God Was Not There
Between Death and Resurrection: The Silence of Holy Saturday
This afternoon, Julia and I took our endlessly energetic Goldendoodle for a long walk. As we strolled beneath trees just beginning to bud, Julia reflected on how she would have approached yesterday’s Good Friday sermon differently. Not that she disagreed with anything I said—but she noticed something I had missed:
The chronological tension of Holy Week.
In my reflection on the temple curtain being torn, I connected it directly to Hebrews—to our access to God through Christ. While theologically true, Julia reminded me that this understanding comes from the other side of Easter—from resurrection and even Pentecost. A fair point—one worth sitting with.
“What if,” she asked, “we sit with what the torn curtain meant on that first Holy Saturday—before anyone knew what Sunday would bring?”
She continued: “What if, at first, the torn curtain didn’t signal access at all? What if it was God, in his grief, tearing the veil like a mourner? What if it symbolized not presence rushing out to meet us, but presence withdrawing—God departing the temple in sorrow?”
That’s a hard point to stay with … isn’t it?
The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once called Holy Saturday “the day of God’s non-existence in the world.” It’s a jarring phrase. It makes me uncomfortable. But it captures something essential about this day:
The absence of God.
Yes, Good Friday accomplished forgiveness.
Yes, the curtain was torn.
But the proof of that redemption—the receipt, if you will—wasn’t handed over until Easter morning.
And in between?
Silence.
On that first Holy Saturday, perhaps God was nowhere to be found. His presence had left the temple. The Son of God lay dead in the tomb. This is the day when God in Christ experiences death not from a distance, but from the inside. God was not watching from afar—but lying lifeless, entering the fullness of human mortality.
We know the ending.
We’ve read ahead.
But the disciples hadn’t.
The women preparing spices hadn’t.
They lived what Fleming Rutledge calls “the void that cannot be filled with premature consolation.”
Earlier today, I sat in a tattoo parlour tucked in Chinatown, accompanying a friend as she marked one year since a close friend had died. I was there not to fix or distract—but simply to be present. As the needle buzzed and a memorial was etched into her skin, I found myself thinking:
This is a Holy Saturday act—absence, grief, remembrance, and the faint feeling of hope against hope.
There are many such Holy Saturdays in our lives: seasons of grief that feel like abandoned temples, times of doubt that stretch like an endless Saturday, moments when we stand before the torn curtain and see not access, but absence.
Holy Saturday is an interruption.
What would it mean for us to enter into the discomfort and hold still in the dark?
There is sorrowful comfort in knowing that Holy Saturday is as much a part of redemption as the Cross and the Resurrection.
Perhaps what I should have said yesterday is this:
From where we stand—we know the torn curtain means access to God’s presence. But the torn curtain on that first Holy Saturday wasn’t an invitation to rush into the Holy of Holies. Perhaps it calls us to wait at the threshold. To name the absence. To sit with the silence.
Tomorrow is my favourite day of the year.
We will celebrate.
The torn veil now opens a new and living way.
But today?
We acknowledge the God who descended—not just to earth, but to Hades.
The God who entered death.
The God who, for a day, was not found.
And even here—especially here.
We trust.
Or at least, we try to hope.