In God’s Time
HOLY SATURDAY
Lamentations 3:1-9, 19-24 • Psalm 31:1-4, 15-16 • 1 Peter 4:1-8 • Matthew 27:57-66
“Maintain constant love for one another…”
As a doula, one serves as physical and emotional support for a person in labor. Whether sitting quietly, watching and waiting, or crouching beside, breathing and pressing, the doula stays the course from the time of the first call until the parent’s release, from early labor until after the birth. From my experience as a doula, I found familiarity when, as a chaplain and then as a priest, I kept vigil with the dying and the dead.
Birth, like death, creates a liminality, an in-between time. What was before is different after something happens. It might be easier to say that the significant event is the moment the baby takes its first breath or the moment a person exhales their last. If we have been in close proximity to birth and death, however, we find there are usually a series of events and moments that lead to and follow both birth and death, creating a sort of bubble of holy time and sacred space that is collective of many moments. Within this bubble time is relative only to the task at hand. Outside the bubble there’s an alternate reality, another dimension, but inside the day of the week doesn’t matter. Time is relative only to our hunger, how we shelter from or seek the light, how we meet our basic needs, all in relation to the one at the center of our attention.
Through it all, at our best, we maintain constant love for one another. It is what bonds us together through the experience.
The timestamps of the day of Preparation and the feast of the Passover mark the time when Jesus died, grounding the critical event around a time we can name. It even has a specific place. And we’ve created ceremonies to acknowledge the moments leading up to, during, and after Jesus’s death because it is all significant. This suffering. This death. They are not outside God’s experience, but, O God, the pain. The absence. The numbing void. What was is no more, and even though we know what is to come, we mark this time when those who loved Jesus in the flesh watched him die, felt him leave. As joyful as it is to welcome new life to the world, so painful can it be to say goodbye in death. Time stands still in the bubble of those whose hearts are connected in love, in birth and in death.
Time does continue. Some move forward with tasks at hand, like Joseph of Arimathea, who seems to have presence of mind and privilege and power to do what others could not do. Perhaps Martha was one out of sight making sure everyone had something to eat. Others, like the Marys, silently keep watch and stay in the holy time.
Close to Jesus and in the grieving, a word like “deception” sounds out of place, unfaithful to constant love. Spoken by those who are not connected with bonds of love, however, we understand the fear. Those who had been threatened by Jesus in life were still worried about him in death. Jesus, they determined, had made a deceiving promise to his followers: “After three days I will rise again.” It’s a deception because who could possibly rise again? The danger, however, is that maybe his followers dared to hope. Remember Lazarus? Maybe that’s what the Marys were waiting and watching for, or maybe they were scouts to alert the ones they would call forth to remove the stone and the body, making it look like Jesus arose from the dead, deceiving others to believe in his resurrection, uniting them in a faith and hope that would defy fear. They would believe in Jesus. They would have hope in victory, even over death. A people united, unafraid, hopeful…what would that mean?
The powers that were wanted to seal the stone and did so. Did they realize that by being in relationship with or at least in proximity to Jesus, they were serving a vital role in the story, participating in the liminal time, stepping inside the bubble of God’s time, which is all time, is it not?
Only it takes significant moments for us to slow down and realize there is space between what has happened and what is to come. If we are awake and aware, we recognize our connection with one another, for good or for ill, and we can feel the pulse of our constant love, when it is strong or weak. We can see more clearly and know ourselves and our lives—what we cling to…what we hope for…and what we hope to let go of. Liminality holds us captive to what is important perhaps solely by God’s grace, because be it a joy or a sorrow, we are carried through from one moment to the next. Then at some point we realize how greatly life as we know it is changed.
In the meantime, while we wait and when we don’t know what else to do, the most faithful things we can do are to persevere through the moments as they come, to tend to the body, to maintain constant love for one another—all in a posture of prayer, all held in God’s grace and mercy, in God’s time, with hope.
© 2023 The Rev. Sara Milford
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas