It is Saturday. For Jesus’ disciples, the Sabbath. The cross is empty. And so it seems are their lives and their hopes. There is only silence, so deafening they can not only feel but hear the fear in their thumping hearts. We can only imagine this day between—because the gospels are largely silent about goings on. We are told that all the disciples fled at Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. Were they even there at his death? Are they now locked up in fear in some upper room? 

The only thing Mark, the gospel whose story we have been following this Lenten season, tells us is that some stranger, Joseph, took the body of Jesus and placed it in a rocky tomb and sealed it with a stone. All that is left are the women, there at the cross as well, now standing watching, keeping silent vigil over where the “body was laid.” Mark is careful let the full impact fall on our senses. The last word of his final sentence is “was laid to rest.” And Mark is the only one of the gospel writers to use in his original Greek a form of that verb “was laid” that emphasizes that this is really the last word. It is over and done with. It is final. Jesus’ story has come to a sad end.

Is it too much to imagine that the women, as they stand there watching, might have grasped for some consolation and comfort in their sorrow. Would not the words of scripture, already a favorite then, just as for us now, have provided some solace?

“Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil, for you are with me;
your rod and your staff
they comfort me.”

(Psalm 23)

Perhaps you and I are standing today—these days—in that dark valley watching alongside the women. A few weeks ago I stood at the graveside of my wife’s sister, 99 years old. As I stood there, I was reminded—as many of you have been while standing at the graveside of a loved one or friend—of the finality of death—though custom has usually prevented us from watching the casket actually being lowered into its final resting place.

And these days we stand in some dark valleys as well, as the news media, and social media, interrupt the silence of our sheltering each day from a fearsome pandemic with the numbers of the sick, the dying, the dead.

These days, this day, we need to hear the promise that the Lord is here in our dark valley. “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, you are with me.”

The Apostle Paul echoes that promise so well, in the words we also often hear at funerals: “There is nothing in all of creation that will be able to separate us from the love God in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:39)

Prayer

O God our Shepherd, help us to hear your promise and know your presence even at times like this when we walk through the dark valleys of suffering, anxiety, and loss. Help us to know that even in times of silence, when we seem not to know what to say or do, you stand beside us, and you will not let us go, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.