I don’t know about you, but I don’t like waiting – waiting in a doctor’s office or in line at a concert or standing in line in the grocery store. I often think about all the things I could be doing instead of waiting. Oddly, we are all in a forced season of waiting right now where we can’t do anything on our own to speed it up. We wait for this virus to subside; we wait for an opportunity to return to normal routines; we wait to see friends or family we can’t see right now; we wait for the economy to rebound. We wait.
This season of waiting coincides with the Lenten season where we wait for Easter. I am reminded of the hardest day of waiting the disciples faced was perhaps the Saturday before Easter Sunday. On Friday, Joseph of Arimathea took Jesus’s lifeless body and wrapped it in linen cloths and placed it in a tomb before sundown when the Sabbath began. And they waited through the Sabbath day of rest. Imagine the feelings of that Saturday in between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
The disciples and other followers of Jesus, including his own mother, waited. They left Golgotha knowing that Jesus – the man they believed to be their Messiah – was dead. What lingered in the air that day was despair and grief. Would their lives ever be “normal” again?
We have the benefit of knowing the end of the story. We know their waiting was merely a day until Jesus would prove to them in an empty tomb that death was defeated and hope was alive. 2,000 years later, we know after Good Friday that Sunday’s coming!
We would do well to pause here and remember that when the world feels a little darker and hope a little more dim that Easter Sunday is coming. On Resurrection Sunday, we can proclaim with every fiber of our being that hope lives! Today, we live in the Saturday – the day between what was and what is yet to come. But friends, have hope, Sunday’s coming. As we gather from various locations this Easter Sunday, may our very lives rise up to proclaim the assurance of resurrection. Jesus lives! Hope lives!
See you online tomorrow as we proclaim this good news together from all corners of our world!
Waiting Together,
Melissa Fallen