn’t know, and it’s that despite all the suffering and disappointment of this world, he should not give in to despair. God is not in an far-off, uncaring world. God is here, suffering too; dying, too. And God is transforming that suffering and death into something new, and just as Jesus rose from the dead, we will rise again, too.
On Holy Saturday, we aren’t quite there yet. Holy Saturday is still a day of stumps. But even now, the hidden work begins. On the one hand, Christ is resting in the grave. On the other, as Peter tells us, Christ is proclaiming the gospel even to the dead. Tradition calls this “the harrowing of hell,” the moment on Saturday when it seems to us that Jesus is at rest, but in reality, he’s down among the souls of the departed, preaching good news to them, too.
In our eyes, in this Holy Saturday world, sometimes it looks like God’s work has stopped. Even now, the hidden work of Easter has begun—Christ is bring forth new life from the deepest, darkest places. Even now, something is going on in your life’s deepest, darkest places, something that you cannot yet imagine and yet which will make everything new.
You cannot see it yet. None of us can. But somewhere, in the place you’d last expect it—maybe even in the sealed-off tomb, in the place from which you thought nothing could come—something new is becoming real.