Silent Saturday
Read Luke 23:56 & Isaiah 53
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And then they returned and prepared spices and perfumes. A nd on the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.
Luke 23:56 (NASB)
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Isaiah 53 (NASB)
Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, And like a root out of dry ground; He has no stately form or majesty That we would look at Him, Nor an appearance that we would take pleasure in Him. He was despised and abandoned by men, A man of great pain and familiar with sickness; And like one from whom people hide their faces, He was despised, and we had no regard for Him. ¶However, it was our sicknesses that He Himself bore, And our pains that He carried; Yet we ourselves assumed that He had been afflicted, Struck down by God, and humiliated. But He was pierced for our offenses, He was crushed for our wrongdoings; The punishment for our well-being was laid upon Him, And by His wounds we are healed. All of us, like sheep, have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way; But the LORD has caused the wrongdoing of us all To fall on Him. ¶He was oppressed and afflicted, Yet He did not open His mouth; Like a lamb that is led to slaughter, And like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, So He did not open His mouth. By oppression and judgment He was taken away; And as for His generation, who considered That He was cut off from the land of the living For the wrongdoing of my people, to whom the blow was due? And His grave was assigned with wicked men, Yet He was with a rich man in His death, Because He had done no violence, Nor was there any deceit in His mouth. ¶But the LORD desired To crush Him, causing Him grief; If He renders Himself as a guilt offering, He will see His offspring, He will prolong His days, And the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in His hand. As a result of the anguish of His soul, He will see it and be satisfied; By His knowledge the Righteous One, My Servant, will justify the many, For He will bear their wrongdoings. Therefore, I will allot Him a portion with the great, And He will divide the plunder with the strong, Because He poured out His life unto death, And was counted with wrongdoers; Yet He Himself bore the sin of many, And interceded for the wrongdoers.
Isaiah 53 (NASB)
There is a weight to Saturday. A heaviness looms.
In Luke’s account, we only have one verse to hold on to.
“Then they went home and prepared spices and perfumes. But they rested on the Sabbath in obedience to the commandment.”
Jesus had died late Friday. His body had been removed from the cross with not much time to prepare it properly for burial before the time of Sabbath began. Upon the arrival of Sabbath, they would not be allowed to do much.
There was nothing for them to do but to prepare for when they could go and properly prepare Jesus’ body for burial. For the time, they placed Jesus’ body in the tomb of a rich man, named Joseph, until they could get to Him.
They were left to simply sit. To wait. To remember all of the things that they had just seen. Everything that they heard, so fresh in their minds. Could you imagine? The weight of it all. It was probably crushing. I wonder if they were remembering His words to them, just a few days prior.
In the middle of hopelessness and chaos and the sting of the memory of the promise of life after death, who knows what was running through their minds. And all they could do was sit and remember and depend on the Lord’s provision. That’s what Sabbath was all about after all. Sabbath was an outward showing of a dependence on the Lord, according to Exodus 35:1-3 and Leviticus 23:3.
But this Sabbath was not like any other Sabbath. Jesus died on the day of Passover (another beautifully symbolic meaning in and of itself!), which made this sabbath day a High Sabbath. It followed traditional Sabbath customs but High Sabbaths took part during festivals and other holidays and had additional ceremonial practices symbolizing God’s redemptive acts. It was a holy time for God’s people, for God was personally believed to be gathered among them.
High Sabbaths served as a time of rest, remembrance and worship of who God had been to them and what He had promised to them. So this was not any normal Sabbath for them. This was an extra special Sabbath to sit and remember that their dependence was on God and to remember and rest in who He was and what He had done. Wow.
So many times we like to skip through Good Friday and get to Easter. Maybe we even slow down and remember Good Friday and once that has sat in, we move on. But there was a full day of sitting and waiting and silence. May we remember and rest.
Prayer
“Jesus, help us remember today that you did die. That there can be no resurrection without death. There is no Hope in Sunday without the heaviness of Friday and the silence of Saturday. Help us to not lose sight of the cost of the Cross. Help us to sit, rest and remember that our dependence is on you and that you take care of us.”