We Wait

A Holy Saturday Meditation on Job 14:1–14, the Old Testament reading appointed in Year C, Revised Common Lectionary

Man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble.
He springs up like a flower and withers away;
like a fleeting shadow, he does not endure [Job 14:1–2].

The Frailty of Life

Holy Saturday holds a strange place in our faith. It sits between the drama of Good Friday and the triumph of Easter morning—a day of silence, of absence, of waiting. It is perhaps the most honest day in our calendar, the one that most resembles the lives that we actually live: caught between what we’ve lost and what we hope for.

Job understood this space. “Man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble,” he says, speaking from the ashes of his grief. He names a truth we often try to avoid—that we are finite, fragile, fleeting. That we are dust, and to dust we shall return.

The disciples felt this truth acutely on that first Holy Saturday. Their teacher, their friend, their hope lay sealed in a tomb. The one they believed would redeem Israel had been executed as a criminal. Their “few days” seemed suddenly fewer, more troubled.

Like them, we know what it means to sit with loss. To wake up the day after tragedy and find the world impossibly, offensively unchanged. The sun still rises. People still go about their business. And yet everything has changed.

The Stillness of Death

Job continues his lament by noting a painful irony:

At least there is hope for a tree:
If it is cut down, it will sprout again,
and its new shoots will not fail [Job 14:7].

Even a tree, when cut down, may send up new shoots from its stump. But what of humans? “So mortals lie down and do not rise,” Job observes. “Till the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused from their sleep” [14:12].

On Holy Saturday, Jesus lay in the tomb—like a great tree cut down. The disciples could not imagine new shoots springing from this stump. They could not foresee that this very death would become the source of their life. They saw only the stillness, the silence, the end.

And yet, in a divine irony that Job could not have anticipated, Jesus himself was the stump of Jesse, the fallen tree from David’s line that would, against all expectations, sprout again. Not just with new shoots, but with enough life to transform the world.

But the disciples didn’t know this yet. It was Saturday. They could only wait in the tension between what was and what might be.

The Cry for Renewal

It’s in the final verses of our passage that Job’s lament turns, ever so slightly, toward something like hope:

If only you would hide me in the grave
and conceal me till your anger has passed!
If only you would set me a time
and then remember me! [Job 14:13].

Here is Job’s almost-hope—not a confident assertion, but a desperate wish that perhaps, somehow, death might not be the end. That God might hide him in Sheol, set him a time, and remember him.

And then comes the question upon which everything hinges:

If mortals die, will they live again? [Job 14:14a].

Job asks the question that every grieving heart has asked. The question that the disciples couldn’t bring themselves to voice on that silent Saturday. The question that we ourselves bring to every graveside, every loss, every ending.

“If mortals die, will they live again?”

And Holy Saturday doesn’t answer him.
But it doesn’t silence him either.

Unexpected Glimpses

Ten and one-half years ago, the day after Dad died, I didn’t know what to think, let alone what to say. So, I went walking, as I often do, thinking perhaps the rhythm might help. The November sky was crystalline blue, the air crisp with autumn—weather that would normally lift my spirits. But grief creates its own climate, one that no meteorological perfection can penetrate.

And then, without warning, a woman I barely knew—pulled along on her own walk by a joyful, disobedient basset hound—paused in front of me. She looked at me and said, “Isn’t this a glorious day?”

It wasn’t. And it was.
It didn’t fix anything. But it whispered: wait.

This is what Holy Saturday offers us—not answers, not yet, but the courage to live in the question. To acknowledge the reality of death without surrendering to despair. To recognize that even in the silence, something is happening. Something we cannot see.

Job ends his question with a commitment: “All the days of my hard service I will wait for my renewal to come.” He doesn’t know if renewal will come. He cannot prove it. But he chooses to wait for it anyway.

This is our invitation today: to wait.
Not with false certainty or easy answers.
But with the stubborn hope that death—whether physical, emotional, relational, or spiritual—is not the final word.

That like the tree that sends up shoots from the stump, like the stump of Jesse that would flower again, what appears to be the end may yet be a beginning.

So, we wait.
We sit with Job in his questions.
We sit with the disciples in their grief.
We sit with one another—in our losses, our not-yets, our waiting.

And we listen for the voice that might whisper through an unexpected messenger—a stranger, a child, a basset hound— “Isn’t this a glorious day?”

It isn’t. And it is.
Because Sunday is coming.
But today, we wait.