Prayer Prompt April 4

SCRIPTURE

Psalm 22:1-2, 9-10

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest. Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother's breast. On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.

REFLECTION

Holy Saturday is the strangest day in the Christian calendar. The tomb is sealed. Nothing has happened yet. The disciples do not know what we know. They are sitting in the rubble of every hope they had, and the silence from heaven is total. This is the day that belongs to everyone who has ever prayed and heard nothing back. Everyone who has ever stood at a grave and wondered if death is, in fact, the last word. We do not skip this day. We need it. Because the faith that cannot sit in Holy Saturday silence is not yet strong enough to receive Easter morning. Sit in the silence today. God has been here before.

PRAYER

God of the long silence, we do not know what to do with this day. The cross is behind us and the resurrection has not yet come, and we are in the in-between — which is, if we are honest, where most of our lives are lived. Teach us to wait without despairing. Teach us that your silence is not your absence. Teach us to say, even now: you have been my God since before I was born. And you will not stop now. Amen.

-Alan Barnes