Between the burial of Jesus and the empty tomb, Luke records almost nothing. The women prepare spices, and then they rest on the Sabbath because God commanded it. That one verse is the answer this guide offers to anyone stuck between the grief of Friday and the joy of Sunday. You keep walking with God by telling him the truth about the loss, doing the next faithful thing in front of you, and letting him meet you there. You do not have to pretend Sunday has already come.
Use this guide alone over a week, or with a small group across one or two meetings. Every reflection prompt is private unless you decide otherwise. Nobody owes anyone their story.
Why the Saturday matters
Christians have a familiar line for grieving people: Sunday is coming. The line is true. It becomes harmful when it ends the conversation and asks the person in pain to hurry to the happy part. The Gospels take their time. Between the burial and the empty tomb there is a full day, and Scripture tells us how it was spent.
Lisa Fields pointed to that day in a conversation with Dr. Esau McCaulley about Good Friday and Easter. She noted that we tend to skip the Saturday, and that the women “took the sadness seriously still after their savior had died.” Then she added the detail that shapes this guide: “they still obeyed God’s commands despite their disappointment.”
That sentence holds together two things grieving people are often told to separate. The sadness was serious. The obedience was real. Both stood at the same time.
Read the Saturday slowly
Read Luke 23:50-24:10 in one sitting. It is narrative, so it shows more than it explains. Watch what the women do and when they do it.
Luke first places them at the burial: “And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid” (Luke 23:55). They watched closely enough to know exactly where the body lay. Anyone who has buried someone will recognize that kind of attention.
The next verse is easy to skim: “And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and rested the sabbath day according to the commandment” (Luke 23:56). They prepare for a dead body, and then they keep the Sabbath. Luke does not say they felt peace while resting. He says they obeyed. The command held whatever they felt.
Then: “Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared” (Luke 24:1). They are carrying burial spices. They expect a corpse.
Take a few minutes with these observations before moving on:
- Which actions in these verses come from grief, and which come from obedience? Are any of them both?
- What do the women not know on Saturday that we know when we read it?
- Where does Luke show God acting, and where does he show the women acting?
John adds that the women stood at the cross before they went to the tomb: “Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene” (John 19:25). McCaulley rejects the common idea that Jesus died with everyone gone. The women stayed, he says. “They loved him to the end.” Their faithfulness on Saturday grew out of an earlier choice to stay near suffering.
A Saturday measured in generations
The cross and resurrection have carried a particular weight for Black Christians, and McCaulley ties it to a long wait. He traces it to the movement from slavery into freedom, when Black believers saw Jesus as the innocent one who suffered at the hands of the state. The threat they lived under was blunt. McCaulley names it: “If you don’t do what we say, we will beat you and we’ll kill you.” He adds that “terror has historically been used as a means of controlling black bodies.”
People living under that threat found two things in the cross. The first was recognition. Jesus had been beaten and killed though he was innocent, so their suffering was not foreign to God. The second was a limit on what the threat could do. McCaulley puts the believer’s reply this way: “The worst you can do to me is kill me. If you kill me, I’ll go and be with my Lord until I’m raised from the dead.” In his words, “the cross has been for African American Christians a source of identification and a source of hope.”
This was Saturday faith on a historical scale. Generations lived and died under slavery and then Jim Crow without seeing the justice they prayed for. In McCaulley’s account, the people who marched in the abolitionist and civil rights movements went out confident “the state was not God, but that God was God.” They acted inside the waiting. Their grief and their courage belonged to the same days, just as the spices and the Sabbath belonged to the same weekend.
That history gives a grieving reader permission to act before the grief is finished. McCaulley describes Christian action now as a preview of what Christ will complete: “our activism now is to tell you what it’s gonna be like when he comes.” For some, the next faithful thing will be quiet and private. For others, a loss sharpens their sense of what is wrong in the world and what they can do about it.
God meets people in the middle of it
McCaulley describes his church holding services on the Saturday itself, including one at the tomb. If Friday is the church’s trauma, he says, “Saturday is a moment of the church’s waiting in which we have to sit with the grief.” He is careful about what the women lost. Jesus had valued them and pointed to a kingdom where the marginalized had a seat at God’s table. So “when Jesus died, it wasn’t simply a death, it was a death of a certain way of life.” Some grief works like that: you lose a person and the future you had built around them.
He also refuses to credit the women with strength they did not have. They kept going, he says, because “these women had enough piety, they had God deep enough inside them to continue forward on instinct.” He gives the Saturday Christian an honest prayer: “I’m not emotionally experiencing these things to be true. I’m deeply disappointed with what I thought God was gonna do in my life. He doesn’t seem to be doing it, but I’m gonna keep going anyway.”
His central claim is the one that matters most for anyone who feels they are failing at grief: “what happened on Easter Sunday is not that these women worked their way through the trauma, right? But that God met them in the midst of the trauma.”
Test that claim against the text. Go back to Luke 24:1-10. Who speaks first at the tomb? What do the women understand when they arrive, and when do they remember Jesus’s words? Does Luke’s account support McCaulley’s reading that Easter came to them as an encounter they had not earned? Is there anything in the passage that pulls against it?
McCaulley speaks from experience here, briefly: “There was times where I wasn’t even sure what I believed, but God came to me in the midst of my unbelief and pointed me towards a better way.” Scripture gives that kind of faith a voice in the father who brought his son to Jesus: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24). Jesus did not send him away for the second half of that sentence.
When Saturday runs long
The women’s Saturday lasted one day. For many readers it has lasted months or years: a diagnosis that did not change, a child who did not come home, a prayer for justice still unanswered. Injustice can stretch further than that. Generations prayed under slavery and died without seeing freedom, and some wrongs done to a family or a people will not be put right within one lifetime.
McCaulley says God eventually turns disappointment into triumph for those who wait. The resurrection does promise that, and Paul ties our future to Christ’s: “But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept” (1 Corinthians 15:20). What the resurrection guarantees is how the story ends. It gives no date. Pretending otherwise turns Easter into a promise God never made and leaves people blaming themselves when Sunday seems late. Hebrews says plainly of the faithful before Christ: “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off” (Hebrews 11:13). That too is faithfulness.
Scripture gives words for the long Saturday. Psalm 13 is a prayer meant to be prayed, and it opens with an accusation: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). The psalmist says this to God and stays in the relationship. Trust arrives only after the complaint is fully spoken: “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation” (Psalm 13:5). Joy is still future tense. The psalm leaves the pain unresolved and names what the psalmist will hold onto while it lasts.
A practice for the week: lament and one commanded thing
This practice follows the women’s two movements, grief taken seriously and obedience that goes ahead without feelings. It takes about fifteen minutes. Do it on three separate days this week.
- Name the loss plainly. Write one sentence saying what you lost, without softening it. If the loss includes a hoped-for future, or a wrong done to you or your people that remains unanswered, name that too.
- Speak it to God in the shape of Psalm 13. Write your own how long. Tell God what you expected and what happened instead. You may stop without a hopeful ending. “Keep going anyway” is enough.
- Choose one ordinary act of faithfulness for tomorrow. The women’s act was rest. Yours might be attending worship as you are, eating a real meal, praying one sentence, keeping an appointment, or showing up for someone else who is hurting. Keep it small enough to do while still grieving.
- Tell one trusted person. The women prepared spices together and went to the tomb together. Tell one person as much or as little as you like. You are asking for company, and you set the terms.
On the third day, read back what you wrote. Notice whether anything moved, even a little, and notice what stayed the same.
If the heaviness has lasted a long time, or is affecting your sleep, work or ability to function, a counselor or doctor belongs in your Saturday too. Seeking that care is part of faithfulness; God works through trained counselors and clinicians. If grief has turned into thoughts of not wanting to live, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline today.
Questions for reflection or discussion
- Luke 23:56 shows the women resting according to the commandment while they grieved. What does obedience look like for you when you feel little or nothing toward God?
- McCaulley describes the loss of a future along with the loss of a person. Is there a loss in your life that is really the death of a hope or a way of life? You may answer silently.
- Has someone ever rushed you toward Sunday? What did they say, and what would have helped more?
- Black Christians under slavery and Jim Crow found both recognition and a limit on the threat in the cross. Which of the two do you need more right now, and why?
- Hebrews 11:13 describes people who died without receiving what was promised. How does that change what it means to wait faithfully for justice?
- Psalm 13 leaves joy in the future tense. Is that an honest prayer for where you are, or does it go further than you can yet?
- What is one small act this week that would treat your grief as real and still keep you walking with God?
If you are leading a group
Some people will arrive with a Saturday that is still going. Say at the start that sharing is optional and silence is a fine answer. When someone shares a loss, offer a verse only if they ask. A simple thank you and a moment of quiet usually serve better.
Do the practice yourself before you lead it, and invite people to describe the experience of doing it rather than what they wrote. If someone’s grief sounds like hopelessness, speak with them privately afterward, stay with them, involve a pastor, and make sure they have the 988 number. Do not carry that alone.
The women went to the tomb to honor a dead man and came back with news nobody had prepared them for. They were present, carrying what they had, when God acted. If spices are all you have to bring this week, bring them.