What do we make of this day? A day that is silent in the Bible, Jesus is executed and laid in the tomb on Good Friday, and then on the first day of the week, Sunday, women arrive at the tomb to bring spices to prepare the body, which in Middle Eastern heat would be starting to go off already.

It has become knows as Easter Saturday, as it is part of the holiday weekend that stretches from Good Friday to Easter Monday, and I am happy with that name. It has become what it is called, you will find it written in TV guides, in newspapers and all over the place. It is the Saturday of the Easter holiday, what could be wrong with that?

I am writing this now because Easter is over. I can now feel free to say why I don’t get the celebration of this day.

The first thing I don’t get is the insistence of calling it Holy Saturday. I know that. It is a Saturday and it is in Holy Week, so that is a fine name as well, but every year the Christian Stupids come out of their hiding places and shout all over social media. “It is not called Easter Saturday!” Well it is, it is called that too. I know that liturgically the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday does not fall in Easter. I also know that liturgically Easter Saturday is the Saturday that falls in the octave of Easter, that is the Saturday after Easter Sunday, but who in the wider world cares about liturgical squabbles? If you must fight over the name of the Saturday before Easter, please do it amongst yourselves, doing it on Facebook just seems odd, an irrelevance, which colleagues asked me about? They though it was an irrelevance. So Christian Stupids, you have made yourselves an irrelevance, why not act like the irrelevance you have become and shut up.

The other thing I don’t like about Holy Saturday is it is a deception. There is no day when Christ is not risen. Christ does not die and rise every year on a day the church chooses. Jesus dies once and for all once only and was raised from the dead on the third day, and whilst we can commemorate that, we think about what the crucifixion achieved, which is why Friday is Good. We celebrate our sins being forgiven. That we should act as if Jesus is not risen on the eve of Easter Sunday is a mystery. It feels false. In any case I’m not that good a Christian that I do not act as if Christ is not risen on many days in any given year. Having a day to act like this and calling it being a good Christian… Huh? I cannot see how it adds up. I have had it explained, but it just sounds like play acting.

I would really like to know.