04/04/2026
Trusting the Ground:
A Holy Saturday Devotion by Rev. Tony Larson
Job 14:7; Lamentations 3:22-23; John 19:38-42
Job knew what we forget: trees understand resurrection better than we do. "There is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again," he writes, marveling that what seems dead can surge back to life. But mortals? We lie down and rise no more. We are, Job laments, more fragile than the forest.
On Holy Saturday, even God lies down in the earth. Joseph and Nicodemus wrap Jesus in linen with myrrh and aloes, laying him in a garden tomb as evening falls. The stone seals shut. The body rests in darkness, returned to the ground from which all life comes.
This is the day when heaven trusts the soil.
The writer of Lamentations sits in similar darkness—afflicted, besieged, enclosed in stone. Yet even in desolation, a turn comes: "The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; God’s mercies are new every morning." The faithfulness that renews creation each dawn is the same faithfulness keeping vigil in the tomb.
Holy Saturday asks us to wait with the earth—to trust that the ground holds more than death, that the cycles creation has always known are woven into God's own life now. The tree cut down. The seed that must fall into the ground and die. The body given back to soil. The waiting.
We are an anxious species, quick to extract and exploit, reluctant to rest or trust. But today the Lord of all creation lies silent in the ground, teaching us what trees have always known: sometimes faithfulness looks like stillness. Sometimes hope means trusting the dark.
Prayer:
God of Holy Saturday, teach us to wait with the earth. In the silence of the tomb, help us trust that your love is buried deep enough to rise. Amen.
