Waiting

Lenten Devotional Series Day 46.  Today’s meditation is on Matthew 27:57-66.

As a people, we are pretty bad at waiting. We would so much rather keep up the feeling of forward motion. Fill every spare moment with something productive or worthwhile. Fight against every delay, even if it means telling tourists where to stand on Metro escalators.

But waiting is something we can’t completely escape. The Bible teaches that we should expect waiting—real, hard-stuff waiting—to be part of the Christian life. Indeed, in today’s lesson, at the very climax of the story of redemption, we find a particularly excruciating and discouraging wait.

Matthew describes believers attending to the death of Christ, while non-believers seek, quite literally, to seal off any remaining hope of Christ’s resurrection. It’s a passage that reminds us how waiting on God can also look and feel a lot like loss, as when we wait for God to show up in a relationship, a career opportunity, or to do redeem the felt loss of the life we had hoped for.

Today’s passage is all the more challenging because the hope lost is Christ himself, or at least it certainly appears to be so. The promised ruler, redeemer, and conqueror now lies entombed.

But as we will celebrate tomorrow, Jesus’ story isn’t over. Knowing this, today’s reading should remind us of how limited our understanding of God often is. We lack imaginative faith to see how he might possibly act in our lives. In fact, it is during this time in the tomb, descended to the dead, that Christ prevails against the gates of hell. The moment of apparent lost hope is the most crucial in realizing our hope once and for all.

During our long waits on the Lord, and as we encounter losses and disappointments, our real hope rests not with the possibilities we see before us but with God himself, unbound by our circumstances or our vision. God gave us Holy Saturday to build up our faith in the unseen, in His timing, in His ability to do things His way. He moves mightily on our behalf even when we cannot yet see that work being accomplished.

The Collect of the Day. O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and he rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.