Black Saturday
(RSV) Next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate 63 and said, “Sir, we remember how that imposter said, while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ 64 Therefore order the sepulchre to be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and steal him away, and tell the people, ‘He has risen from the dead,’ and the last fraud will be worse than the first.” 65 Pilate said to them, “You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can.” 66 So they went and made the sepulchre secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard. Matthew 27:62-66
Black .. the absence of light.
Black.. the opposite of white.
Whereas white contains all the colours as can be seen when you hold a prism to a beam of light, black contains no colour.
Or, if we reference painting, the addition of all colours is muddied randomness. You get an ugly black. It is not a pure colour like white.
Can you picture a night without stars? Can you remember a time when you were confined in such darkness that all you could do was sense the presence of “something” in the room? Was the sense a positive experience or a negative experience? Was it a heart warming sensation or a fearful sensation?
Black Saturday is a Christian tradition that has come and gone only to come back again. It is something that waxes and wanes. Why? Could it be that we can only stand the thought of God’s absence for so long before we have to put the idea out of our thoughts? My wife was asked one year to carry the Christ candle during Maundy Thursday service. The tradition is to have lit candles during the service only to have them extinguished one by one after the reading of Scripture. Only the Christ candle remains lit. At the end of the service, this one remaining candle is carried out of the church. She shared with me after carrying the Christ candle out that it was one of the hardest things she has ever had to do - remove Christ from the church. Years later, she still recalls the chill, the sorrow, the fear she experienced in do this and has said many times “I never want to do that again.”
Without God present, life is worse than black. It is nothingness. That is what Black Saturday symbolizes to me. I cannot fully imagine what it would be like without God present. Even those who state they do not believe in God, or that they reject the God they envision would not be able to live without the presence of God on earth. Life is God. God is Life. Light is God. God is light… and hell is it’s absence. Black.
I wonder what the chief priests and Pharisees felt as they approached Pilate on that first Black Saturday? Matthew does not call the day the Sabbath day, which it was, but he calls it “[The day].. after the day of Preparation”. Even Matthew could not say “On the Sabbath”. Why I wonder? Is it because Matthew knew that what the chief priests and Pharisees were doing was extremely egregious to what the Sabbath stood for? Did he have such difficulty in writing this story down that he had to circumnavigated it indirectly? Did he sense that God was so affronted by this act that he could not mention anything pertaining to life, light, and Father God?
In this passage we find the leaders of the day sealing in their fears, sealing in the threat to their stories, sealing in their lies, sealing in the “Light”, sealing in the “colour”, sealing in the newness of life….. black, black, black. Do we do that with God today? In our society, in our fellowship, in our personal lives?
I wonder what that Saturday was like for all present in Jerusalem that day… Was God truly GONE?