Lent 2025 Day 46

Pandita Ramabai, Scholar and Activist
James 2:14–17 | John 18:1–19:37
 
Holy Saturday is a day of stillness and shadows, a day in between. The cross is behind us. The resurrection has not yet come. It is a day of waiting, mourning, preparing, and hoping. It is the quiet work of love—washing the body, tending the wounds, wrapping what has been broken. It is a day of divine silence, when it feels as though God has gone still—but not absent.

In the Christian tradition, Holy Saturday has long been understood as the descent—the day when Christ enters the realm of the dead, harrowing hell itself. It is a time of in-between space, what theologians call the “liminal”—the threshold between death and new life, despair and deliverance. It is the time of the sealed tomb, of grief that does not yet know joy, of prayers uttered without answers. And it is sacred.

Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922) knew what it meant to live in the in-between. Born in India to a high-caste Brahmin family, she became a scholar, activist, Christian convert, and champion for the liberation of women and girls—especially widows and orphans cast aside by society. Her life was marked by transitions and tensions: between religions, between social classes, between East and West, between sorrow and hope. She understood what it meant to stand at the threshold of death and new life.

Her work was deeply shaped by her faith in Jesus and the Magnificat’s vision of reversal: God lifting the lowly, feeding the hungry, bringing down the powerful. Luke 1:52–53 was not poetry to her—it was promise. She founded the Mukti Mission, a refuge for women and children deemed “untouchable” by the caste system and abandoned by families. There, she taught literacy, sewing, sanitation, Scripture, and self-worth. Her Christianity was never an escape from her Indian context—it was an incarnation within it. “Christ’s work,” she wrote, “is a work of lifting up, of comforting, of transforming.”

John 19 tells of Joseph and Nicodemus, two men moved by love and reverence to care for the broken body of Jesus. They do not preach. They do not flee. They wrap the body and place it in the tomb. This is the hidden work of Holy Saturday—the slow, sacred work of honor and hope. Pandita Ramabai did this work too—not with linens and spices, but with hands that built schools and opened doors. She lived between crucifixion and resurrection, laboring for a world she believed was possible even as she grieved the one that was.

Holy Saturday reminds us that not all faith looks like victory. Some faith looks like tending the dead, like waiting in the dark, like sowing seeds we may never see grow. It is a day that honors those who remain when others walk away. Those who wait at the tomb. Those who prepare for the dawn not with trumpet blasts, but with tears.

Pandita Ramabai lived in that holy space of not-yet. She did not flee the suffering of her people. She did not pretend the world was already whole. She worked in the in-between, believing that God was still moving even when the world seemed paused. Her life is a witness to the kind of hope that doesn’t demand immediate results, but offers faithful, daily acts of restoration.

Reflection:

• What does it mean to tend to the body of Christ in a broken world? 
• Where are you being called to the quiet, faithful labor of Holy Saturday? 
• How does Pandita Ramabai’s vision of reversal challenge the systems around you? 

Breath Prayer: Inhale: He lifts the lowly… Exhale: And fills the hungry with good things.

May this Holy Saturday steady us in love, as we wait with Ramabai and the saints for what God will do next.

Amen.