Holy Saturday: From Silence to Light

HOLY SATURDAY is a day without liturgical celebrations. It is the day of the Great Silence. Jesus died the previous day. At dusk, His body was buried in a sealed tomb, close to Calvary. Yes, Jesus truly died. On Mount Calvary, the cross of Christ stands, bare and silent… There is silence. His disciples are silent, feeling the pain, the absence, the failure… and they hide in fear. The women disciples are also silent… but active in their grief, they prepare ointments for when the Shabbat ends, planning to return to the tomb to anoint the dead Jesus. With them, Mary, His Mother, keeps everything in her aching heart, repeatedly praying, her loving acceptance of faith: “Let it be done to me according to your Word.”

It is Holy Saturday, “the day of God’s silence.” But it is not really silence. It is that He speaks differently. One must learn to listen to God’s silence. Only the one who prays can discover the voice of the Lord in the silence. God’s silence is found throughout the biblical experience. And the one who delves into the way God speaks—who is not in noise, earthquake, clamor, or fire, but in the whisper of a gentle breeze (cf. 1 Kings 19:11-13)—can experience the breath of the Spirit of Life, which is over death, over hopelessness, and over the apparent failure of the cross. One must learn to listen to the voice of God’s silence. It is in the voice of the one who falls or fails, in the pain, in the irrationality of violence and war, in hunger, in the lack of solidarity with the poor, in injustice, and in death… There, in this story of the cross, Jesus is dying. “Oh, that today you would listen to his voice,” says Psalm 95:7. The one who prays today “sees” and “perceives” the speaking of God from the failure of Golgotha and from the silence of a tomb waiting for the Love that overcomes death and brings the fullness of “New Life”: His Easter.

Let us make our own the words of the world of death today with Job, who, in his anguished voice and great solitude, exclaims: “I cry out, but you do not answer me; I stand up, but you merely look at me” (Job 19:20), and with the believer of Psalm 22, and of Jesus Himself on the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Today, we must pray from the silence of the Just One, persecuted to death, victimized on the Cross, “delivered for our offenses” (cf. Rom. 4:25). This silent prayer is made contemplating the Cross of Golgotha, present in the crosses of today; in the cross of Jesus is the key to interpreting His life and the source of His saving power. The authenticity of faith is always measured by the attitude towards death, rooted in His Easter, the strength that gives life.

The believing community today lives the deep silence of this Holy Saturday, in expectation of His Easter, which gives full meaning to all pain, to every historical imbalance, and commits us to the missionary dynamism of His Kingdom.

Listen today to that “speaking of God.” Discover His voice in the silence. Recognize His living Word that is behind contradiction, pain, illness, and even death itself. Learn to read in our reality the slow but demanding path of overcoming selfishness, of searching for empty superficialities, of valuing triumph, power, instant success, and self-gratification. Today, His silence of surrender has a voice: It is a silence that teaches us to live the mystery of the Cross and the waiting for New Life, in the surrender of the Crucified-Risen One. Today, in the silence of God, we understand the secret of His Cross and the Death of the Just One, who speaks and lovingly reveals where full Life is, that of Love given. We will then understand the mysterious value of pain, of giving oneself to others, of forgiveness, fraternity, equity, and solidarity with the crucified ones of history, in close following of Him who gave His Life as the true Word of God that judges and liberates history fully.

A day to pray in silence: to feel deeply loved by Him, to the point of giving His life and re-signifying the reverse of a story of hopelessness, suffering, anguish, and death. Because in Him, everything makes sense. Jesus enters into the depths of the meaninglessness of suffering and death, to transform it into life and show true hope: that of love. María Antonia París understood this deeply when she wrote the synthesis of her life: “The Lord taught me everything from the tree of the Cross.” From the Cross to the light. From death to Life. In Him, everything finds value and speaks to us with the Voice of God. It is the good news of Easter, the one of justice and fullness, the one of active hope in Him.