Season 3: Episode 12 | We are Saturday People: A theology for the Weary, Waiting, and the In-Between

Holy Week lament is the theology the church forgot to teach. We know Good Friday. We know Easter Sunday. But Holy Saturday, the day of silence, grief, and not-knowing, is the day we skip. And in skipping it, we have left an entire generation of weary, deconstructing, justice-exhausted Christians without a theology for the in-between.

This episode slowly and honestly walks the full arc of Holy Week. We begin with two processions entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday from opposite directions — Pilate from the west with warhorses and armor, the empire announcing itself unmistakably, and Jesus from the east on a borrowed donkey surrounded by peasants crying, “Save us now. Two kingdoms. Two completely different answers to the question of what power looks like. The gospel has always been a study in contrast and the crowd waving palms knew exactly which procession they were joining.

But the conflict didn’t start on Palm Sunday. It started the moment Jesus began his ministry, every healing a disruption, every meal with the wrong people a provocation, every “you have heard it said, but I say to you,” dismantling someone’s authority. Power doesn’t strike randomly. It strikes when it feels threatened by someone who refuses to disappear. By the time Jesus entered Jerusalem that final week, the decision had already been forming. The question was no longer if. It was when and how.

We walk through the tightening of that week, the temple clearing as direct confrontation with economic and religious power, the last supper as Passover reimagined, the garden of Gethsemane as the first Holy Saturday, Jesus in agony asking for another way and staying anyway. And then the cross.

The cross is not primarily a transaction. It is a revelation. Pilate had reasons. The Sanhedrin had reasons. The crowd had reasons. Everyone had a worldview that made what they did feel not just acceptable but necessary. And they killed the most innocent person in the room. That is what the cross exposes, the specific, particular way that power protects itself by wrapping violence in the language of reason, religion, and necessity.

James Cone named this connection in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, holding two symbols together and asking how American Christianity could claim the cross as its central symbol while remaining silent about the spectacular public torture of Black Americans. They had reasons, too. Scripture. Tradition. The sincere belief that the social order they were protecting was ordained by God. The mechanism was the same. The century had changed.

And we are watching the pattern again. Bible verses on official platforms while families are torn apart at the border. The language of Christian nationhood everywhere, while the teachings of Jesus about the poor, the stranger, the prisoner, the sick are treated as political opinions. A Presbyterian seminarian quoting Micah on the floor of a legislature gets called the Antichrist by church-attending, Bible-quoting Christians. Nobody picks the wrong procession on purpose. We just slowly, quietly, reasonably end up on the wrong side of the road, singing the right songs, holding the right Bible, walking in the wrong direction.

Then we stay in Saturday. With the disciples behind locked doors. With Mary Magdalene, who didn’t know she was one day from the most important moment in human history, she just knew she was grieving. With the lament Psalms, which make up nearly half of the entire Psalter, and which the people of God sang in worship and handed to their children as a legitimate way of being with God. With Job, whose friends got presence right for seven silent days before they opened their mouths and delivered every platitude we have ever been handed in our grief.

And with the Black church, which never lost the theology of Saturday. It built its faith inside the not-knowing, the unanswered prayers, the deaths without justice, because it had no choice. Which survived four centuries of American suffering not by having better answers but by refusing to let go. That is the hardest-won, most battle-tested faith any of us knows. And it has something to teach every one of us who is sitting in our own Saturday wondering if faith is still possible.

If you are carrying something unresolved, a loss without a reason, a healing that hasn’t come, a church that couldn’t hold you, a faith that used to feel certain and now trembles, this episode is for you. You are not doing it wrong. You are not behind. You are in the oldest story.

Lament is not the opposite of faith. It is faith stripped to its bones.

COMING NEXT WEEK:

Resurrection Is Not a Reset, It’s a Reordering. Next week, we will talk about what resurrection actually means, and it is not the triumphant reversal you were probably taught. It is new life that still bears scars. Hope that has looked suffering in the face and refused to blink. The “and yet” of God spoken into the longest Saturday. Don’t skip it.

SCRIPTURE REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Luke 22:39-46 — The garden of Gethsemane
• Luke 22:44 — Sweat like drops of blood
• Matthew 21:12-13 — The temple clearing
• Matthew 26:26-28 — The last supper
• Psalm 22:1 — My God, my God, why have you forsaken me
• Psalm 13:1 — How long, O Lord, how long
• Job 2:11-13 — Job’s friends sit in silence
• Job 38 — God speaks from the whirlwind
• Zechariah 9:9 — The king comes on a donkey
• John 20:1 — Mary Magdalene at the tomb

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• The Many — Lament(spoken word, scripture, and music. A beautiful place to sit in your Saturday.)
• The Cross and the Lynching Tree— James Cone (deep end of the reading list: it will cost you something. Read it anyway.)
• Beyond Faith as Usual Reading List | Click Here!
• Season 3: Episode 4 | Just Left of Centered: Black Theology, Liberation and the Gospel