#BeingHuman. Saturday.
The disciples sat behind locked doors, paralyzed by fear. The women walked toward a dead body carrying spices. Joseph and Nicodemus stepped into the open for the first time. Christ descended into hell. Saturday is not a day of rest. It is the quietest and darkest day in the history of redemption, and we are still inside it.
Saturday began with silence. Not the silence that is inner peace, but the kind that remains after something has ended completely, when you still do not know whether this really is the end or whether there is something on the other side of it. Like the silence after another massive strike, when we count the destroyed and the killed and the injured.
The disciples sat behind locked doors, and John says it plainly: behind locked doors, out of fear. The same people who for three and a half years had walked beside the One who kept saying do not be afraid. They were afraid. They were hiding. They did not know what to do with what they had witnessed.
Two other people did the opposite and stepped out of the shadows.
Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus were both secret disciples. Both had been careful in public all that time, keeping their connection to Christ’s teaching hidden, since both belonged to the Sanhedrin and feared the consequences. Nicodemus had come to Jesus at night so that nobody would see him. Joseph believed and kept silent, and the text does not even make clear whether he ever met Christ directly or whether Nicodemus passed the teaching on to him. And now, with Christ dead and the danger from the religious leaders and the Roman occupiers no smaller than before, these two are the ones who step forward publicly. Joseph goes to Pilate and asks for the body. Nicodemus brings myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds, a royal amount for a burial. They did in public what none of the twelve had done.
Was it too late? Yes. They had not been present during His public ministry, nor at the Last Supper, nor with Him in Gethsemane. They did not carry His cross. They came only when everything was already over, in the judgment of the religious leaders and the occupiers and the disciples alike.
And the Gospel records their names, the way it records Simon of Cyrene. Too late is better than never. But Saturday reminds us of something important: time matters. There are things that can be done only when the right moment comes, for me or for someone else, and there are choices to be made while there is still a choice. This applies to evangelical churches and leaders who kept silent for years and are now looking for something to say. It applies to partners who woke up only after Bucha and then did more than express concern. God accepted the ministry of Joseph and Nicodemus: late, imperfect, and real, and public.
And then there were the women.
They came early, before dawn, with spices to anoint the body. They did not know about the resurrection, even though they had heard Him speak of it, and they were not walking toward the tomb expecting a result. They were going to a dead body because they loved Him, knowing that the anointing would change nothing. Love as service to a body that could no longer be helped by anything except one last act of honor.
I think about the people carrying out exhumations in the de-occupied territories today. Those who identify the fallen by DNA, by fragments, by whatever is left, by personal belongings. Those who bring bodies back to families on a shield, so that there is something to bury. Those who prepare graves so that there is a place for us to come and weep. This is our theology of the dignity of the dead, and the evangelical church in Ukraine still has to learn it. These were not people who went out to kill. These were people who stood up to defend their country and their neighbors, and Sunday services and fervent prayer in relative safety are possible precisely because of them, because the Lord protects us from murderers and rapists through people.
This ministry of honor and memory produces no results in the conventional sense, and God sees it and remembers it. In our church, Skelya, every Sunday we keep a minute of silence and read aloud the full list of church members and relatives and friends serving at the front, and we pray for the missing and for those in captivity. By name. More than a hundred names. And then we pray one of the four chaplains’ prayers, closing this weekly service of memory with the Lord’s Prayer. Someone might say that this takes fifteen or twenty minutes of the service and that another sermon could fit there instead. Friends, our defenders are giving years of their lives for our protection, and we are troubled by fifteen minutes once a week?
The women came with spices, and it was to them that the risen Christ appeared first. God sees those who remember by name, with love, and He appears with love to those who come to honor His death and His body.
The body of Jesus lay in a borrowed tomb. He never had one of His own, as He never had a home of His own. The tomb belonged to Joseph, and this is a detail easy to miss and worth noticing. He was born into this world in a borrowed manger. He lived as a refugee in Egypt in a borrowed house. He served in borrowed spaces. He entered Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey. He kept the Last Supper in a borrowed room and washed His disciples’ feet from a borrowed basin. He died among criminals and was buried in someone else’s tomb. From beginning to end, borrowed space. That is why I keep thinking these days about a theology of borrowed space.
The disciples did not know the word resurrection from their own experience. They had seen Him raise Lazarus, four days in the tomb. They had seen Him raise the daughter of Jairus, a child who had just died. They had seen Him raise the widow’s son at Nain. But who would raise Him now? He had raised others, and He himself lay dead. The whole framework built over three and a half years on the words and deeds of a living Christ had stopped. They knew one thing only: He was dead. And they did not understand what came next.
This is where Holy Week culminates in Ukraine under an ongoing invasion. For the defenders. For those of us who rejected the mantra that this is not our war. For the volunteers. For our partners. We are living in this Saturday too, between the death of what was, that life and those people and those cities and those relationships and that faith which knew how to answer simple questions before 2014 and before 2022, and the resurrection of what is not here yet and cannot yet be named, because it has not been revealed.
Andrii’s body lies in the ground. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians killed by russians lie in the ground, and it is not known for all of them which tomb they lie in, borrowed or nameless or never found at all. Millions of Ukrainians live inside this Saturday darkness, between the faith that existed before the war and a reality that has not yet given us words for what is happening. It is the hardest place for my faith, because nothing in it is confirmed. Only silence. Only the absence of the people we love. Only locked doors. Only a borrowed tomb. Only waiting.
Peter writes that Christ went and preached to the spirits in prison. Saturday is not a pause in the story of redemption but its deepest moment. He descended where no human ministry can reach, no volunteer effort, no prayer, no outstretched hand, no form of help. To the point where nobody can help anymore. And that is precisely where He went first.
Where was God on the day Andrii was killed? Not above the battlefield near Krynky in the Kherson region, watching from a safe distance. God was inside death itself. His descent into hell means there is no depth He did not descend to first, even when that depth is hell. No grief He did not enter before us. No captivity, no exhumation, no nameless grave, no basement where His presence had not already been. I cannot explain this theologically and I do not want to, since these are things I accept by faith without explanation, as a crippled evangelical.
And it means one more thing, something rarely said in the context of loss. The same Christ who is present with us now and comforts us by His Spirit in our grief for those we have lost is present, right here and right now, with those we have lost. With Andrii. With the other five relatives killed by russians. With those whose bodies have not been found. With those in captivity, in the unknown. Saturday is the place where the living and the dead church are joined in Christ into one cloud of witnesses, not by our own effort and not by any prosperity theology, but through the One who descended into death and remains there with them while we wait here, either for their resurrection or for our own death, when we will join that cloud ourselves.
Our unity with those we have lost is neither sentimental nor abstract. It rests on trust in a Christ who is present here and there at once. The living and the dead are joined in Him, in this very Saturday, in this very darkness, with the curtain between us torn.
Saturday is not over. There is still one more night of fear and unknowing ahead. But somewhere in the darkness of a borrowed tomb something is happening that we cannot see and cannot yet name. Not because God is absent, but because He is precisely there, in the death and in the hell, quietly doing what only He can do. And we are waiting.
Taras D., Ukraine
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