At Work in Silence

Holy Saturday

The BBC show The Cultural Frontline recently featured a segment entitled, “Recording Our World Under Lockdown.” It featured Nick Ryan, an artist who is archiving the sounds of daily life that we often missed pre-pandemic, especially in large cities when we were surrounded with the sounds of traffic, construction, buying, selling, kids going to school, etc.  

The cessation of some of the significant activities in our lives has been unsettling. But it has also given us the opportunity to hear some things that we seldom, if ever noticed. Ryan described the growing chorus of song birds on his street that now accompanies the sunrise.  

Imagine the silence on the morning following Jesus’ execution:

            The silence of a Sabbath.

                        The silence of emotional exhaustion.

                                    The silence of fear.

                                                The silence of grief.

                                                            The silence of despair.

Yet in that silence God was at work. Something was happening. Just as God appeared to a harassed and despairing Elijah not in an earthquake, mighty wind or fire but in a tiny whispering sound, God was getting ready to speak to the world in the sound of a stone sliding away from the front of a tomb. –jc