The habit of keeping our ears open
Photo by Matt Buck
It was 4am when my dad woke me to hunt coyotes.
A few nights before, we heard them yipping out by the barn while trying to snag a chicken or two. We wouldn’t have paid them much attention, but one of our mares had just given birth, and dad saw a colt killed by coyotes when he was a teenager. So, out of either revenge or self-protection, we walked towards the nearby soybean field where my dad had seen them hanging around. It was cold and the field was littered with stripped soybean stalks that crunched as you walked on them. Combined with the leafless trees, it was the perfect portrait of the bleak midwinter.
We didn’t talk. For my dad this was a tactical consideration. I didn’t speak because I, an angsty teenager, considered this early morning father-son escapade a form of cruel and unusual punishment. This rendered the stillness of rural Mississippi even more silent.
But it wasn’t, really. I just didn’t have ears to hear.
Not too far off, a colt was using its new lungs to breathe deep, hot horse breathes. Underneath our feet the soybean stalks were decomposing and the soil was being fed for another growing season. Behind my father’s silence was the reverberation of love for his only son.
Silent, maybe. But alive, definitely.
Holy Saturday is marked by silence. The Son of God is in the grave, seemingly within the black hole of death itself. His friends and family try and reach back in their minds to remember His voice, thinking they will never hear it again. The hope that had spoken so powerfully seems to have trailed off into nothing.
But it was anything but silent.
The cup of wrath was poured out. The gates of hell were stormed. The head of the serpent was crushed. The yawning chasm of death filled with the life of God Himself.
Holy Saturday was full of the sound of redemption, and so are the silent places in our lives. Like Jesus’s followers, we do not yet have ears to hear all that God is saying. Slowly but surely, though, He is tuning our hearts to hear Him in the silence.
Holy Saturday is an invitation to keep our ears open because God is speaking through His Spirit, His Word, and His Church, even when we can’t seem to hear it.