Holy Saturday
Fr. Anthony Brankin
Holy Saturday is the most important day of Holy Week. It is the most important day of the Easter season, of the Lent Season, of Christmas Season. It is the most important day of our lives. Today is the day when we learn that our lives do not end in death. Our time on earth does not end in a hole in the ground or in a handful of ashes. Today we learn that our lives are not only valuable, they are priceless. Our lives, in fact, have been purchased by the infinite sacrifice of the Son of God and because of that our lives are like His—holy and imperishable!
Today we learn that we live forever, because Our Lord conquered death, for our sake. This is more of that “really real” supernatural we keep talking about. The moment that Jesus walked out of that tomb He put a whole new understanding on life. We have a reason to be here—and it is to go there. We now know there is Someone all-wise and all-loving and all powerful Who wants us to live—and with Him.
The creeping in of modernity
I feel sorry for the person who does not believe in God. He sprawls on top of his bed at three in the morning, his head pounding from a self-induced headache. He drinks too much, perhaps to keep from asking: Is this all I have to show for my life? A pointless round of days that begin somewhere and end up nowhere? No rhyme, no reason. Why should I even get up this morning? The atheist’s only consolation when he thinks about the emptiness of it all is that when he is dead he won’t even know it. This is the godlessness of our age. The modern world does not believe in God or in Heaven or hell or in a resurrection. But that is why our buildings and our music and our art and our life is so often so ugly. There is no God and therefore no truth or beauty and therefore no hope.
And this modern atheism creeps little by little into our lives. It seeps into our awareness and creates strange new categories for us about the way we think of life and death. And we hardly notice it. I stood there at a burial once, and someone got up and spoke and told everyone that the dead person will indeed live on as long as the friends and family remember the deceased. And I thought, that is wrong, that is not what we believe. That we live on as memory in someone else’s brain? That if someone does not remember us we no longer exist? What kind of religion is that? I saw two other times where the people at a burial were asked to put their fingertips on the casket so that the oil from the fingertips would stay forever on the casket. I thought: What in heaven’s name is that supposed to mean? To leave our fingerprints on the casket? So instead of our souls living on, instead of us going back to God, our fingerprints live on? I guess if there is no Heaven, no hell, no purgatory, then this is life eternal—Memory flashes and fingerprints.
I am sorry. That is not enough for me. None of it. I will accept nothing less than the religion and faith of my parents and my grandparents. I will accept nothing less than the glorious prospect of rising from the dead at the end of the world and embracing my mother and my father and sister, and my brothers, with the same arms that God had created for me when I was conceived. It is fantastic, but it is something to hope for! I would rather slip into cosmic coma than to think I exist only as a context for someone’s fingerprints or as a memory trigger. No. Give me the reality of flesh and blood, mind and soul. Give me a real life with a real body in a real resurrection at the end of the world. Give me what Jesus promised! Give me that and I will be happy—forever.