{"id":5286,"date":"2026-03-12T09:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T13:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5286"},"modified":"2026-03-12T09:00:26","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T13:00:26","slug":"on-the-third-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/12\/on-the-third-day\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Third Day"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a>
\u00a0
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.<\/em>

It\u2019s hard not to like Saturday.\u00a0
\u00a0
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 \u2013 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.
\u00a0
It\u2019s tempting to wish that every day could be Saturday.
\u00a0
Biblically speaking, however, we don\u2019t want to get stuck in a never-ending Saturday.\u00a0
\u00a0
That\u2019s not a knock on the Sabbath. Saturday is the seventh day of the week on the Jewish calendar \u2013 God\u2019s amazing gift of rest. We cease from our work because God ceased from his work on the seventh day. We rest because God\u2019s work has provided everything we need \u2013 in this world and the next.
\u00a0
When it comes to Jesus\u2019 Last Weekend, however, Saturday is the in-between day. It\u2019s the caught-in-the-middle-day between Good Friday (the First Day) and Easter Sunday (the Third Day).
\u00a0
Because it lies between Jesus\u2019 crucifixion and resurrection, the Second Day (or Holy Saturday, as it\u2019s 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\u2019ll be stuck in the limbo of Saturday forever.
\u00a0
It’s a relief to discover that the original circle of Jesus\u2019 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.”\u00a0

That’s incredible.\u00a0And deeply reassuring.\u00a0 \u00a0

The biblical figure most associated with doubt, of course, is Jesus’ friend Thomas.\u00a0\u00a0

His name, “Thomas, also called Didymus,” reveals something interesting. “Thomas” is an Aramaic word and “Didymus” is a Greek word. Both words mean “twin.”\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0

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 \u201cdoubt\u201d comes from the same root as \u201cdouble\u201d?\u00a0To doubt is to be in two minds about something. Double-mindedness is skepticism. I\u2019m stuck in the muddled middle between two convictions or conclusions and feel hesitant to commit to either one.
.
That\u2019s 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,<\/em> the principal figures have a running discussion about hope. Red, Morgan Freeman\u2019s character, who has come to accept the likelihood that he will never leave prison, says, \u201cHope is a dangerous thing. Hope can break your heart.\u201d But for Andy, Tim Robbins\u2019 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.\u00a0\u00a0
.
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.\u00a0They 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\u2019s 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.\u00a0They happen bang-bang-bang<\/em>.

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, \u201cThree days from now you\u2019re going to cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land.\u201d
\u00a0
The prophet Hosea writes, \u201cHe will revive us after two days, he will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before him\u201d (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, \u201cGod, please just let me go out the way I came in.\u201d

In the Bible, three days becomes a kind of shorthand for waiting in hope. The Apostles\u2019 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, \u201con the third day\u2026\u201d
\u00a0
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\u2019s 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?\u00a0

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.\u00a0You might say that at last he had the grounds to doubt his own doubts.\u00a0\u00a0

We’re not likely to meet Jesus in this world the way Thomas did.\u00a0But 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).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0

The Apostles\u2019 Creed asserts that God took action on the third day so our deepest hopes could be realized.
\u00a0
And that leaves the ball in our court.
\u00a0
The day we quit hoping is the day we start dying.

The choice is ours<\/em>.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0Throughout 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\u2019s hard not to like Saturday.\u00a0\u00a0Saturday is the day most working people get to sleep past the alarm clock. The kids are out… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5287,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1080,126,18],"class_list":["post-5286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-apostles-creed","tag-doubt","tag-hope"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5286"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5288,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5286\/revisions\/5288"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}