“When it was evening of that first day of the week, the disciples were gathered together with the doors locked because they feared the Jews. Jesus came and stood among them, and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Jesus’ final week before His death was pretty action packed. And we have studied all of it in nearly endless detail. I don’t necessarily mean that we as a church have, but scholars have done this work several times over. We can pretty well piece together what happened on every single day of Jesus’ last week. 

Except for one. 

We don’t know what happened on Saturday. Well, that’s not totally true. We know from Matthew’s Gospel that Saturday is when the chief priests who were in charge of the whole operation and the Pharisees who had been following Him around, taking careful note of the things He said and did went to Pilate to ask him to place a guard on the tomb to make sure the disciples didn’t try to steal the body in order to give credence to the ridiculous claim Jesus had made about coming back to life on the third day after His death. (I guess they didn’t connect the dots all the way from the fact that if He was right about His prediction of His death, then there was at least a chance He was right about His prediction of His resurrection, but we’ll leave that alone for now.)

But that’s it. We don’t have any idea what the disciples or Jesus’ other followers were doing on Saturday. They weren’t waiting for Him to be resurrected, that’s for sure. None of them expected that. More than likely they were hunkered down and hiding out, waiting to see what was going to happen to them next. The anxiety and uncertainty of that moment had to have been intense for them. Their whole world had been turned upside-down and inside-out by Jesus’ death. They weren’t planning on that. Yet here they were. 

As far as they knew, the chief priests and the Romans had succeeded in smashing what they had previously understood as God’s plans to pieces. What else were they supposed to think? They were just really beginning to think that Jesus was the Messiah and then He died which as far as their thinking on the matter went meant that He wasn’t. Where was God in this? What were His plans? 

How much time do we spend living in this kind of a space? How much time do we spend living between what we thought were God’s clear and obvious plans and the unknown of what’s going to happen next when those plans have been seemingly blown completely to pieces? 

This hits us in all kinds of different ways. Maybe it was the loss of a job and the ensuing financial uncertainty that brought to your life. It could have been a devastating medical diagnosis. Perhaps it was a relationship that ended suddenly and dramatically. There are a million other things it could be, but in each instance, we are left in the same place. We are left on Saturday; wondering and waiting to see what God is going to do next. Is He going to do anything next? 

Well, the thing about Saturday, is that it isn’t Sunday. 

That sounds like a pretty obvious thing to say, so let’s unpack that just a bit. When the disciples and Jesus’ other followers were hanging out on Saturday, Sunday hadn’t yet arrived. But it was coming. Jesus was in the grave and dead as a doornail, as the saying goes. But He wasn’t going to be for much longer. It was only another few hours until the world would change forever. The lives of His followers gathered there in Jerusalem would be changed forever. The power of death was about to be broken. The opportunity for eternal life for anyone who cared to receive it was about to be made available to the world. From then it was only a little while longer until the Holy Spirit arrived and things really kicked into high gear. 

They just had to wait. And trust. God wasn’t done. They couldn’t see it yet. They couldn’t even imagine it. But it was coming. 

Friends, we still serve this same God today. He hasn’t changed a bit. We may live huge chunks of our lives on Saturday, but as the saying goes, “Sunday’s comin’.” 

What we know with absolute assurance is that Jesus rose from the dead. Because of that, God has promised eternal life to everyone who is interested in having it. No one gets left out who doesn’t choose to be. Well, no matter what it is we are currently facing in this life, that eternal life is still ahead of us. Saturday won’t last forever. Your Saturday won’t last forever. Have hope. Jesus rose from the grave.