Hoy Saturday

'Holy Saturday is the moment when everything stops and waits.'

Tom Wright, in 'The Cross and the Colliery', has been an excellent companion over Holy Week. He manages to write brilliantly at different levels, whether it's in his popular commentaries such as the '... for Today' series, his weightier tomes in the 'Christian Origins and the Questions of God' series, or mid-way in 'Paul: Fresh Perspectives' for example.

'The Cross and the Colliery', a series of sermons given during Holy Week 2007 in Easington, is easily accessible, but reveals the richness and creativity of Tom Wright's mind, as well as a depth of spirituality. Over this last week I have been nourished in mind and soul, and enabled to enter more meaningfully the events of this week.

He writes today, 'Holy Saturday is the sabbath rest after the completion of the work of redemption. Remember how, at the end of the creation account in Genesis, we are told that when God finished all his work on the sixth day he rested on the seventh day. Now John has brought Jesus' redeeming work to its completion, with that great word 'It is finished' as Jesus dies. Hold in your mind all that it means for the Jesus of John's gospel to die: the Word of God, falling silent; the living water, no longer flowing; the bread from heaven, scattered in the long grass; the light of the world, snuffed out; the good shepherd, snatched away from the flock; the grain of wheat, falling into the earth and dying; the Messiah coming to his own people and his own rejecting him. Put them all together, and see them folded in this deep and dark sabbath rest, this seventh day, waiting as we must wait for whatever God will do and bring.'