Plague Journal (24): Holy Saturday

Yesterday the nation passed the half-million threshold for confirmed infections, and this weekend we will surely pass the 20,000 mark for deaths from CoV-19. This past week has seen the deaths reach close to 2000 per day, making it the most deadly week yet, but some experts have said we are near the peak now. Indeed, the numbers this week have been steady rather than rising.

In my own state of Maine, we are seeing about 25 new cases per day and a total so far of 17 deaths. It seems that social distancing has been effective in slowing the spread of the virus and thus limiting the deaths. 

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I finished Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year a couple of days ago. There are fascinating parallels to our own time. Human nature, it seems, has not changed much since those days. There is a passage toward the end about how, when the plague had abated, people were at first grateful to God, and purposed to reform their lives, but that soon people fell back into old grooves. For example, early on in the plague people had a tendency to chase after quack remedies (relying on magical potions, astrologers, etc.), and many were fooled into a costly complacency by trusting these. But as the plague progressed and worsened these quacks were discredited and disappeared. Either they themselves were taken by the plague or they fled the city. But then, once the plague was over, and after a brief interval, they began to appear again, and their practices were just as profitable as ever. Interesting.

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It is Easter weekend of course. Yesterday I posted something about Good Friday. Today is sometimes called Holy Saturday. It is the final day of Holy Week and of the 40 days of Lent. This is a day of anticipation for Christians. On Friday we solemnly remembered the death of Jesus and what it means to us. Today, we wait. We know that tomorrow will be a day of celebration, of awe and thanksgiving. We will all shout He is risen! Death, where is thy victory! But today . . . today we wait. The first disciples waited. Jesus had told them on multiple occasions that he would be killed, but that on the third day he would rise from the dead. Did they believe him? Did they understand?

I think they huddled together, they prayed, they wondered, and they also feared. Would the authorities come for them as they'd come for Jesus?

Many folks who were raised in some kind of nominal church-going Christianity live in this same fear, not of the authorities, but of death. They have heard the Easter story, and they like many of the traditions, and the brief respite from worry that such holidays afford, but they do not truly believe that Christ died in their place, for their sins. They have spent much of their lives buying into a comforting myth that their own sins are negligible, far outweighed by the goodness in their hearts (if not their deeds), and that God, if he exists at all, does not really care much about them anyway. The trouble is this "comforting" lie does not comfort much. There are times when it doesn't comfort at all.

No man or woman knows true comfort, and release from the fear of death, till they come to the cross with no claims, no defenses. I have lived my life in the wrong direction. I have looked to the wrong solutions, trusted in comforting lies, run from the truth. On this day, this day between, this day of waiting in the shadow of the cross, it is time to face reality. The Easter shout . . . He is risen! . . . will mean nothing to you if you do not stand in the shadow of that cross and know, this was for me!