Great Saturday
Matins – Ezekiel 37:1-14; 1 Corinthians 5:6-8; Galatians 3:13,14; Matthew 27:62-66; Vespers – Genesis 1:1-13; Isaiah 60:1-16; Exodus 12:1-11; The Book of Jonah; Joshua 5:10-15; Exodus 13:20-15:19; Zephaniah 3:8-15; 1 Kings 17:8-24; Isaiah 61:I0-62:5; Genesis 22:1-18; Isaiah 61:1-9; 2 Kings 4:8-37; Isaiah 63:11-64:5; Jeremiah 31:31-34; Daniel 3:1-23 and the Song of the Holy Children (Apocrypha); Liturgy – Romans 6:3-11; Matthew 28:1-20
Read Romans 6:3-11
Great and Holy Saturday is a day of waiting. It is a day of silence as our Lord goes about His work of salvation. Our Christian life during these three days exists between the pillars of the cross and the empty tomb. So often we want to move quickly through this day, from the rigours of fasting and the spiritual warfare of Lent and Holy Week right to Pascha. But we should not be so quick to do so. As Fr. Richard John Neuhaus reflected in his classic devotional work, Death on a Friday Afternoon, we should linger here awhile, at the tomb and not be so quick to move to the Resurrection. Without the cross there is no tomb, without the tomb there can be no resurrection. This is what the Holy Apostle is alluding to in today’s epistle from the vesperal liturgy: “For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His.”
Brothers and sisters, as we prepare to celebrate our Lord’s radiant and glorious Pascha, let us recall our baptism and how through it we died with Christ and are raised with Him. Let us delight in our baptism and never tire of living it out in the world – the world redeemed by Our Lord’s passion, death, and resurrection.