For as long as I can remember, I’ve struggled with being misunderstood, and for that reason, I have grown to love the implication of the day between the cross and the empty tomb.
It is a day of … silence, and is often referred to as Silent Saturday because there seems to be nothing happening between the death of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus.
Of course, on this side of both of those events we know that there was an eternity of things happening on the middle day, but think for a moment from God’s perspective on that first day of silence.
God was willing to be misunderstood. He was willing to be questioned, doubted, and even blamed for the tragedy that had taken place the day before, not by people who didn’t love him, but by those who did.
We’d seen this willingness to be falsely accused in the life and ministry of Jesus, of course. He had been given a sham trial and a pointless death sentence (the redemptive plan of God notwithstanding), and had remained silent. He had come to a people who refused to join him on the mission, even after his strategy was the opposite of the one who had gone before him, and been rejected as well. This is how he explained it in the red letters of Matthew:
