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Easter Saturday

On Good Friday Christians remember the day Jesus died.  An innocent, holy man unjustly executed in a most painful way.  The immortal Son of God submitting himself to a shameful death.  On Good Friday, goodness and mercy and justice and peace are put to death.  Evil wins.

And on Easter Saturday, nothing happens.
Goodness has died, and life goes on.

When something terrible happens to someone else, we may try to comfort them.  Or we may avoid them, because we don't know what to say.  If we do have a conversation with them, we may come out with statements which attempt to minimise the person's suffering or provide an explanation for it.  At least he didn't suffer.  You still have your health.  Worse things happen at sea.  Everything happens for a reason.  Your prayers were answered, just not in the way you wanted.  Never mind, life goes on.

We find these painful times so uncomfortable.  What we absolutely hate to do is to sit with the pain and do nothing.  Rationalisations or comforting platitudes seek to make it a little less awful but I wonder whether, in order really to move beyond a terrible situation, we have to be allowed to acknowledge how awful it is.  We have to be allowed to cry, or to stare at a wall, numb.

On Easter Saturday, everything looks bleak, and there's nothing we can do.  Of course, that's not the end of the story, but we're not at the end yet.



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