The Silent Deep
A Reflection on Easter Saturday
Easter Saturday hangs suspended between death and resurrection—a threshold of sacred uncertainty. This day, nestled between the anguish of Good Friday and the triumph of Easter Sunday, carries a weight of holy disquiet.
The Gospels offer but a single glimpse of this day, found in Matthew 27:62-66. While the chief priests and Pharisees scramble to Pontius Pilate, demanding guards for Jesus' tomb, fearful of resurrection rumors, the disciples themselves vanish from the narrative entirely.
They are nowhere. They are silent. As silent as their Lord in his rocky tomb.
Easter Saturday unfolds as a vast landscape of silence.
Henri Nouwen reminds us that such silence is not merely therapeutic retreat, but rather "the place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born..."
Imagine the disciples on this day of absence. How their expectations must have crumbled like dust. How their dreams must have withered like cut flowers. What profound questions must have echoed in their hearts as they sifted through the fragments of three years with their Teacher, desperately trying to discern what was real, what would endure.
Yet silence is far more than the absence of sound. It is the presence of something infinitely deeper—the mysterious current flowing beneath the surface of our conscious thoughts.
This brings to mind Jacob's blessing over Joseph in Genesis 49:
"...by the Almighty who will bless you with blessings of heaven above,
blessings of the deep that lies beneath, blessings of the breasts and of the womb."
May the unsettling silence of Easter Saturday speak to us of God's hidden work—that divine labor taking place in darkness, beneath the visible world. Even as we wait in the discomfort of uncertainty, the womb of God continues its mysterious gestation, preparing to birth new life from seeming emptiness.
The deep that lies beneath is never truly silent; it pulses with the heartbeat of a God who transforms endings into beginnings.
Katrina Lambert