© Church of the Good Shepherd, Edinburgh

Church of the Good Shepherd Murrayfield

It was Archbishop Desmond Tutu who in his delightful way coined the expression: “We are Easter people – and hallelujah is our song.”
Well we have sung and will sing a good few Hallelujahs today.
But truth to tell, I don’t often feel like one of the Easter people.
I tend to feel much more like a Holy Saturday person. Let me explain.

Holy Saturday is the in-between day. It is the day that lies between Good Friday and Easter Day. It is sometimes thought of as the day of waiting, or preparation.
For some that preparation is of a practical nature – the church decoration team come in and into the bare and empty building, stripped of flowers for the six weeks of Lent they bring the beauty of the new life, represented by the spring flowers. For others the preparation is of the family meal to be held later today – a tradition followed more in the Eastern Orthodox church with the roasting of the lamb. For still others the preparation is the last-minute dash to the shops for the Easter egg or card.
But Holy Saturday ought to be a time of deeper preparation, of spiritual preparation.

I suppose my favourite moment in this crowded Holy Week and Easter is often that just before we hold the 7.00 pm Easter Eve service. The church is quiet after the bustle of the morning, there is the faint waft of scent from the flowers, the light from the evening sun comes through the west window. All is ready and we wait.

On Holy Saturday we stand suspended between the past and the future, the death and the resurrection, Good Friday and Easter Day. The crucifixion is over but the body is still in the tomb in the Garden, sealed by the mighty stone, secured by Pilate’s guard of soldiers. Time is in suspense, it seems to stand still. We wait, with that mixture of grief and sadness from the story of the cross and yet with hope and expectation from the story of Easter. Both stories so well known, both stories so beloved by us.

And that’s why I tend to identify myself as a Holy Saturday person.
Because I think I inhabit that space between these two events, these stories.
I live in the space between the chains of the past and the glimpses of the future.

I feel the Good Friday part of me as I know the reality of life as it is and as I live it. The reality of a world, a nation, a church – and myself – still in thrall to sin, in that distortion of what ought to be. I know that I – and all of us – are still caught by the cords of our personalities, backgrounds, parental upbringing, educations and the scars and blessings of all of life.  Each of us knows and feels that we are not what we could be or ought to be, and like St Paul we look at ourselves and say “O wretched person that I am. Who can deliver me from this body of sin?”
That’s the Good Friday part of me. I stand by the cross with Mary and the other women, with John, with the centurion – and I feel the awfulness of it all. Because that’s what life is often like – feeling like a hopeless situation, a valley of the shadow of death, an uphill struggle, a sea of despair.

And as Christians perhaps above all other people in society need to recognise that so many people – those with addictions, living in the endless struggle of poverty and debt, in abusive relationships, and especially a younger generation looking at the example we set before them – feel all of those black emotions much more acutely than we ever have done, do or will do. Sometimes because they are more honest than us.

But I am not a Good Friday person. I am a Holy Saturday person.
Because alongside all of that, as I stand in this moment of between-ness, I see glimpses of the future, of the reality of what is to be.

A reality spelled out in the stories of the Resurrection appearances that we hear during this Easter season. A reality hinted at in the signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God that we have been looking at in our Lent Groups this year. A reality evidenced by the story of one Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus Road whose life was changed, whose name became St Paul. A reality manifested by all the saints, the Easter people, of history – yes, down to Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The Easter part of me sees these glimpses of glory, of transformation, of transfiguration (that Gospel story is another one of them). On February 18th – after the Vestry meeting as people left the Rectory there was a strange phenomenon. It was a still clear frosty evening and floating gently down from the sky were ice crystals, it was like angel dust – a glimpse of unbidden beauty, an Easter moment.

And I do feel these Easter moments – feelings of peace (the Easter greeting of the risen Lord to his disciples in the Upper Room), feelings of joy (there is the Easter verse which tells how the disciples “disbelieved for joy”) of security – of blessedness.
They are so often momentary- they are glimpses of what is to be – flashes of hope and expectation in the midst of the muck, the messiness of what is and what I am.

The language of liturgy in worship expresses this perhaps best of all. Today we sing the Gloria again – a song of absolute praise and worship “Glory, glory to God in the highest” - an Easter song BUT yet still with the Good Friday note “Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.” There is that ambivalence in the Gloria – that honesty – which explains why the writers of liturgy could never decide where in the service the Gloria should be put, at the beginning or the end!
And hear again the words of the Advent Eucharistic prayer: “Alight with the vision of a kingdom, given yet still to come”.

That’s where I feel myself to be most of the time: a Holy Saturday person.
On Holy Saturday, I live between the reality of life as I know it – and as I know myself to be, the Good Friday person – and the reality of what is to be – for me and the whole cosmos – the Easter person. Called to live with the mess of life but with the moments of glory, that encourage and sustain me.

In fact that for me is what faith in the resurrection, in Easter – really means.