Holy Saturday 2025: Empty Roads and A Course in Miracles

I think often of the disciples for whom he really was dead. The ones who’d eaten with him the day before and never would again. The ones who had heard him laugh and teach earlier in the week and never would again.

They did not know yet that Easter was coming. The ruined body of Jesus was eaten by dogs, scavenged by crows. Those disciples didn’t have a body to bury, let alone a tomb from which it could rise.

Jesus was dead and gone, and they were alone.

The invitation the Lenten narrative extends is to give attention to their grief. To imagine it, explore it, even recreate it. Jesus is dead and gone and we are bereft. Now what?

Good Friday is trauma – the recognition of the scale of our ignorance and violence (we crucified him after all, we consented to his crucifixion). Good Friday includes – it must include if it is going to be healing and not merely additional immiseration – our willingness not to deny or project this grave error but to sit with it, become responsible for it.

On Saturday, we ask what is possible given that error. What remains for us to do? What can we do?

The value of those questions is granted by the depth of our willingness on Friday. How close to the error did we get? Did we deny and flee, like Peter?

Or, like Mary Magdalyn, did we attend the dying? Did we face the cross? Did we witness the horror?

Two things arise on Saturday, both of which made Easter possible, and both remain possibilities – really, callings – in our own lives.

First, a story, dear to my heart.

Two disciples leave Jerusalem after the crucifixion. They are bound for Emmaus. As they walk, they come upon a stranger who shares the road. He asks about their obvious grief and they tell him about Jesus and how he died.

The stranger responds by talking about scripture. He points out threads in Daniel and Isaiah, Genesis and Jeremiah, and the Psalms, all of which account for – make sense of, give meaning to – Jesus’s death.

It’s not a solution of course – Jesus is still dead – but it helps.

At day’s end, still shy of Emmaus, the disciples pause to rest. They invited the stranger to stay with them, offering to share their meager bread. He consents and prays over the meal.

And in that moment – that offer of shared food, that blessing and prayer – they recognize Jesus. Is it clear? They do not recognize a body but a practice – a practice that any body can do, even you and me.

I said a moment ago that the early disciples lost Jesus and the question was, now what?

The answer was: do what he taught us to do. Welcome the stranger, give rest to the weary, feed the hungry. Make peace, not war. Open the gate, don’t close and bar it.

I think it’s clear this is what those disciples did. They left Jerusalem heartbroken and terrified but some of them – Mary Magdalyn-like – did not betray their teacher. They remembered what he taught them about communion and love and they kept on practicing.

They loved their neighbor as their own self or – if you prefer an ACIM frame – they continued to “love in a loveless place” (T-14.IV.4:10).

And that first thing – a practice – led to a critical insight: when they practiced love in Jesus’ name, Jesus actually appeared and lived among them, albeit in a new form. It turns out that when we seek only to love our neighbor, our neighbor becomes Christ.

If you see glimpses of the face of Christ behind the veil, looking between the snow-white petals of the lilies you have received and given as your gift, you will behold your brother’s face and recognize it. I was a stranger and you took me in, not knowing who I was (T-20.I.4:2-3).

This is an old old story.

Those disciples learned that Jesus’s death was not an end, but an extension of his mission because now he was longer contained by space and time. And there was a practice – a way of being – by which they could experience and share this truth.

Easter is a creative act in which we participate; resurrection is a creative process that is outside of history and impossible to contain – in one person’s body, in one church’s body, in one country’s body.

It begins in our willingness to serve our brothers and sisters, and to be nonviolent as God is nonviolent.

Saturday is when we say well, he’s gone, but I am here, and so I will love the way he loved. I will share the way he shared. I will to the best of my ability emulate his lovingkindness.

Saturday is about what we do with the body. On Friday the body is ruined; the individual life is destroyed. The law of the state, which is the law of men, is brutally and efficiently enforced. Death is the end. The empire, not God, decides.

On Saturday, we don’t deny this, we simply resolve to respond to it with love. We will follow him, even though he died on a cross. On Saturday, without in any way glorifying sacrifice or idolizing suffering, we simply refuse the cross as the end of the story.

Saturday is when we say to one another, there is another way. Together we will find it.

Good Friday – Holy Saturday – Easter