Mt 28,1-10 – Holy Saturday
The immense expanse of silence on Holy Saturday is the greatest preparation for Easter. It’s a suspended time, apparently empty, in which everything seems still. The women prepare themselves with their ointments to take care of a corpse, unaware of the encounter they will have with the Risen One.
Yet the meaning of Holy Saturday is not simply to dismantle Calvary or prepare the empty tomb. Rather, it is a necessary time. A time of silence, of waiting, of reflection. A time that resembles that moment that each of us should allow ourselves before making an important choice. It is the stillness that allows discernment. It is the space in which things mature. Without this step, we risk living everything superficially, without depth.
Maybe we don’t really enjoy Easter precisely because we don’t know how to live Holy Saturday. We don’t know how to stop, we don’t know how to breathe, we don’t know how to stay silent. We are continually projected elsewhere, incapable of living in the present, incapable of remaining within what is happening. Yet it is right there, in the silence, that something is preparing. That’s where God works in a hidden way. Holy Saturday is not an empty time: it is a fruitful time, even if invisible.
Pascal was right: «All the unhappiness of men comes from one thing only: from not knowing how to remain calm in a room» (Thoughts, n. 139). Without silence there is no depth, without waiting there is no true rebirth. Holy Saturday teaches us this: not to be afraid of the void, not to escape silence, to let life mature even when we see nothing. Because it is precisely from this silence that Easter is born.
