“[T]he middle-aged, who have lived through their strongest emotions, but are yet in the time when memory is still half passionate and not merely contemplative, should surely be a sort of natural priesthood, whom life has disciplined and consecrated to be the refuge and rescue of early stumblers and victims of self-despair.”
“I would invite the members to reimagine the framing of the human context in which the question of abortion arises. Instead of a zero-sum conflict among strangers over the permissible use of lethal force, think of it instead as a crisis facing a mother and her child. Then ask how we can work together across our differences to come to their aid not just during pregnancy, but throughout life’s journey.”
A homily preached at Trinity Cathedral, Pittsburgh, on Holy Saturday 2024
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
In the famous story of Jesus walking, unrecognized, with two of his followers after his resurrection, there is a remarkably poignant, human moment. Jesus asks them what they are discussing as they walk away from Jerusalem, and after they recount the chaos and tragedy of the last few days, they say about Jesus (not knowing that they are talking to the Risen One himself), “We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.” That perfect tense — “we had hoped” — contains and conceals a world of grief.
We are all familiar with the crush and pain of dashed hopes. You can’t live much beyond childhood to feel it (and many taste it already in childhood). The friendship you thought would last forever ends in betrayal. The career you had set your sights on becomes impossible because of an incurable injury. The divorce papers are finally signed. The chemo and radiation treatments are discontinued, and all that is left to do is wait for death’s coming. The key is returned. The lid on the casket is lowered for the last time. We had hoped.
If you’re religious (as I assume you are — you’re here for a Holy Saturday service!), then you know this same pain in your life with God. The bewilderment and hurt of unanswered prayer. The ache of the lack of God’s experienced presence. The recurring sense that this is all just pious fantasizing. The secret fear that God has finally abandoned you. We had hoped.
One of the great teachers of spirituality from the last century once wrote that every Christian who prays (and not just the great mystics or hermits) sooner or later experiences “the dark night of the soul,” the time — sometimes a long time — when God’s presence can’t be discerned or enjoyed anymore:
The beginner is usually granted ‘sensible’ [sensory], tangible consolations by way of encouragement; his senses and intellectual powers rejoice in the discovery of divine meaning and divine presence in the words and events of Scripture. As he advances, these consolations are necessarily withdrawn from time to time and for indefinite periods, for God does not wish to be found on any other path than his Son’s dying and rising.
God, in other words, allows us to remain in darkness, grief, and unknowing for a purpose: so that we might not rely on shallow, false pictures of who God is and might instead discover God right in the midst of dying and death, on the cross and in the tomb.
The writer Joan Didion says that after her husband died suddenly in their living room one night while she was in the kitchen preparing dinner, “There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible.” She calls this time of confusion her “year of magical thinking.” Her memoir with that title is the story of the slow recognition that the magic was false and that the reality was in fact irreversible: her husband really wasn’t coming back, and she now had to find a way to go on living without him.
That stripping away of illusions is what Holy Saturday is about. We thought we could ensure that Jesus and his Father were always available for our manipulation. We may have imagined that we could somehow use God to advance the agendas we prefer. We might have believed that we could forecast how God would always act and rely on him to meet our needs in the way we determine is best. But now we are faced with the cold, graying corpse in the tomb and the reality that we had it all wrong. We had hoped.
But Holy Saturday is also about waiting for a new hope on the far side of death — a hope that isn’t just a continuation of what we thought we wanted but a transformation of how we relate to God in faith and prayer. Christians usually picture Jesus descending into the nethermost caverns of hell on this day, and we might imagine him, as he dives downward, shedding all of the controls and expectations we try to clothe him in.
Holding that image in our minds, we might also imagine ourselves the way one of the church fathers pictured us in prayer: as ascending higher and higher on the crags of Mount Sinai with Moses and finding that the closer we get to God’s fiery presence, the darker and darker our vision becomes. God appears to us as cloudy, luminous darkness because only when we let go of what we think is light are we able to better approach the light that God is with humility and (true) hope.
As Jesus descends into darkness, we ascend into darkness, the one enabling the other — and our life with God as we know it dies so that it can rise again true and pure.
And so, in the words of one of our greatest Christian poets,
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
My name is Wesley Hill. I am an associate professor of New Testament at Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan. I am also a priest serving at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Pittsburgh. This is my commonplace book and sometime-journal.
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