April 8, 2023 - Leave It Blank

     One day this week one of my sisters called me and said, “I need your help.  I do the message on our church sign.  Friday’s message is about the nails at the Cross.  Sunday’s is He Is Risen.  What should Saturday’s message be?”
     My immediate response was, “I’d leave it blank.”  She said, “That was my first thought, too.”  I am assuming that if you drive by her church today that you’d see nothing on their church sign.
     The Gospels give us no insight into what Saturday was like for the disciples.  The pages of the Bible are blank when it comes to sundown on Friday until daybreak on Sunday morning.
     We don’t know what they did.  Did they get together on Saturday?  Did they begin packing what little belongings they may have had, getting ready to head back home?  What would they say to the people, maybe their own families, who may have questioned their willingness to leave everything to follow a rabbi?
     The disciples’ grief was compounded.  Not only were they grieving over the death of Jesus, but they were also grieving that every one of them fled in the Garden when He was arrested.  Just one of them, John, had the courage and the love for Jesus to be at Calvary.
     The only insight we get to what Saturday was like comes from the discussion that Jesus had with the two on the road to Emmaus when they said to Him “but we had hoped.”
     The loss of hope is devastating.  It was to the 11 and the women and the other followers of Jesus.  It is for us when all hope is gone when it comes to the health of someone we love or maybe in some other major circumstance of this life.
     What transformed their loss of hope?  Of course, the resurrection of Jesus on Sunday morning.
     The one who had to have been the most devastated on Saturday was Simon Peter who had denied Jesus three times.  The “rock” was mere sandstone when the young maiden asked him if he was one of Jesus’ disciples.
     Peter learned that our hope as followers of Jesus is tied to two events.
     One would be the resurrection of our Lord.  Peter would write in 1 Peter 1:3 “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
     It was the resurrection that brought hope in the face of death for Peter and the 11.  It is the resurrection of Jesus in the face of death or any grief that brings us hope.
     Hope came from another event in Peter’s mind.  1 Peter 1:13 “Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming.”
     Peter understood that hope for the believer as we live through the problems and circumstances of this life also comes from the promise that someday Jesus will return.
     The page may be blank on Saturday.  All of us go through those times when we feel like the page is blank and the situation is hopeless.
     But Sunday is coming.  And some day Jesus is coming.  We live between the resurrection and the return.  He is our blessed hope.