How Long?
The courage we need while we're waiting
There is a song that will not leave my head today. U2 recorded it in 1983. Bono pulled the lyrics straight from Psalm 40, almost word for word, and the crowd at every concert since has turned the closing refrain into something between a chant and a prayer: How long to sing this song? How long? How long?
It lands differently this Holy Saturday.
Somewhere in Iran, a Christian convert is sitting in a cell at Evin Prison while bombs fall on the city around her. She was arrested for the crime of believing. The country that labels her a “Zionist missionary” is being struck by the actual state of Israel and by the United States, both of which have invoked the language of divine mandate to justify the campaign. The regime that persecutes her calls it a holy war. The nations bombing her call it Operation Epic Fury. She does not know which explosion will be the last one she hears.
In Panorama City, a Christian teacher is looking at her class roster and wondering how many of her students’ parents will still be in the country next month. The neighborhood is one of the most heavily Latino communities in Los Angeles, and federal enforcement actions have made the question concrete. The administration carrying out those actions has strong support from prominent Christian voices who frame obedience to the state as obedience to God. This teacher does not have the luxury of debating the theology in the abstract. She is watching families in her school disappear.
In a living room I will never see, a man who has followed Jesus for thirty years is staring at the ceiling at 2 a.m., trapped in a cycle of habitual sin he cannot break. He has read every book. He has confessed to every accountability partner. He has begged God for deliverance so many times that the prayer has worn a groove in him, and the groove has become a rut, and the rut has become a grave he climbs out of every morning only to fall back into by nightfall.
And somewhere in a study, a church leader is finishing the last touches on an Easter message about resurrection and new life, and the voice in his head is asking the question he will not say from the platform: What if Sunday doesn’t come the way I need it to?
I am less interested today in whether we can explain the silence of God and more interested in what the silence does to us while we are inside it. Because the Hebrew Bible has a word for this day. It has a prayer for the people who are living it. And that prayer is not what most of us have been taught to pray.
The prayer is two Hebrew words: עַד־מָתַי (ʿad-mātay). It means “how long?” and it appears across the Hebrew Bible not as a question requesting information but as a protest lodged against heaven by people who have run out of patience, run out of explanations, and have not yet run out of faith.
Psalm 94:3 asks it twice in a single verse: ʿad-mātay rĕšāʿîm YHWH, ʿad-mātay rĕšāʿîm yaʿălōzû. “How long shall the wicked, O LORD, how long shall the wicked exult?” The repetition is not rhetorical ornamentation. The first ʿad-mātaybreaks off mid-sentence, as though the cry is too urgent to complete before the pressure forces it out again. This is the grammar of someone who has been waiting so long that the question has become the entire prayer.
The verb yaʿălōzû (from ʿālaz, to exult, to triumph) is doing critical work. The psalmist’s problem is not merely that evil exists. The problem is that evil is celebrating. The wicked are visibly, publicly winning. The Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT), under the entry for ʿad-mātay, places this construction within the broader lament tradition and notes that the question does not expect a timeline in response. It expects divine action. When the psalmist says “how long,” the real question underneath is: Are you still God? The temporal question is a theological question wearing a mask.
This cry runs through the Scriptures like a fault line. In Psalm 13:2-3, David asks ʿad-ānâ four times in two verses, each from a different angle of suffering: How long will you forget me? How long will you hide your face? How long must I carry this anguish? How long will my enemy triumph? The fourfold repetition suggests the waiting itself has become a form of suffering distinct from whatever originally caused the pain.
Habakkuk 1:2 sharpens the blade. Habakkuk does not just ask “how long.” He adds the accusation: How long, O LORD, shall I cry and you will not hear? The silence is reframed as choice. And then, remarkably, in Exodus 10:3, the formula reverses. God asks Pharaoh: ʿad-mātay mēʾantā lēʿānōt mippānāy, “How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me?” The same ache moves in both directions. God asks it of human stubbornness. Humans ask it of divine silence.
The rabbis understood this cry not as a failure of faith but as its most honest expression. Midrash Tehillim (Shocher Tov) on Psalm 13 reads David’s fourfold “how long” as corresponding to the four exiles Israel would endure. Each ʿad-ānâmaps onto a distinct historical period of divine hiddenness. The interpretive move matters: the rabbis refused to spiritualize the waiting. They insisted it had concrete, datable, historical weight. The silence of God was not a metaphor. It was a lived address.
Rashi, commenting on Psalm 94:3, reads the doubled question as intensification born from lived experience with oppression. The psalmist repeats because the situation has not changed since the last time the question was asked. The repetition itself is evidence that God has not yet answered.
And then there is Berakhot 32b, where the Talmud teaches that even when the gates of prayer are shut, the gates of tears are never shut. This is the rabbinical framework for the ʿad-mātay: there exists a form of prayer so raw that it bypasses all the normal channels. The “how long” is not liturgy. It is a tear.
The rabbis had a name for what happens during the silence. They called it hester panim, the hiding of God’s face. They did not resolve the tension between God’s sovereignty and God’s apparent absence. They named it and refused to explain it away. The Zohar (II:163b) suggests that the very hiddenness of God becomes the space in which faithfulness is tested and deepened. That the darkness is not the absence of the relationship but one of its most demanding forms.
This is the theology of Holy Saturday. And it is the theology that most of our churches don’t know how to live into.
Good Friday gets the drama. Easter Sunday gets the triumph. But Saturday, the day between, gets almost nothing. We rush past it. We treat it as dead air, the awkward intermission between the cross and the empty tomb. And in doing so, we rob it of the very thing it has to teach us: that there is a form of courage that can only be forged in the space where God is silent and the outcome is not yet visible.
On the cross, Jesus himself entered the ʿad-mātay tradition. Matthew 27:46 records him crying out from Psalm 22:2: Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He dies inside the question. He does not receive an answer before his final breath.
And then comes Saturday. The disciples do not know that Sunday is coming. They have only Friday’s horror and Saturday’s silence. Luke 24:21 captures it precisely. On the road to Emmaus, two disciples say: “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” The verb is past tense. We had hoped. Hope, for them, died with Jesus. Saturday was the day they lived without it.
But 1 Peter 3:18-19 preserves a tradition the early church refused to abandon: that during this interval, Jesus “went and made proclamation to the spirits in prison.” Whatever was happening in the silence, it was not nothing. Even in the space between death and resurrection, liberation continued in places no one could see.
This is what I want to name today, because I think it is the thing most needed and least spoken: there is a kind of courage the New Testament calls hypomonē (Romans 8:25), and it does not mean passive acceptance. The Greek carries the force of active endurance under pressure. It is the posture of someone who has asked “how long” and has not yet received an answer but refuses to stop waiting. Paul says it is the shape hope takes when you cannot see what you are hoping for.
That is what I see when I look at the Iranian believer in Evin Prison whose government calls her a traitor and whose supposed liberators are leveling her city. She is living inside the ʿad-mātay. She cannot resolve it. She can only endure it with her faith intact. That is hypomonē.
That is what I see when I look at the teacher in Panorama City who cannot protect her students’ families from an enforcement apparatus cheered on by people who call themselves Christians. She is living inside the ʿad-mātay. She cannot fix it. She can only keep showing up. That is holy courage.
That is what I see when I think about the man at 2 a.m. who has not yet been delivered from the thing he keeps confessing. The silence of God is not evidence of abandonment. The hester panim is not the end of the story. But he does not know that at 2 a.m. He only knows that the question is still unanswered, and he is still asking it, and the asking itself is a form of faithfulness the church rarely honors.
And that is what I want to say to the church leader who knows theologically that resurrection is real but wonders, privately, whether it will show up in the specific mess he is carrying into Easter morning. The answer is: I do not know. And the Hebrew Bible suggests that the honest “I do not know” is closer to faith than the premature “God has a plan.” The psalmist did not resolve the tension. He prayed inside it. The rabbis did not explain the hiddenness. They named it. Jesus did not skip Saturday.
Here is what I think we miss when we rush to Easter.
We miss the part where courage is not the absence of doubt but the decision to keep asking the question. The ʿad-mātay is not a prayer of despair. It is a prayer of insistence. It assumes that the God being addressed is still there, still listening, still capable of acting. The question “how long” only makes sense if you believe there is someone who can end the waiting. Despair does not ask “how long.” Despair stops asking.
The Iranian believers who are comforting the wounded in the streets of Tehran while bombs fall and their own government hunts them for apostasy are not living in despair. They are living inside the most demanding form of the ʿad-mātay: the place where the people who claim to serve your God are the ones causing the suffering, and you worship that God anyway. That is not naivete. That is holy defiance.
The historically marginalized communities in this country who are watching leaders with crosses on their lapels advocate for policies that uproot families and silence dissent are not living in despair, either. They are singing the ʿad-mātay that their ancestors sang. They know the melody. It has carried them before.
And the person reading this who feels stuck, who woke up this morning inside the same struggle they fell asleep in, who is wondering whether the Easter sermon will feel like good news or like a cruel joke played on someone who has been waiting too long: the Hebrew Bible says your prayer has a name. It is the oldest prayer in the book. It is the prayer that Jesus himself prayed. And the gates of tears are never locked.
Holy Saturday is the day we learn that courage is not the certainty that Sunday is coming. It is the willingness to keep breathing inside Saturday when you have no evidence that it will.
The ʿad-mātay does not get a timeline. It gets a tomb that opens. Not an explanation, but an event. And the event does not arrive because anyone’s faith was strong enough to summon it. It arrives because the God who hears the cry of the afflicted has never once failed to act, even when the action comes in a form and on a schedule that no one predicted.
How long? As long as it takes. And not one breath longer.