Psalm 88 and Holy Saturday

Psalm 88: The Darkness and Our Hope

The Meaning within Holy Saturday

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I have known a couple of different reactions to the old spiritual “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” One was from a pastor and church leader I deeply respect but who surprised me with his take on the old song. He said we look silly when we sing in the presence of non-Christians “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” We look silly because everyone knows literally that we were not there. But that is not the point of the song is it? The song is more an expression of the implications of the Bible’s teaching on the Christian sacrament (or ordinance, if you prefer) of baptism. St. Paul asks us if we know or not that we have been baptized into Christ’s death that we might be raised with him in his resurrection. (Romans 6:1-11 for a fairly full context) So from one sort of literal perspective none of us were there when they crucified the Lord. But the overwhelming Christian answer says “Unless I was there I have no hope for the resurrection. I not only was but am there because of my baptism, just as I was not only there but am there at his resurrection because of my baptism.

The Christian doctrine of baptism is an assertion that “in Christ” has meaning because our lives as Christians are forever connected to Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. The Gospel is not “Christ died for you, so what now are you going to do for him?” The Gospel is the declaration that Christ died for us, was buried for us, was raised for us, all that we might die in him, be buried in him, and rise with him. Our lives are now directed into a new trajectory wherein our lives hidden in Christ are transformed to become themselves presentations of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. This is why Psalm 88 in all its darkness is a part of the Christian experience of the Gospel. We are thankful it is not the whole, but let us also be thankful that it is a part of that experience.

Psalm 88 begins with the prayer of one crying out to God, “O Lord, God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee. Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear to my cry.” (Psalm 88:1-2)

Then comes the pain and sorrows being poured out by a supplicant who says “For my soul is full of troubles and my life draws near to the grave.” (Psalm 88:3) The next few verses describe a life that has come near to death and feels trapped in the pit of the grave. As one who is approaching sixty years of age I have been resigned to the reality that the grave will soon be where my present earthly body is soon to make its residence. I will never forget how I pondered death before becoming a Christian. I remember listening long and hard to Laura Nyro’s song made famous by Blood, Sweat, and Tears as they sang “And when I die, and when I die, there will be one child left to carry on.” Sometimes in our Christian lives we skip over the burial of Christ. We move right from the sacrifice to the resurrection. But the burial is essential to the Gospel. It is essential to every Christian funeral. In my Anglican tradition a funeral is not so much a celebration of life remembrance. That may be connected to a family’s rituals in a funeral, but the funeral office itself is a solemn and simple rite in which we bury a body in the expression of the Christian hope that like a grain of wheat is planted into the ground and rises in new life, so the believer who is buried with Christ will be raised in newness of life. We don’t celebrate a life in our burial of a Christian. We plant them in the ground for a celebration to take place when they rise from the dead. We meet death head-on because we are in Christ, who met death on our behalf head-on. He met death on Good Friday. He was buried and experienced the pit of the grave spoken of in Psalm 88 on Holy Saturday. He rose from the grave on the Resurrection Sunday of Easter. Psalm 88 is bleak and full of darkness. But we face times bleak, full of doubts, full of questions without easy answers, full of darkness. It is important for us when facing those experiences to know that we were there and are there in Christ’s death and burial and we therefore are there and will be there in Christ’s resurrection. There is a sense for the Christian that our present life is continually an experience of Psalm 88, for it is not yet seen what we shall be when we see him on the day of Christ. We carry death in our lives on a daily basis until we die and rise in him but until then we can say Donne’s words to the grave “Death thou shalt die.”

It is one of the more meaningful services in my Anglican experience when we visit our little church on Good Friday. The altar is stripped and a black veil is placed over the cross to symbolically represent the darkness of Good Friday. It is like the darkness Israel faced in Egypt when the darkness could be felt that fell upon the land of Egypt the night of the Passover. This is not to be extracted from the Gospel but remembered in the Gospel because darkness so foreboding to us, so full of our fears, is part of what it means for us to be buried into Christ. So there is something meaningful for me to ponder when I enter the bleak scene of Good Friday and see this scene before me.

Our simple sanctuary is so bleak on this day. But this is not a forgetting of the Gospel but a pondering of it. For on Good Friday as his body was taken down from the cross and on Holy Saturday as his body lay in the grave, we in him met our darkest fears. We asked in the words of Psalm 88 we who are buried in him are forced to pray the words of a litany crying out, “Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy loving-kindness be declared in the grave? Or thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? And thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?” (Psalm 88:10-12) We have been buried with him. The disciples who had lost hope when Jesus was crucified spent Holy Saturday grieving and asking such questions. They had hoped for the kingdom. They now faced their Master’s death. They would not again take hope until they recognized him in eating in his presence on the road to Emmaus or until in they could put their fingers upon his wounds. For the disciples they hadn’t realized it but they had been buried with him even as they walked around Jerusalem in the darkness of their souls. We all had been buried into his death, into his burial, and on Holy Saturday we were baptized into the cold darkness, or as Laura Nyro put it, the “crazy cold down there.”

But Psalm 88, contrary to popular opinion is a psalm expressing wonderful hope. It is hope expressed in a single verse, but what a perfect and profound expression of hope it is. It says, if we modernize the words of the King James: “But unto thee have I cried, O LORD, and in the morning shall my prayer come before Thee.” (Psalm 88:13) Holy Saturday is when we cried out all the day. It was darkness and bleakness and there will be days like that we can be assured. But in the morning our prayer shall rise to thee. What is a Christian’s prayer? Is it the hours we spend on our knees, the words we say, or is it something more profound, more perfect, more real than any words we can speak. For on Holy Saturday while our words were a mess, our thoughts scrambled, our feelings stuck in the miry clay of the pit our prayer was dead and hopeless. But on Holy Saturday the reality is that our prayer, in the morning shall arise to come before thee. For the morning will no longer be Holy Saturday in the bleakness and darkness, but Resurrection Sunday and the empty tomb, and the affirmation of Hallelujah, He is risen. He is risen indeed.”

My words of prayer, my cries in the night, they have died but they will rise in the morning when he arises and comes before thee. That single verse found in Psalm 88:13 is the anthem of all Christian hope. It is the anthem for every believer realizing one day I will die, for every widow and widower who has buried a soul-mate, for every parent that has lost a child, for every soul that has heard the grim news of how terrorists have taken a loved one’s life. Whether by sickness, plague, war, tyranny or just wearing out after a long earthly life we come to our own Holy Saturdays. As we commit bodies to the earth we commit them to the one who faced his own Holy Saturday. The darkness is now not so bleak, and the bleakness is meaningful because we understand in the pain and sorrow of the moment that in the morning, my prayer that is thy Son thou hast given us, he shall ascend and appear before thee having conquered sin and death until the day when it will be death and sin that are given their burial and shall be no more. But on Holy Saturday in the darkness and bleakness, it is enough that my prayer shall arise to greet thee in the morning.