Holy Saturday. That strange, almost awkward interval between the horror and devastation of Good Friday, and the joy and exhilaration of Easter. What to make of it? Jesus is dead and lies in a nondescript tomb. His followers are devastated, their world collapsed around them. Today, in mainline Catholic and Protestant churches across the world, altars have been stripped, and crosses set aside or displayed in black shroud; a hush has fallen over Christendom. It’s a strange, breathless kind of day.

A portion of a homily from the early days of the Church by an anonymous priest reads as follows:

“Today a great silence reigns on earth, a great silence and a great stillness. A great silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. . . He has gone to search for Adam, our first father, as for a lost sheep.”

In the Apostles’ Creed, which serves as the basic foundation for all Christian belief, this day is remembered with the words “he descended to the dead”, recalling that time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday when Christ either: a) ministered to the souls who lived in darkness and the shadow of death, or b) simply lay dead in the tomb (there is plenty of theological debate on either count) – a death He would conquer through his Resurrection that glorious Sunday.

Me, I’ve often heard among in those words another message, one not nearly so traditional, dogmatic, and/or theologically divisive. This message carries with it a more contemporary, hopeful, and accessible meaning and purpose, one that reflects God’s ultimate desire and purpose for us all: the ready and willing descent of Christ through the Holy Spirit to the world we live in, to minister to the spiritually dead or dying – those souls who have found nothing but emptiness, loneliness, and despair in a fruitless search for happiness and inner peace through all those things the world offers in spades: the pursuit of material weath, creature comforts, unhealthy addictions involving alcohol, drugs, and sex, and unfulfilled dreams and unrealistic expectations.

Jesus’ promise to each of us – “remember, I am with you always” (Matthew 28:20) – transcends not only the bloodstained cross and the darkness of the tomb known to His disciples, but for all those bloodstained crosses and silent tombs each of us has experienced at times in our own lives. For that very reason, Holy Saturday is not a day of mournful despair and silence without any practical reason for hope (as it must have been to Jesus’ followers), but a day of hope and reassurance that God is not just with us always, but is always ready to descend to us in our own darkness and shadow of death to reveal a different way and offer a different kind of peace – one that world cannot give.

The question is, do we have the will and the courage to accept that different way? To allow God to create in us that “clean heart and right spirit” (Psalm 51: 10) that leads to true life and true peace?

For that, too, is the Way of the Cross.