Holy Saturday: Sometimes it causes me to tremble

Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work -- you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female servant, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you.  Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

The fourth commandment is an injunction to do no work on the last day of the week, remembering the sacredness of the Creator who fashioned the daylight.  On this day, rest and worship are to be the natural extensions of remembering God's sacredness.  On this day, Christ descended to the dead, to open eternal life to those who had died before his coming.  However one interprets this, the main point is to illustrate that all salvation, whether it be for Christians, for those outside of the Church, for those who lived and died before Christ birth, is through the grace which floes form Christ's sacrifice on Calvary.  So, the world was quiet that Sabbath after the LORD was crucified.  It was the first tie in thirty three years that the fleshy God was not walking about.  Creation rested that Sabbath, as it no longer tentatively bore the enfleshed Christ on the earth.  Creation had stood as a witness to the Incarnation, and now was alone again, as the God-Man was no longer resident.

But to those He left behind that day, there was a different sensation: Peter was no where to be found, Judas was dead, and the remaining Twelve were scattered and hiding, even from one another.  They were holed up in their homes, packed into a Jerusalem overflowing for the Passover, and afraid for their lives.  They hid as brigands, lost, defeated, alone, and with the Mn in whom they had hoped so much newly dead and laid out to decompose.  They despaired.

But at least one of Christ's band experienced that day so differently.  Surely a devout Jew, Mary of Nazareth spent the Sabbath as she always had, in restful calm, and certainly pondering many things in her pierced heart, as Luke relates in his infancy narrative.  In the heart of Mary, what joy and sorrow, what hope and pain there must have been!  So much had been promised, and had it all been lost in that blood and water?  She knew God to be faithful to His covenant, and knew her Son to have been that covenant, but one which could be touched, loved, consoled, killed, and eaten.  Mary certainly hurt that Saturday, and certainly felt alone.  But instead of ear, she had a raging hope.  Surely it was silent, but ready to burst forth from her when the news trickled in the next day that the LORD had been seen.  She rushed out of her home, rushed out into a new day.