Did you ever think that the resurrection could have gone down in an entirely different way?
In one sense, we didn’t really need Saturday… Jesus could have given up his spirit, then died, and then bounced back to life immediately. After all, God is not all that bound by time so he’s really capable of doing anything he wants in any timeframe that he wants…
But instead we have all of Friday and all of Saturday…
Which means we have doubt.
It’s simply not good enough or even accurate to maintain that the disciples were just sitting around on a Saturday biding their time until Sunday. The Biblical record would show that they were, well, freaked out. Devastated. Maybe they were left with a shred of hope, but overall what they have witnessed—the betrayal, the arrest, the torture, the beating, the execution—had shaken them to their core.
Saturday in Holy Week is a day of anticipation and hope, but it is also necessarily a day of faith and doubt.
Sometimes I think that Jesus left us with a Saturday (and a Friday for that matter) so that we would know that doubt is not only okay but is actually integral to the life of faith. For my part, while I wish I did not have periods of doubt, and that my faith was rock steady and consistent in the face of whatever life threw at me, I know otherwise.
My vision gets blurry. My hope fades sometimes. My trust waivers.
And all this from a pastor?
But here’s the deal: the disciples doubted. They lost hope, at least temporarily.
Sometimes, we fall into the trap that thinking that faith means never having doubts… we think that to believe means that the sun will always shine, and that will never be confused, and that we will never be afraid, that we will never look to the heavens and ask “why God?”
But that’s not really the definition, is it? There’s a distinction between faith and knowledge, and we are called to one and not so much the other.
this is eric case 