Good Saturday morning! Ah yes! The wonderful quiet time of prayer on Good Friday! If you do not participate in the prayer vigil at the church, you should give it some consideration next year. The end of the week and the feasting and celebration of the Passover continued. The priests got busy doing their priestly things; the governor and his legions went back to doing their occupation duties, with the exception of one small detachment of guards who had the graveyard shift. If we had the privilege of listening in back in the day, we might have heard one complain that his years of training were wasted guarding dead bodies in sealed tombs. Another might have been thinking of a wife back in Rome or a girlfriend up in Nazareth. Most of them would have grumbled about pulling weekend duty in a cemetery. If only the centurion hadn't caught Marcus paying a visit to his daughter last week, the troops of another company might have been chosen in their place. Not much chance of glory guarding a cave with a stone rolled across the entrance. And so the Saturday passed as a few curious folks may have stopped by to look hard at a rock in front of a small cave, the tomb of a wealthy Jew now given over to a criminal's body.
Down through the ages however, Christians have speculated on what might have gone on inside that tomb on the day between the crucifixion and the resurrection. Did the body of Jesus begin the restoration, the changes that would result in his new, glorified body that rose from death on Sunday? Did angels come to minister to our Lord in the darkness of the tomb that day? We may never know these things, but we can't help a little curiosity. Perhaps Jesus simply rested as the dead rest, and the resurrection came in a moment on Sunday at the crack of dawn. The Roman soldiers may have stood the most boring post of their careers on that Saturday. As troops will, they may have complained about the day totally wasted on some foolish orders from 'above'. On the other hand, they may have looked askance at each other as vague noises seemed to come from behind that big rock. Rumblings of power as from a not-to-distant thunderstorm might have fed their fear until on Sunday morning the guards on duty fled to Jerusalem, unable to withstand their fears of something new and unknown happening in that tomb.
We don't want to spend a lot of valuable time in this, but once each year it doesn't hurt to wonder a little at what God was doing on that Saturday. Did angels behind the rock enjoy a little chuckle while the guards startled again and again as God's power healed the body of Jesus? We don't know. Silence may have been the guards only companion that Saturday night as the people went to their beds in Jerusalem. We know that God is never idle as we at times find ourselves. I like to think that those guards heard or felt something that increased their fear as the resurrection approached. Like His birth in Bethlehem, the second 'birth' of the Christ would be something the world had not seen before. Those guards may well have endured a fearful anticipation that finally broke their discipline the next morning. One day, we may get to ask Jesus about that particular Saturday outside of Jerusalem.
Have a wonderful Easter weekend!Bucky
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