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Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.
It’s hard not to like Saturday.
Saturday is the day most working people get to sleep past the alarm clock. The kids are out of school. Wall-to-wall sporting events crowd our TVs – some of them even worth watching. Saturday is often the best day of the week to walk the dog, visit the park, catch a new movie, go see friends, or eat at that new Italian place everyone is talking about.
It’s tempting to wish that every day could be Saturday.
Biblically speaking, however, we don’t want to get stuck in a never-ending Saturday.
That’s not a knock on the Sabbath. Saturday is the seventh day of the week on the Jewish calendar – God’s amazing gift of rest. We cease from our work because God ceased from his work on the seventh day. We rest because God’s work has provided everything we need – in this world and the next.
When it comes to Jesus’ Last Weekend, however, Saturday is the in-between day. It’s the caught-in-the-middle-day between Good Friday (the First Day) and Easter Sunday (the Third Day).
Because it lies between Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the Second Day (or Holy Saturday, as it’s come to be called) is typically experienced as a time of waiting. Expecting. Doubting. Not knowing. Wondering if God is going to take action and do something significant to eradicate our uncertainties, or if we’ll be stuck in the limbo of Saturday forever.
It’s a relief to discover that the original circle of Jesus’ followers, the Twelve, had their doubts, too.
Just a half dozen verses from the end of the Gospel that bears his name, Matthew points out that even when they’re standing before the risen Jesus, “some doubted.”
That’s incredible. And deeply reassuring.
The biblical figure most associated with doubt, of course, is Jesus’ friend Thomas.
His name, “Thomas, also called Didymus,” reveals something interesting. “Thomas” is an Aramaic word and “Didymus” is a Greek word. Both words mean “twin.”
Today we tend to think that twins are special. But in the ancient world twins were considered bad omens. They messed up the way family inheritance was distributed, and it was assumed that twins were simply going to have a tougher time in life.
Have you ever noticed that the word “doubt” comes from the same root as “double”? To doubt is to be in two minds about something. Double-mindedness is skepticism. I’m stuck in the muddled middle between two convictions or conclusions and feel hesitant to commit to either one.
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That’s where Thomas the twin finds himself during the week after Easter. He is torn. He wants to hope. He wants to believe that the promises of Jesus might still be true. But all of his prior experience screams that dead people do not reappear.
During the movie The Shawshank Redemption, the principal figures have a running discussion about hope. Red, Morgan Freeman’s character, who has come to accept the likelihood that he will never leave prison, says, “Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can break your heart.” But for Andy, Tim Robbins’ character, the day you quit hoping is the day you start dying.
The dreadful thing about doubt is that it makes us hesitate to hope.
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Author and pastor John Ortberg notes that on the pages of Scripture there are two different kinds of hope-generating stories. There are 40-day stories and three-day stories.
Forty-day stories are crock-pot stories. They concern patience and perseverance.
Moses went up on Mt. Sinai for 40 days, and the people of Israel had to wait for him. Noah and his family rode out 40 days and 40 nights of rain. Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness confirming God’s purposes for his life. In each of these stories hope emerges after 40 days of patient waiting.
Three-day stories are different. They are microwave stories. They happen bang-bang-bang.
On Day One something goes terribly wrong. On Day Two there is a hold-your-breath kind of waiting. On Day Three God had better show up and do something, or all hope will be lost.
After Moses leads the Israelites into the Sinai wilderness, God tells him that on the third day he will meet Yahweh face-to-face on the mountain. Joshua is later told, “Three days from now you’re going to cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land.”
The prophet Hosea writes, “He will revive us after two days, he will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before him” (Hosea 6:2). When Queen Esther learns that her people have been targeted for genocide, she asks everyone to fast for three days before she approaches the king. Jonah spends three days in the belly of a big fish.
Ortberg suggests that during that whole time Jonah was praying, “God, please just let me go out the way I came in.”
In the Bible, three days becomes a kind of shorthand for waiting in hope. The Apostles’ Creed takes Jesus to the lowest possible place. He is crucified. He dies. He is buried. Like everyone else, he is relegated to the place of the dead. But then, “on the third day…”
The Passion of Jesus turns out to be a three-day story of hope.
On Friday there is the disaster of the kangaroo court and lynching. On Saturday there is waiting and uncertainty. On Sunday there is the spectacular in-breaking of God’s power.
What the Gospels tell us is that while all the other disciples experience the third day of the story, with its amazing new grounds for hope, Thomas, who wasn’t with them, is still stuck on Saturday.
Are you stuck on Saturday right now?
Real disciples have real doubts because we live in a Saturday world, squeezed between the heartbreaks of all the Fridays we have known, and the hope that God might still make everything right when Sunday finally comes.
It’s worth noting that Doubting Thomas didn’t remain stuck. When he finally had the chance to meet the risen Jesus, his uncertainty peeled away. You might say that at last he had the grounds to doubt his own doubts.
We’re not likely to meet Jesus in this world the way Thomas did. But Jesus boldly said to his followers, including us, that whoever seeks will find, whoever asks will receive, and whoever knocks will see the door swing open (Matthew 7:7).
The Apostles’ Creed asserts that God took action on the third day so our deepest hopes could be realized.
And that leaves the ball in our court.
The day we quit hoping is the day we start dying.
The choice is ours.