East 38th and Chicago: a previously non-descript corner of South Minneapolis, now infamous. On May 25, 2020, this is where George Floyd was murdered.
If you walk down Chicago Ave from Cup Foods, names line the street. Names of Black men, Black women, Black boys, Black girls, and Black gender-diverse individuals. Hundreds of them: murdered by hatred, by systemic injustice, by entrenched racism. By pure evil. George Floyd is among the names listed there. So is Breonna Taylor. And Amir Locke, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michelle Cusseaux. Soon they’ll add the name of Patrick Lyoya, a 26-year-old refugee from the DRC who was killed just last week in Michigan for driving while black. He was unarmed. And a traffic stop resulted in his death.
I visited the now-memorial to George Floyd and other Black victims on Holy Saturday and I don’t think the day has ever made as much sense as it did while I walked slowly beside memorial after memorial after memorial to Black lives: where it really does seems like evil has the upper hand, that injustice is inevitable, and that too many “good” people are doing nothing (a form of injustice and evil, in itself).
The Christian liturgical calendar focuses a lot on the bookends of Holy Week(end). I grew up celebrating Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday, but Holy Saturday? That was just a day in the middle. A day of waiting, but with the inevitable result of Resurrection Sunday coming, so let’s-just-get-on-with-the-show-and-get-to-the-party kind of day. But that’s not what it looked like (at all!) for the earliest followers of Jesus.
Jesus was a poor Brown man murdered at the hands of an evil authoritarian empire. He had told his disciples that he would conquer death, but after witnessing the utter torture of his state-sanctioned murder (and his own cries of “I can’t breathe”), I don’t think any of them were spending Saturday eagerly or lightheartedly counting down to Sunday.
To them, Holy Saturday was the darkest and most hopeless day imaginable. It was the day after a tragic loss where you feel numb and angry and detached from reality and hyper-aware and utterly exhausted all at the same time. Where you’re dehydrated from crying so much. Where you can barely remember your name or what day it is, but somehow can still remember ever detail about what you witnessed and now have lodged in your body. A day where God was silent, where hope was a cruel joke, if even a concept at all, and there was no future knowledge of any of that changing.
As it turns out, life is Holy Saturday.
Cancer, Addiction, and Chronic Illness: Holy Saturday. Sexual Exploitation, Abuse, Discrimination, Rape: Holy Saturday. Gun Violence: Holy Saturday. War, Genocide, War Crimes, Forced Migration: Holy Saturday. Racism and White Supremacy: Holy Saturday. Slavery and Economic Exploitation: Holy Saturday.
Where all of creation cries out in pain and longing for justice and righteousness to flow like streams of water in dry desert land (literally and metaphorically) and God is silent. When it seems like God is dead, or at very least not listening — and I’m not sure which one is worse.
The cries of humanity, “How long, Lord?” or more honestly in today’s vernacular: “Where the f**k are you?” feel appropriate and accurate. The only thing accurate, really. Where prayers look like weeping and screaming or silent tension because no words feels sufficient. Where all sense of religious piety falls short, where no amount of spiritual bypassing or toxic-positivity can measure up to reality or bring any kind of meaningful comfort.
To this kind of grief.
To this kind of anger.
To this kind of anguish.
To this kind of evil.
As I walked down Chicago Ave, reading names slowly, it hit me in a new way that it’s only because and exactly because of the gravity of Holy Saturday and the ways it stands as a metaphor-of-sorts for the weight and reality of actual life that Resurrection Sunday is so utterly necessary, compelling, and the most liberating reality.
Where the promise of light coming into the darkness isn’t just a poetic phrase, but an anchor amidst the most harrowingly painful realities of being human.
The Resurrection, even in its mystery, anchors us in something beyond this pain and in the promise that one day (one blessed and glorious day) it will end. It’s the promise that amidst all sorts of opposition and everything that speaks and suggests otherwise: Hope is ours to hold on to and that death does not have the final word.
And yet, this hope — as real and robust and hearty as it is — still does not diminish the pain or the reality of what we endure, nor does it lessen the impact of the evil that persists.
Very little about faith feels given or even easily describable these days. How does one follow the true and liberative and radically loving and peacemaking way of Jesus in a world where there is so much evil and injustice (both inside and outside of the church?) and in a way that is itself neither complicit in nor directly contributing to aforementioned evil and injustice? To be honest, I don’t know.
But in that, perhaps Holy Saturday has something to teach us.
Maybe the invitation of Holy Saturday is an invitation to not just “skip to the good part” — in the Easter story, yes, but even more so in the ways we engage with grief and pain and systemic injustice. Maybe it’s an invitiation to ditch premature or toxic positivity (including pithy and overly positive or dismissive “theology”) and instead pursue robust and costly justice lived out in mutality and beloved community. Maybe the invitation is to actually let it — reality as it really is — sink in: to our hearts, to our souls, to our bodies, to our ways of being and thinking, so that we can’t do anything but be a part of a better path forward, even when it will cost us something. And it will cost us something.
I still believe that the hope of the resurrection is real and that it’s the deepest hope I can or will know. I still believe the mysterious and powerful narrative of dead things coming back to life, and in a way that changes just about everything. But I also wholeheartedly believe that it’s messier and grittier and more stained with tears and lament and blood than we like to admit (or least for those of us who have the social luxury to opt out of thinking about it when its too uncomfortable, rather than facing it as a daily lived reality). There’s little shiny or pretty about it and theres no part of it that’s divorced from reality.
This is the hope that has been on the lips of enslaved individuals as they long for freedom that they will not know personally in their lifetime, the hope echoing in the songs and writings and activism of those around the globe and down the street who have known no life outside of oppression, marginalization, and/or occupation.
To be people of the Resurrection is to be people continually awake to hope and to the work of sustaining joy, but it’s also to be people awake to the pain and evil in ourselves and in people and systems around us: both.
Joy and lament.
Celebration and mourning.
New mercies with each morning and enduring systemic injustice(s) that lodge(s) trauma in bodies for generations.
Holy Saturday teaches us that the promise of God with us is not God distant or far away from the deepest evil or wrongdoing or injustice or ache. He is not a God removed from subversive social action that priorities the “other”, the oppressed, the marginalized, or the disheartened.
Emmanuel — the Risen Christ — is found right there.
And in South Minneapolis, He walks down Chicago Avenue, weeping over every name.
