Catechesis – Jubilee 2025. Jesus Christ our hope. III. The Easter of Jesus. 7. Death. «A new tomb in which no one had yet been laid» (Jn 19:40-41)
Dear brothers and sisters,
In our journey of catechesis on Jesus, our hope, today we contemplate the mystery of Holy Saturday. The Son of God lies in the tomb. But this “absence” is not a void: it is waiting, contained fullness, a promise kept in the darkness. It is the day of great silence, when the sky seems mute and the earth motionless, but precisely there the deepest mystery of the Christian faith is fulfilled. It is a silence full of meaning, like the womb of a mother who guards the unborn child, but already alive.
The body of Jesus, taken down from the cross, is wrapped with care, as one does with the most precious thing. The evangelist John tells us that he was buried in a garden, inside «a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid» (Jn 19:41). Nothing is left to chance. That garden recalls the lost Eden, the place where God and man were united. And that never-used tomb speaks of something that is about to happen: it is a threshold, not an end. At the beginning of creation, God planted a garden; now the new creation also begins in a garden: with a closed tomb that, soon, will open.
Holy Saturday is also a day of rest. According to Jewish Law, on the seventh day one does not work: after six days of creation, God rested (cf. Gn 2:2). Now the Son, too, after completing his work of salvation, rests. Not because he is tired, but because he has finished his labor. Not because he has given up, but because he loved to the end. Nothing remains to be added. This rest is the seal of the completed work, the confirmation that what had to be done, has been done. It is a rest filled with the hidden presence of the Lord.
For us, it is hard to stop and rest. We live as if life were never enough. We run to produce, to prove ourselves, to not fall behind. But the Gospel teaches us that knowing how to stop is an act of trust that we must learn. Holy Saturday invites us to discover that life does not depend only on what we do, but also on how we know how to bid farewell to what we have been able to do.
In the tomb, Jesus, the living Word of the Father, is silent. But it is in that silence that new life begins to ferment. Like the seed in the earth, like the darkness before dawn. God does not fear the passing of time, because he is Lord also of the wait. Thus, our “useless” time, that of pauses, voids, sterile moments, can become a womb of resurrection. Every silence welcomed can be the prelude to a new Word. Every suspended time can become a time of grace, if we offer it to God.
Jesus, buried in the earth, is the meek face of a God who does not occupy all the space. He is the God who lets things happen, who waits, who withdraws to give us freedom. He is the God who trusts, even when everything seems lost. And we, in that suspended Saturday, learn not to hurry to rise: first we must remain, welcome the silence, let ourselves be embraced by the limit. Often we seek quick answers, immediate solutions. But God works in the depths, in the slow time of trust. The Saturday of the burial thus becomes the womb from which the strength of an invincible light springs: that of Easter.
Dear friends, Christian hope is not born in noise, but in the silence of a wait inhabited by love. It is not the daughter of euphoria, but of confident abandonment. The Virgin Mary teaches us this: she embodies this wait, this trust, this hope. When it seems that everything is stopped, that life is an interrupted path, let us remember Holy Saturday. Even in the tomb, God is preparing the greatest surprise. And if we know how to welcome with gratitude what has been, we will discover that, precisely in the small and the silent, God loves to transfigure reality, making all things new with the fidelity of his love. True joy is born from the inhabited wait, from patient faith, from the hope that everything lived in love will certainly rise to eternal life.