Christ’s resurrection from the dead is a sign and a wonder to dwarf all other signs and wonders. It opens the door to hope. Hope that death is not the end. Hope that darkness is not for ever. Hope that light really does triumph over darkness. Perhaps this is why we choose to focus most of our attention on Easter day’s celebration rather than the events of Good Friday. As for Easter Saturday, this is easily glossed over altogether. An inconvenient pause before a mighty celebration. I believe Easter Saturday is an important day which we neglect at our peril even though it is out of joint with the fashion of 2019.

The first Easter Saturday must have been a time of deep shock, grief, confusion and loss for the followers of Jesus. It was a time of unanswered questions. The crucifixion was not the sanitised event portrayed in polite art: it was a raw, horrific murder designed to humiliate the victim. What must the morning after the death of Jesus have been like for his family and followers? ‘Traumatic’ does not begin to describe it. A time for lament.

We in England in 2019 not do ‘lamentation’. The closest we get is a superficial feeling of gloom every time we are eliminated from football’s World Cup.

Celebration is an easy sell. Lamentation is the other end of the spectrum. Celebration is to celebrated: think New Year’s eve and firework displays from around the world. Lamentation is to be avoided. Are we are losing the vocabulary and capacity to express the range of emotions it involves? Consider Colin Brazier’s reflections written shortly after the death of his wife:

“At root, the modern funeral represents the privatisation of what, hitherto, was a public event. A funeral was one of the great punctuation marks in the life of a community. Open to all, imparting its lessons of Last Things to everyone, sharing a life story to a universal audience. But as soon as we start to treat funerals like a family ‘do’, where commemoration becomes a series of in-jokes or semi-private reflections, we close off the lives of others from that clear-eyed posthumous examination which only comes when their race is run. I am happy to leave it to the priest. It’s his gig. He will sum up my wife’s life, approaching that task not dispassionately, but at one step removed.

Then there’s the ‘celebration’ element. I have emailed friends and former colleagues with details of my wife’s funeral, politely asking them to leave their Hawaiian shirts and pink helium balloons at home. Black please, if you don’t mind. It’s unfair on children to insist that a funeral should mean rejoicing in a life now passed. Maybe grown-ups can handle the cognitive dissonance required in ‘celebrating’ a life rather than, you know, being all morbid. But I seriously doubt children can.” (Spectator 21 July 2018)

Colin views were reported in the English media and the reaction from the public suggests that he was onto something. He spoke about it very honestly and movingly on the radio.

When I was first forced to go to church as a schoolboy the part of the service I dreaded most was the weekly singing (perhaps not the right word) of a psalm. Boring does not begin to describe the experience. The language was archaic, the melody non-existent and the experience baffling. Fifty years later I increasingly appreciate and value the psalms and start to see why they formed the heart of both Jewish and Christian worship. They give us a window into the emotions of their authors and show us how they engaged with God. Some of them are celebrations (e.g. Ps 100). But a surprising number are lamentations: see for example Psalm 6. Here is Prof Ellen F Davis’s excellent short comments on this Psalm which say what I would like to say but much more elegantly than I could.

(This is taken from “Getting involved with God”).

From time to time each of us experience disappointment, grief, abandonment and despair– probably not to the extent that Jesus’ followers did on Easter Saturday but none the less in a real way.   As Ellen Davis shows, the Bible does not air brush these difficulties from its pages and nor should we. 

Thank God for Easter Sunday but in our thanking let’s not forget the reality of the day before and make time and space to acknowledge times when Easter Saturdays seem more real than the joy of Easter Sunday.