This article thoughtfully considers three ways we might pass Holy Saturday. Now resident in his native Australia, Gerald O'Collins SJ is emeritus professor of the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, and of St Mary's University College, Twickenham.

Some have described Holy Saturday as the longest day in human history. Certainly it can seem like the longest day in the Church’s liturgical year. How might we spend Holy Saturday? What might feed into our prayer on that day? Let me suggest three possibilities.

1 One way to move through Holy Saturday would be to recall imaginatively one particular person or some people whom we read about in the Gospels and imagine how they might have spent the evening and the day that followed the death of Jesus. We could picture the Jewish high priest Caiaphas or the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, and reflect on what they might have been thinking or saying at home with their family and friends. Matthew’s Gospel tells us that Caiaphas and company wanted the tomb of Jesus guarded, so as to make sure that nothing ‘unfortunate’ could happen. Pilate made a detachment of soldiers available, those soldiers who were to enter Christian depictions of the resurrection thousands of times. What went through the minds of Caiaphas, Pilate and the guard during the evening of Good Friday and the long hours of the first Holy Saturday?

Or we might think of Simon of Cyrene, first recalled in Mark’s Gospel as being abruptly forced to carry the cross for Jesus and named as ‘the father of Alexander and Rufus’ (15.22). Many scholars have commented that these three names are mentioned because Simon and his family became followers of Jesus. That apparently chance meeting on the way to Calvary changed Simon for ever. Did Simon begin by feeling sharp anger and humiliation at being forced to carry a cross for a condemned criminal? Was he changed even on the way to Calvary or on Calvary itself when he stayed behind to watch Jesus die? Did Simon begin by seeing only the cross and end by seeing only Jesus?

What of further people involved in the story of Jesus’ crucifixion? According to Mark 15.39, when the centurion in charge of the execution saw how Jesus died, he declared, ‘Indeed, this man was the Son of God.’ How then did the centurion spend Good Friday evening and the hours of Holy Saturday? What was he thinking and what might he have said to the other soldiers?

In this way we can call up for ourselves some or many further people who belong to the passion narrative: Peter, Mary Magdalene, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, the beloved disciple, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the other holy women whom the four Gospels mention. We could quietly pass Holy Saturday in their company, sharing in their memories, grief, and prayers.

2 A second and very different way of spending Holy Saturday prayerfully is suggested by the site of Jesus’ execution: Golgotha, ‘the place of the skull’ (Mark 15.22). Jesus was the Lord of life, but the world had closed in on him and brought him to a violent death at ‘the place of the skull.’ Pondering the places of the passion story could be another way of letting it all come home to us and fill our praying.

At the end of his life, Jesus moved away from a reasonably large place, the region of Galilee. He came up to the city of Jerusalem, and sent two of his disciples to arrange for a room in a house where they could all celebrate together the Last Supper (Mark 14.13-15). From the house he went into a garden where he was arrested to be brought first to the palace of Caiaphas and then to Pilate’s pretorium. From there he was led to death at ‘the place of the skull’, and finally placed in a tomb.

From the time Jesus left Galilee, everything closed in on him. The places mentioned become smaller and smaller: a city, a house, a garden, a palace, a pretorium, the place called after a skull, and finally a tomb cut out of rock. The world took Jesus away from the broad space of Galilee to kill him and shut his body up in a tomb.

But with his resurrection from the dead, everything will open up again. An angel of the Lord and then Jesus himself tells two holy women that he will rendezvous with his disciples in Galilee. There they will meet him and then go out into the whole world, knowing that he will be with them across the whole earth and to the very end of time.

The sequence of places – from Galilee to the place of the skull and the tomb and then back to Galilee and out into the wide world – says something valuable about Our Lord’s death and resurrection. In death he endured a terrible closing in and closing down. But he rose from the dead to reach out into the whole world. Everywhere and always our world will be charged with his life-giving presence and power.

3 A third way of spending at least a part of Holy Saturday in prayer would be to recall some favourite title of Jesus and let it focus our gaze on the cross or on the tomb. Addressing Jesus, we can say:
You are the Word of God spoken to us, but you finished in the silence of death.
You are the Lamb of God, and you have taken away the sins of the whole world.
You are the Bread of Life, broken for us, and broken to give us eternal life.
You are the Light of the world, but you went into the darkness of death.
You are the Good Shepherd, and you died for your sheep.
You are the Way, and walked a way that led you to Calvary.
You are the Truth, denied and ignored by many but enlightening our world.
You are the Life that came to death but overcame death.
You are the image of the unseen God, and you became a crucified image, our Crucified God.