Saturday is not the End
April 14, 2001
Saturday can be quite an ‘in between day’ for people. As they live their lives, it’s the day between the end of the five-day working week, and Sunday- the real day off. It’s often the day for errands to be done and for catching up on everything that wasn’t done through the week, so it can, for many, become quite a tiresome and down day.
What was Saturday like for the disciples after Jesus died? Can you imagine a darker day than those disciples had that horrible week? Peter, James, John, and the other disciples, experienced the longest Saturday in history, that week when Jesus died. When he died, they lost everything they had lived for. Their hopes were not only wounded; they were exploded out of existence! They were annihilated and blown to bits. Their dreams were not shattered, but they were completely stripped away and destroyed beyond imagination. I think God can only know the torment of that Saturday in the lives of the first disciples- He watched as they plodded through that day. He watched as they just put in the time that Saturday. He was there with them, although they might not have been really aware of that, as they hit a bottom in despair and sadness. They remained locked away together, and the questions, the anguish, the confusion, and the fear must have been so incredible!
They had left their previous lives to follow Jesus, their rabbi. They had been stirred by the ‘call’! They had responded to the great hope that Jesus aroused in them.
You and I have been there, to a degree, at least, and we need to get in touch with that a bit today in order to understand something so crucial in this season.
If you’re married, I want you to think back to the wonder and excitement and the anticipation you had when you were married. Remember the idealism and the idea that nothing could possibly go wrong. For some of us, it might be good to think back to the time when we came into the faith- whether you define that as coming into this church, or the time when you first responded to God’s call to you. I well remember my youthfulness and enthusiasm at that time and the lengths I would go to, even adjusting my life as I saw God’s call putting different requirements on me. I remember the hours of prayer and study and the miles driven just to go to church. I remember the excitement in the air at church and in me, as I was with the church! This was where I learned Christianity as a way of life! (Tell my personal story in 3 minutes.)
The disciples were there. You don’t have somebody come up to you and say, “Follow me,” and go, immediately, without having incredible hope and anticipation and energy to do that! The disciples had that. They pinned all their hopes on him and on his vision of the future. They saw him as the one who was to come. In fact, where most would not have been so bold, on one occasion, Simon Peter declared the belief he had and which was, likely, the belief of so many others, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God!” To the disciples, he wasn’t just the nebulous ‘son of man’, but they grew to recognize him as God’s Son and the hope of the world!
But then he died. In the most excruciating, embarrassing and humiliating death the Roman Empire could give to someone, he died. Beaten, tortured, spat on, verbally abused, Jesus had to carry his own instrument of death toward the site for crucifixion. On the cross, Pilate got in one last jab at Him and the Jewish people, whom he despised, by putting the trilingual sign on the cross declaring, “This is the King of the Jews.” Pilate was declaring that this was all the king the Jews were ever going to have- a humiliated, naked, useless, poor excuse for a human being, impotent, illegitimate, failure! (The religious leaders didn’t like that and because they understood what Pilate was saying, desperately wanted that sign removed.) As long as He was alive, the disciples could still hope, because of who He was, and they could expect Him to come down from the cross and to begin the great victory they anticipated, but then He died- “into your hands I commit my Spirit”, and “it is finished!” And the feeblest of hope they still had, disappeared.
Hope is never more needed than on the Saturdays of life. Something has gone. Something has left us. Something has died. Something or someone that once filled a great place within has left us just as empty as we once were full, just as lonely as we once were filled with friendship, just as uncertain as we once were so sure. The hardest part of life is dealing with the Saturdays of life, as the disciples of Jesus had to deal with that dark, dark Saturday. We’ve all had those days, haven’t we? We’ve all had those days when we aren’t sure we can go forward because everything we’ve tried has just blown up and sifted down around us in bits of black powder. We’ve all had those days when it seems that everything we’ve attempted has been destroyed, and Jesus’ disciples had that kind of day. It was the longest, blackest, most hopeless, discouraging, desperate, anguish-filled Saturday in history. All their hope was pinned on Jesus… and He was dead and buried in a sealed tomb. As far as they knew, all the hope of all humanity lay dead in that tomb. Dead is dead, after all, and that’s the end. Dead stays dead, as far as they knew, so where to now? I can only imagine the depths of despair those men knew; it was black.
Let’s backtrack a little bit and consider the general thrust of what Jesus did. Jesus turned the kingdom of common sense on its head continuously. Think about a few of these times.
To bloodthirsty Jewish nationalist zealots, He declared, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5.44). To his own disciples, who were often very vengeful, He upped the requirement in acts of forgiveness from seven to “seventy times seven” (Matt. 18.22). To the bereaved Martha, whose beloved brother Lazarus had just died, He made it clear that the resurrection was more than simply a coming prophetic event.
John 11. 21-26- Martha was in incredible grief and Jesus walked right into that grief. He walked right into the conflict that was going on inside her. It wasn’t enough for her to be grieving the loss of her brother, but she was bewildered, too. Her question was simply “why?” “Why had he not come earlier? Why had He waited this long? Surely he could have saved her brother- after all, he had raised Jairus’ daughter, and he had healed Peter’s mother-in-law, who was near death.” Martha was struggling with the same thing you and I often struggle with- that huge and nagging ‘if’. “IF you had been here, my brother would not have died” (v.21).
What Martha hoped would happen did not. Things had just not panned out the way she had expected or imagined. If there was any present hope in sight she could not imagine it and she could not see it. When our hopes have fallen flat and what we expected has not happened, where do we turn? How could a heart once so full of hope and now so disappointed ever find hope again? This is something we face a lot and is something we find the answer to in this special weekend!
To Martha’s dilemma Jesus brought hope in the form of five short words: “Your brother will rise again” (v.23). He didn’t say how. He didn’t say why. He didn’t even say when. He did, however, bring her a promise and an emphatic one at that.
Now, practical Martha, and religious Martha went to work and she automatically assumed that Jesus was speaking in the not-to-be-experienced-yet prophetic sense. She offered mental agreement to the belief in a doctrine- the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. It’s an important doctrine, for sure, but certainly not one that would make any difference in the overwhelming Saturday she was now facing.
Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” In other words, “I know what all our doctrines are. I have studied them well. I know that I have the hope of someday seeing my brother again in the kingdom.” It’s as if Martha feels for a moment that Jesus is giving her the last thing anyone wants at a moment of deepest distress- a church doctrinal review. (Sometimes we can seem to offer the least helpful support at the times of greatest need and Martha thought this is what was happening.)
What she did not realize, though, is that not only would there, one day, be a resurrection, but she was that moment standing directly in front of resurrection itself, resurrection incarnate. All of the power to resurrect, to bring back to life, to transform and to make new was in the hands of the one with whom she was at that moment conversing. The dark valley of the shadow of death she had entered just four days earlier was about to be visited by the only person on the planet who possessed a power greater than death. All that was required, Jesus said, was that she “believe.”
Martha’s confession of faith in a coming resurrection was no small thing. At least she had a long-term hope in God’s ultimate power over death. Jesus was, however, calling her to a more immediate awareness. Resurrection power was not relegated to a future event in history. No, resurrection power touched the planet the moment Jesus arrived. Why is this true? Because he was and is and will forever be the “resurrection and the life.” Oh, Martha had hope, but Jesus had a higher one.
The resurrection power resident in Jesus preceded the empty tomb, and it would go beyond it. Whenever Jesus came on the scene, resurrections occurred. Dead things came back to life. Blind eyes suddenly could see. Deaf ears could hear. Tax collectors offered refunds. Prostitutes could pray. Lame men stood up and walked. And… dead men lived. Every moment was infused with resurrection power and potential. All the laws governing the kingdom of common sense were up for grabs, because a higher kingdom and power were present and at work!
This is important to remember when you and I find ourselves in our Saturdays of despair and feelings of hopelessness. And those days do come. For some of you, they have some in the ending of a marriage that you began with incredible hope and expectation. For some of us, they have come when someone we loved has died.
I remember when Mom died. I was in Kelowna, along with my sister, at Mom and Dad’s home. She was in the hospital and not doing well. It was Saturday night/Sunday morning- 2 a.m.- and the call came to come to the hospital. I was the only one to hear the phone and answered it and had to wake Dad and my sister, and then we drove to the hospital nearby. I remember coming off the elevator and two nurses coming toward us as soon as they saw us and my only words were, “Oh, no.” And we went to her room, where she had died just a few minutes earlier- only 76 years old and so much of my life for 42 years. That Sunday turned out to be a very dark Saturday of my life!
Some of you have faced your worst Saturdays in losing a job you loved, or losing health, or losing a child. The point is that we’ve all faced them. There’s no way to avoid them. But we have to remember something that we can remember and that the disciples didn’t really know yet. When there’s Saturday, Sunday is coming! And, when that comes, oh, what hope and promise comes with it.
Matt. 28. 1- 8- oh, the joy they felt!
But their joy is not meant to be just a matter of history. Neither is it meant to be something we understand intellectually, alone. It’s something that we’re meant to grab hold of and apply in our lives when we hit those Saturdays of our lives.
We need to take hold of hope. Hope is what enables us to get a resurrection in our sights when we have come face to face with a death or with a loss.
How do we grab that hope and what do we need to do to keep resurrection in our sights?
First of all, we need a word from the Lord to hold on to. A passage or promise from Scripture gives our hope something to cling to. For Martha it was in the form of five words- ‘your brother will live again.’ We have to remember that the cross was not the final chapter after all- the cross is not the end.
Second, we need a fresh view of Jesus. The book of Psalms tells us that God is more than someone who wants simply to brighten our perspective about our ultimate destiny. He is more than a stabilizing doctrine. He is an “ever-present help in trouble” (Ps. 46.1). And Hebrews tells us that Jesus is the “Exact representation of his being” (Heb. 1.3) to us. He was and is the bright vision of God we need.
The Greek words translated ‘hope’ are used 85 times in the New Testament. Of those, only 5 are in the gospels, 10 are in Acts, and 70 are in the epistles. These words aren’t used much in the gospels and there’s a great reason for that. Jesus, the object of the believer’s hope, was at that time present with His disciples. Their view of Him and His power was fresh and less obstructed. Their hope was an “ever-present help.”
Finally, we need to look beyond the circumstances and believe. Jesus called Martha to simply “believe”- in other words, to lift her eyes above the kingdom of common sense and to become more impressed with the faithful character of God than the frustrating circumstances of life.
If we stop at the cross, we can enter a Saturday like the disciples did. They saw the death and the humiliation and the ending of what they had hoped was to happen. So, they went through a Saturday of incredible discouragement and despair. As far as they knew, there was no Sunday to come. But it was coming! God knew that and Jesus knew that all along. So, they went through their Saturday of despair only to face the most incredible Sunday they ever knew!
What will you do with your Saturdays of discouragement and despair? You and I are in a better place than the disciples. We know how the story turns out. We know about Sunday! We know that Jesus is not far away. When it’s darkest, He is nearest! It’s incredible to realize, but is true. As they despaired, He was ready to rise and was even risen- hope was alive and well- and when they became aware of it, their hearts thrilled!
There’s no way to go through life without our Saturdays. If you’re going to follow Jesus, you will suffer some; there’s no way around it. However, we’re to suffer while being in tremendous hope! Jesus is our hope. Jesus is the resurrection! He’s always there and we need to keep Him before us!
