We had hoped…

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“We had hoped…” These have long struck me as some of the saddest words in the Bible.  “Now on that same day” – that is on Easter – two folks are heading out of Jerusalem towards Emmaus and they are talking about  “all these things that had happened.”  While they are talking Jesus appears alongside them but is unrecognized by them.  They tell Jesus, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”  (Luke 24:41)

I hear anguish and sadness and a deep disappointment.  And I hear the unspoken, “but we must have been wrong.”  They had placed all of their hopes and dreams for redemption, for salvation, for life itself, on Jesus having been the one.  And now he was dead.  Never mind that the reader of Luke knows that he is alive and in fact the one talking to them.  I want to sit with the two for a while, to feel what they must have felt.

On Easter a friend of mine posted on Facebook, “I’m not ready to proclaim ‘He is risen!’ I need to sit in Holy Saturday for a bit.”

That’s where I am on this fourth day of Easter.  Still sitting in Holy Saturday.  Still thinking “but we had hoped.”  We had hoped to be back in church for Easter.  We had hoped to be back in our classrooms.  We had hoped to be in Florida with my brother and sister-in-law.  We had hoped this would all go away.

Holy Saturday has historically been the day Jesus is understood to have “descended into hell” to save those who had died before Christ had come.  When my son was young, maybe five, he asked me – loudly – in the middle of the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, “Mommy, where is hell?”  I whispered back to him, “Hell is wherever God is not.”  He thought about that for a moment and then told me, and a good portion of the congregation, “Well, that doesn’t make sense.  If God is everywhere, why do we say that?!”

I’m not a strong believer in hell.  And, in truth, I’ve never been quite sure what to do with our proclamation that Jesus descended into hell.  My son’s question seemed right to me.  But if hell is wherever God is not – or wherever God appears not to be because all of the things we associate with God, all of our hopes, are a little bit blurry – Holy Saturday and Jesus descending into hell starts to make a little bit more sense to me.

We had hoped COVID-19 would go away.  But it spreads and gets bigger.  And now I know young adults who have had to postpone their weddings and students who are soon to be college graduates whose plans for next year have been cancelled.  I know people who have had and are recovering from COVID-19 and I know people who have lost loved ones to the virus.  I know pastors who are trying to comfort grieving families when they cannot all gather together and where physical distancing highlights our reliance on human touch for comfort.  I had hoped that would not be so.

I have faith that this, too, shall pass and that we will retrospectively be able to see that Christ was here with us all along.  I really do.  But, I also wonder if we do ourselves and those around us a disservice by jumping too quickly to that moment.  Sometimes we need to abide in the now-ness of Holy Saturday.  It is a place of lament, of naming our sadness and disappointment and shattered hopes for what we thought would be.  “We had hoped” is sad, a sort of accusation even.  But it is also honest.  And, I think it is faithful.