Today is Black Saturday

Today is Black Saturday the announcer would say as the screen showed a black and white drawing of (if memory serves) a hillside with a boulder blocking a cave, and a cross in the background. I was nine at the time, and this announcement always gave me the shivers. It would probably give me the shivers now, actually.

The designation of the day before Easter Sunday as "Black Saturday" appears to be a tradition within Filipino Catholicism, and various folk practices accompany it. In the morning, children leap into the air as church bells ring in hopes of growing tall. The Spanish custom of not bathing on Good Friday is widely observed, so many bathe in rivers and in the ocean on Black Saturday. During the night, dummies of Judas stuffed with firecrackers are exploded in church plazas, a tradition reminiscent of Guy Fawkes'Day in the U.K. Children are woken before midnight Mass and fed meat dishes (meat being forbidden on Good Friday) lest they become deaf.

I think about these things on this day. They were followers of Jesus, y'see, and I'm a follower of Jesus too. Tonight, two thousand years ago, my master, my friend, my teacher and savior is dead in a cave, cold, his corpse growing stiff. Easter morning is only a few hours away, but tonight it seems like it will never come.

But the great joke is that it does. There's a surprise in store for all of us, an amazing plan that has already gone off just the way it was meant to. We still think all's been lost but the truth is that what we believed to be total defeat was really victory.

God has a weird sense of humor sometimes. You gotta love him for it.