Holy Saturday, April 8, 2023
Easter Vigil
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
The second seven stations of the cross
See yesterday for the first seven …
Back to Friday, late morning.
Jesus and the crowd.
Now, our Easter vigil. God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but the fire next time.
On this day after, the church remains empty, the bread and wine all eaten, and the crucifix is covered in black. Here, alone without God’s presence, we remember the agonies of Jesus. Just yesterday, just then.
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.
EIGHT. The women wailed for him as he walked. But Jesus warned them in their mourning: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say, ‘Blessed are the childless women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ Then they will say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us!’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us!’
“For if people do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it’s dry?”
God said, “Let there be light!” And there was light. God saw how good the light was, and God separated the light from the darkness.
NINE. Jesus falls for the third time. Jeremiah had written, “Let him sit alone in silence, for the Lord has laid it on him. Let him bury his face in the dust – there may yet be hope. Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him, and let him be filled with disgrace. For no one is cast off by the Lord forever” (Lam 3:27-31).
God created man in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them, saying: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.” Evening came and morning followed.
TEN. What clothes he came with, Jesus had no longer. The soldiers drew lots for his robe. Nothing remained now than for Jesus, naked as he was when he was born, to be raised like a saraph on the cross, where all who looked upon him would be healed. Moses was there, watching. As he watched he remembered his own moment in the desert, holding up the snake made precious again by the medical societies of the world, and Moses once more wept for his people.
ELEVEN. As the guards climbed the hill with Jesus and Simon, only a few climbed with them. The air seemed thinner up here. The crowds, rough and loud in the narrow streets, rose up now as nothing more than a weary whisper. Simon was excused. The heavy nails pounded through the flesh of Jesus’ hands and feet into the splintery wood. Jesus’ companions in death, two thieves, were hoisted on their crosses into the air. Jesus too now, lifted up. His mother watched, weeping. His disciple John standing close, arms around Mary. It was difficult for Jesus to look down. They looked up.
God put Abraham to the test. “Abraham!” he called. “Here I am,” Abraham replied. “Take your son Isaac, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him up as a holocaust on a height that I will point out to you.”
The crucifixion of Jesus. Woodcut engraving by Gustave Dore, 1879
TWELVE. Jesus dies. Now comes this crooked darkness in the middle of the afternoon. “It is finished!” Jesus cries.
Just see, see in every tree and in the dark black sky, see how his Father loved him! “For a long time I have kept silent, I have been quiet and held myself back. But not now. Now, like a woman in childbirth I cry out, I gasp and pant … and now I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will make darkness light to them, make crooked things straight. Hear, ye deaf! And look, ye blind, that ye may see! (Isaiah 42:14-18)
The Lord said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to go forward. And you, lift up your staff and, with hand outstretched over the sea, split the sea in two, that the Israelites may pass through it on dry land.”
THIRTEEN. To those who had not yet held a body, the dead weight of Jesus was shocking. Joseph and his friends leaned the cross down to the ground, lifted Jesus’ hands and feet off the iron nails as carefully as they could, and carried him to Joseph’s nearby tomb. They did this under a black green sky, a sky ready to explode. God was angry.
The column of cloud became dark and night passed without the Egyptian soldiers coming closer. Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the Lord swept the sea with a strong east wind throughout the night and made for his people a path of dry land. When the water was thus divided, the Israelites marched through it, with the water like a wall to their right and a wall to their left. But when the Egyptians tried to follow, Moses once again lifted his hand over the sea, and the waves covered the chariots of Pharoah’s whole army. Not a single one of them escaped.
FOURTEEN: Mary and Joseph and their friends, carrying the body of Jesus, ran inside the tomb just as the rain began to fall in sheets. The wind tore at the tomb’s entrance. It was as dark outside as it was inside. Mary quickly lit three candles, and they began to dress Jesus in his burial clothes. It seemed to all of them as if the world was ending. The world as they knew it … yes, it was.
Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord: “I will sing unto the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously, the horse and rider he has cast into the sea!”
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Now with our own Lazarus in the darkness we wait, sharing stories by the fire, baptizing in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, listening for the sound of Gloria, the sound of trumpets, for the crashing sound of the tomb’s stone bursting away and … now once and for all, for our Savior to come forth.
(Genesis 1-2, 22, Exodus 14-15, Isaiah 54, Isaiah 55, Isaiah 12, Baruch 3-4, Ezekiel 36, Isaiah 12)
(Psalms 104, 33, 16, 30, 19, 42, 51, 118)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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