The Fathers often compared Lent to the forty years journey of the chosen people through the desert. From the Bible we know that in order to keep His people from despair, in order also to reveal His ultimate design, God performed many miracles during that journey; by analogy, the same pattern of explanation is given by the Fathers to the forty days of Lent.
Although its final destination is Pascha, the promised land of God's Kingdom, Lent has at the end of each week a special "stopover"—an anticipation of that goal. It is two "Eucharistic" days—Saturday and Sunday—which in the spiritual journey of Lent have a special significance.
Let us begin with Saturday. Its special liturgical status in our tradition and its exclusion from the lenten type of worship need some explanation. From the point of view of "rubrics," which we explained earlier, Saturday is a day not of fast but of feast for God Himself instituted it as feast: "and God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it: because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made" (Gen. 2:3). No one can undo or abolish that which God has ordered. It is true that many Christians think that the divine institution of sabbath has simply been transferred to Sunday which thus became the Christian day of rest or sabbath. Nothing in the Scriptures or Tradition can substantiate this belief. On the contrary, the "numbering" of Sunday for the Fathers and the entire early Tradition as the first or the eighth day stresses its difference from and a certain opposition to Saturday which forever remains the seventh day, the day blessed and sanctified by God. It is the day on which Creation is acknowledged as "very good," and such is its meaning in the Old Testament, a meaning retained by Christ Himself and the Church. This means that in spite of sin and the fall, the world remains God's good creation; it keeps that essential goodness in which the Creator rejoiced: "and God saw everything that He had made and, behold, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31). To keep the sabbath as was meant from the very beginning means therefore that life can be meaningful, happy, creative; it can be that which God made it to be. And the sabbath, the day of rest on which we enjoy the fruits of our work and activities, remains forever the blessing which God bestowed on the world and on its life. This continuity of the Christian understanding of sabbath with that of the Old Testament not only does not exclude, but indeed implies also a discontinuity. For in Christ nothing remains the same because everything is fulfilled, transcended, and given a new meaning. If the sabbath in its ultimate spiritual reality is the presence of the divine "very good" in the very texture of this world, it is "this world" that in Christ is revealed in a new light and is also made something new by Him. Christ bestows upon man the Kingdom of God which is "not of this world." And here is the supreme "break" which for a Christian makes "all things new." The goodness of the world and of all things in it are now referred to their final consummation in God, to the Kingdom which is to come and which will be manifested in all its glory only after "this world" comes to its end. This world, moreover, by rejecting Christ has revealed itself to be in the power of the "Prince of this world" and to "lie in wickedness" (I John 5:19); and the way of salvation for it is not through evolution, improvement, or "progress," but through the Cross, Death and Resurrection. "It does not come to life unless it dies" (I Cor. 15:36). A Christian thus lives a "double life"—not in the sense of juxtaposing his "worldly" and his "religious" activities, but in the sense of making this life in its totality the "foretaste" of and preparation for the Kingdom, of making his every action a sign, an affirmation and expectation of that which is "to come." Such is the meaning of the Gospel's apparent contradiction: the Kingdom of God is "in the midst" of us and the Kingdom of God is "to come." Unless one discovers it "in the midst" of life, one cannot see in it the object of that love, expectation, and longing to which the Gospel calls us. One can still believe in. punishment or reward after death, but one can never understand the joy and the intensity of the Christian prayer: "Thy Kingdom come!"— "Come, Lord Jesus!" Christ has come that we may wait for Him. He entered life in time so that life and time may become the passage, the passover into God's Kingdom.
Sabbath, the day of Creation, the day of "this world," became—in Christ—the day of expectation, the day before the Lord's Day. The transformation of the sabbath took place on that Great and Holy Sabbath on which Christ, having "accomplished all His works," rested in the grave. On the next day, "the first after the sabbath," Life shone forth from the life-giving tomb, the myrrh-bearing women were told "Rejoice!," the disciples "disbelieved for joy and wondered," and the first day of the New Creation began. Of that new day the Church partakes, and into it she enters on Sunday. Yet she still lives and journeys in the time of "this world" which in its mystical depth has become sabbath, for according to St. Paul, "you are all dead and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, appears then we also will appear with Him in glory" (Col. 3:3).
All this explains the unique place of Saturday—the 7th day—in the liturgical tradition: its double character, as a day of feast and a day of death. It is a feast because it is in this world and in its time that Christ overcame death and inaugurated His Kingdom, because His Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection are the fulfillment of Creation in which God rejoiced at the beginning. It is a day of death because in Christ's Death the world died, and its salvation, fulfillment, and transfiguration are beyond the grave, in the "age to come." All Saturdays of the liturgical year receive their meaning from two decisive Saturdays: that of Lazarus' Resurrection, which took place in this world and is the announcement and the assurance of the common resurrection; and that of the Great and Holy Sabbath of Pascha when death itself was transformed and became the "passover" into the new life of the New Creation.
During Lent this meaning of Saturdays acquires a special intensity, for the purpose of Lent is precisely to recover the Christian meaning of time as preparation and pilgrimage and of the status of the Christian as "alien" and "exile" in this world (I Peter 2:11). These Saturdays refer the lenten effort to the future fulfillment and thus give Lent its special rhythm. On the one hand, Saturday in Lent is a "eucharistic" day marked by the celebration of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and Eucharist always means feast. 'The peculiar character of that feast, however, is that it refers itself to Lent as journey, patience, and effort and thus becomes a "stopover" whose purpose is to make us reflect on the ultimate goal of that journey. This is especially evident in the sequence of the Epistle lessons for lenten Saturdays selected from the Epistle to the Hebrews in which the typology of the history of salvation, of pilgrimage, promise, and faith in the things to come are central.
On the first Saturday, we hear the majestic preface to the Epistle (Heb. 1:1-12) with its solemn affirmation of Creation, Redemption, and the eternal Kingdom of God:
...in many and various ways God spoke of old to the fathers by the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He created the world.... Thou art the same and Thy years will never end....
We are living in these "last days" —the days of ultimate effort. We are still in the "today," but the end is approaching. We hear the second Saturday (Heb. 3:12-16):
Take care, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil unbelieving heart leading you away from the living God. But exhort one another every day as long as it is called today...for we share in Christ if only we hold our first confidence firm to the end....
The fight is difficult. Suffering and temptations are the price we pay for a "better possession and an abiding one." For this reason, the lesson of the third Saturday (Heb. 10:32-38) exhorts us:
Therefore, do not throw away your confidence which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance so that you may do the will of God and receive what is promised. For yet a little while and the coming one shall come and shall not tarry....
Faith, love, and hope are the weapons of this fight as the lesson of the fourth Saturday (Heb. 6:9-12) affirms:
...for God is not so unjust as to overlook your work and the love you showed for His sake in serving the saints as you still do. And we desire every one of you to show the same earnest in realizing the full assurance of hope until the end so that you may not be sluggish but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.
The time is growing short, the expectation becomes more eager, the assurance more joyful. Such is the tone of the lesson for the fifth Saturday (Heb. 9:24-28):
...Christ having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.
This is the last lesson before the Saturday of Lazarus when from the time of expectation we begin the "passover" into the time of fulfillment.
Gospel lessons for the Saturdays in Lent are selected from the Gospel of St. Mark and also constitute a sequence.
The key to its meaning is given on the first Saturday: Christ overrules the hypocritical taboos of the Jewish sabbath proclaiming:
...the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. Therefore the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath.... (Mark 2:23-3:5)
A new age is coming, the re-creation of man has begun. On the second Saturday we hear the leper say to Christ:
...if you will you can make me clean....and Christ answers him, I will: be clean.... (Mark 1:35-44)
On the third Saturday, we see Christ breaking all taboos and
...eating with tax collectors and sinners.... (Mark 2:14-17)
On the fourth Saturday, to the "very good" of Genesis 1, the Gospel responds with the joyful exclamation:
He does all things well, He even makes the deaf hear and the dumb speak.... (Mark 7:31-37)
Finally, on the fifth Saturday, all this finds its climax in the decisive confession of Peter:
... Thou art the Christ.... (Mark 8:29)
It is the acceptance by man of the mystery of Christ, of the mystery of New Creation.
Lenten Saturdays, as we have said above, have a second theme or dimension: that of death. With the exception of the first Saturday, which is traditionally dedicated to St. Theodore Tyron, and the fifth—that of the Akathist— the three remaining Saturdays are days of the universal commemoration of all those who "in the hope of resurrection and life eternal" are asleep in the Lord. This commemoration, as we have said already, prepares and announces the Saturday of Lazarus’ Resurrection and the Great and Holy Sabbath of Passion Week. It concerns not only an act of love, a "good deed"; it is also an essential rediscovery of "this world? as dying and death. In this world we are condemned to death, as is indeed the world itself. But in Christ death has been destroyed from within, has, as St. Paul said, lost its "sting," has itself become an entrance into a more abundant life. For each one of us, this entrance has begun in our baptismal death which makes dead those of us who are alive ("you are all dead," Col. 3:3), and alive those of us who are dead: for "death is no more." A broad deviation of popular piety from the true meaning of Christian faith made death black again. This is symbolized in many places by the use of black vestments at funerals and "‘requiems." We should know, however, that for a Christian the color of death is white. Praying for the dead is not mourning and nowhere is this better revealed than in the connection between the universal commemoration of the dead with Saturdays in general, and the lenten Saturdays in particular. Because of sin and betrayal, the joyful day of Creation has become the day of death; for Creation, by "subjecting itself to futility" (Rom. 8:20), has itself become death. But Christ's Death restores the seventh day, making it the day of re-creation, of the overcoming and destruction of that which made this world a triumph of death. And the ultimate purpose of Lent is to restore in us the "eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God" which is the content of Christian faith, love, and hope. By this hope "we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience ...." It is the light of Lazarus Saturday and the joyful peace of Great and Holy Saturday that constitute the meaning of Christian death and of our prayer for the dead.