The Sabbath of the Son of God

Christ’s Descent Into Limbo, Albrecht Duhrer.

The mystery of Holy Saturday, an essential piece of the drama of the Paschal Mystery, is a theological and spiritual black box for so many devout persons. It is unfortunate that so much discussion of it in recent decades has almost exclusively taken place in the context of Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s opinions regarding the reasonability of hope for the salvation of all souls, which in recent times was resurrected (pun intended) by Bishop Robert Barron. This piece is not meant to address these concerns, which I feel are, on some level, theologically and spiritually decadent. We cannot know how many will be saved, nor is it in our best interest to know. Our Lord Jesus, as ever invested in our best interest, evades the question in the Gospels, preferring to insist on the need for individual conversion and repentance. Just as he evades our curiosity on the exact time of his Glorious Coming, he declines to indulge our idle curiosity on the number of the saved and the damned. It is more profitable to us to deploy our efforts to ensure, by God’s grace, that we are among the former. As St. Joan of Arc put it so beautifully, if we are not in God’s grace, may God be pleased to place us there. If we are in God’s grace, may God be pleased to keep us there.

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed has proclaimed for centuries that Christ descended “among the dead” after his crucifixion, a dogma which is based as much on the Canonical Epistles of Saint Paul as it is on allusions to pseudepigraphal works prevalent in the first century. We also ought not to forget that before Christ rose from the dead, Saint Matthew records that several righteous people rose from the dead as well (Matthew 27:52-53). The verses in question seem to indicate that their tombs were ‘broken’ at the time that Christ died, when the veil of the temple was rent in two. Yet the sequence of time conveyed grammatically by the Evangelist is somewhat strange. While the tombs seemed to have been opened on Good Friday, they only appear to have “gone forth out of the tombs after the resurrection of him [Jesus].” This seems to indicate that their appearances within Jerusalem were delayed until Jesus himself was raised from the dead. This interpretation is reinforced by the use of the aorist active participle exelthontes, that they went forth from their tombs only after the specific moment of Christ’s Resurrection. Something had to be achieved on that mysterious Saturday before these resurrected men and women could truly depart from their tombs. I do not believe this was simply because Jesus wanted to ‘steal the show’. After all, many moments of Divine Revelation were preceded by prodigies performed by means of human or angelic agents. God is not vainly jealous of his glory. He delights in utilizing heralds to precede him.

In short, Christ evidently was quite busy in the ‘time’ which elapsed on Holy Saturday. We are not certain in what sense Christ, without a body, yet still having of a human soul, would have experienced time, but it is clear from the data at hand that he proclaimed his victory to the “spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3:19). The Patristic interpretations of this verse are as evocative as they are diverse. What we can say safely is that the objective of Christ was twofold: to bestow the fruits of his victory upon the righteous who awaited him before his Coming, and to despoil the empire of Satan and to make a mockery of him.

Because of the ancient Christian tradition to not celebrate the Eucharist or any of the Sacraments on Holy Saturday, there is an unfortunate deficit of liturgical commemorations, and therefore, homiletic reflection on this particular mystery. However, it is my opinion that the mystery of Holy Saturday is probably for many Christians the hidden mystery from which very many would draw deep spiritual nourishment, but cannot, because there is such a deficit of spiritual reflection upon it, short of the questions regarding the ‘brass tacks’ of what precisely Christ was up to when he visited the underworld.

Why is this? The answer is multifaceted. First, for many believers, their spiritual journey is often not lived primarily in closeness to the Passion of Christ, nor is it marked with that peculiar intimacy which so illuminates Holy Thursday, when Christ called his “chosen band” his friends, and fed them himself with his own hands, as St. Thomas Aquinas so beautifully put it. Nor do many believers live their days in the light of the Resurrection, because the Resurrection is, by definition, something not of this present world. There is always something about the Resurrection which is beyond our comprehension, just as it was beyond the Apostles’ comprehension. The joy of Easter is not like the joy of Christmas. We can grasp on a human level the vulnerability and the joy of the birth of a child, and the warmth of human love. Yet Jesus, from the first instant of his Resurrection, always seems elusive, just beyond the grasp of those who reach out for him, like Mary Magdalene, to whom he said most famously, “Do not touch me: I have not yet ascended to my Father” (John 20:17). Even in Jesus’ Public Ministry, he was able to be touched, and was quite frequently. Now, the Forty Days to the Ascension are marked by a sort of gradual introduction of the Church to an encounter of the Lord in the Sacramental Economy. The Church now must walk by faith, and not by sight, let alone by touch.

Holy Saturday, however, sits between the Cross and the Empty Tomb. Christ is secretly active in his Triumph, and he has even led certain persons out of their tombs: but they are not yet permitted to enter the Holy City, Jerusalem. Holy Saturday is the Sabbath of the Lord’s physical body, which rests in the tomb, as he prepares to solemnize and consecrate the Eighth Day as the New Sabbath, the Sabbath consecrated by the New Adam, who in his own body, has begun to make the whole cosmos new in himself. Is this not the situation of the Church on its pilgrim journey on earth? Do we not sit, as C.S. Lewis once put it in his work The Great Divorce, in the “valley of the shadow of life”, the penumbra of eternal day?

Bringing this down from the abstract to the concrete, so much of the life of the average person is spent waiting, and preparing. Although we have shortcuts like never before for many things, there are many processes which we cannot avoid. A child usually spends years in school to prepare for a lifetime of adult work in a developed economy. A woman waits approximately nine months to give birth to a child. Our dinner in the oven has to cook a certain time at a certain temperature to be ready on time and fit to eat. In the spiritual order, we also have these ‘slow burns’ which are neither the agony of the Cross, nor the ecstasy of the Resurrection. Much like with diet and nutrition, the most important thing about spiritual health, to adapt the words of Abbot Chapman, is that we are consistent. The highs and the lows of our spiritual journey are rarely what define us. Often, they are merely what reveal who we are. It is what we do everyday that shapes our inner character.

Benedict XVI, appropriately born on Holy Saturday, also eluded to the fact during his lifetime that he believed that the mystery of Holy Saturday is particularly relevant to the postmodern world, to an age which proclaims the ‘death of God’. He reflected upon Holy Saturday repeatedly both before, during and after his Papacy. So many people feel acutely the absence of God. Even faithful believers frequently feel the apparent absence of God. It was Benedict’s belief that increased devotion and meditation on the mystery of Holy Saturday would enrich both our appreciation of the Passion of Christ and the Resurrection of Christ. It was in this vein that he spoke in May 2010 of the Shroud of Turin as a mysterious cloth, a sort of “photographic negative”, a snapshot in time of the moment when Christ descended into the absolute silence and solitude of the tomb, only later to emerge in triumph. True to form, Pope Benedict beautifully wove theological hope into his message of Holy Saturday. Ultimately, Holy Saturday is about the moment when a “ray of love” entered into the place of “total abandonment”. Holy Saturday reminds us that even if we feel that we are buried and left to rot, even there, Jesus can reach us.

Holy Saturday is also a mystery which I believe bears special consideration during the Easter Season, and especially as I turn, as is my custom, toward those beloved sons, the Priests. Priests in a particular way, in this age, bear acutely the weight of a world which moves blindly and heedlessly through this postmodern ‘death of God’. In many places, the degradation of the Church and her institutions is not so much a Calvary as it is crumbling cenotaph; a beautiful temple, once graceful and exalted, now decayed and in ruin. Sometimes, the more cynical among us may decry her condition as that of a “whitewashed sepulchre” (Matthew 23:27). The Lord appears to lie sleeping in his tomb, and his faithful disciples are scattered, and in confusion. Saint Peter sits with the weight of his conscience, knowing the depth of his betrayal. The other disciples, save John, feel similarly. They have not yet experienced the Divine Mercy, as Jesus breaks the prison bars of their shame, as much as he broke the prison bars of death. Especially when so many Bishops seem to reign in glorious detachment from the average Priest’s concerns and cares, when they are more poised to be assassins than shepherds, Holy Saturday should remind us of the behavior of the disciples: they came together, they sought solace and fellowship with one another. And it was there, and as far as we know only there, that Jesus manifested himself to his disciples. When they were gathered fishing, Jesus appeared. When they were walking together to Emmaus, Jesus appeared. Even Mary Magdalene, to whom Jesus appeared alone, only did so after she had come with others.

It is all too common now that Priests feel powerless against the injustices and indignities which beset them, both from within and without. But Jesus taught his first disciples to go out in pairs, and so was the practice of the Apostles. A solitary Priest is a vulnerable Priest. We await the Resurrection and the Renewal of the Church, but we often neglect the behavior which so defined the Apostles on Holy Saturday, which was their dedication to mutual encouragement, to prayer and to fellowship. Is it any coincidence that Religious Priests report greater levels of satisfaction and more trust in their superiors and peers? Of course, religious communities also have their problems, but as Scripture famously reminds us, “a cord of three strands is not easily broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12); that is, people are always stronger when they are united.

Holy Saturday and the elusiveness of Our Savior is a mode of relating which persists into the Easter Season, and which persists into the current age. Christ is risen from the dead, it is true. But in-between our personal Calvaries and Easters, we require deeper spiritual vision in order to perceive the latens Deitas, the ‘hidden God’, who does not obscure himself in order to confound us, but in order to spur us on to greater seeking, and to greater yearning. Perhaps above all, as we live Holy Saturday in our own lives, we remember: this is not a permanent state of affairs. This will pass. Christ may seem to be lying in the tomb, bound head and foot, immobile. But in fact, he is breaking chains, releasing prisoners, and humiliating the devil. We ask this Easter to claim with him his victory, but also for the key to his heroic patience, because patience is the virtue which makes us capable of obtaining painful and difficult goods.

Happy Easter to all, and may the splendor of Christ, Risen from the Dead, shine upon the hearts and minds of all who long for his presence.