Matthew 27:62-66
Saturday of Holy Week … have you ever given it much thought? Unless one is part of a congregation that holds an Easter Vigil service on Saturday evening, in most churches Saturday is the day to ready the sanctuary for Easter morning – arrange the lilies, make sure there are enough bulletins, space for musicians and so forth. At home, people are going about their regular Saturday lives while maybe adding Easter egg dyeing or special meal preparations for the next day.
Perhaps we’ve never thought much about Saturday in Holy Week because the gospels are virtually silent about the day. After detailing every day from Sunday through Friday, Mark’s gospel says nothing at all about the Sabbath. 1 Only Matthew’s gospel includes a brief reference to the day, as if to underscore one more time that it appears the realm of Caesar has trumped the realm of God. Listen now to these words from the 27th chapter of Matthew, verses 62-66:
62The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate 63and said, ‘Sir, we remember what that impostor said while he was still alive, “After three days I will rise again.” 64Therefore command that the tomb be made secure until the third day; otherwise his disciples may go and steal him away, and tell the people, “He has been raised from the dead”, and the last deception would be worse than the first.’ 65Pilate said to them, ‘You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can.’ 66So they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone.
Now, it is natural that there would be silence in the gospels about Saturday. It was the Jewish Sabbath; and by law and custom, no work was allowed to be performed, no travel. It was a day of rest.
Another reason there could be silence in the gospels about Saturday is that there was little need to explain the day. It was simply a matter of passing the time when Jesus’ words that in three days he would rise from the dead would be completed, with the days not counted as an exact 24 hour period; but Friday, the day of crucifixion as the first day, Saturday the second day and Sunday when Jesus appeared to the disciples, the third day.
However, though there is little found in scripture about Saturday, the day is included in a piece of historic Christian tradition, the Apostles Creed, where we hear these lines about Jesus:
He suffered under Pontius Pilate
Was crucified, died and was buried.
He descended into hell. Or, as some translations render it: “He descended to the dead.”
Descended to the dead? To quote a comment from one of the Leisurely Lectionary members, “Whenever I recited those words I never could figure out why Jesus, who was without sin, would spend time in hell.”
Well, the short answer to that wondering is that this is part of a Jewish-Christian tradition called the harrowing of hell. ‘Harrowing’ is an Old English word for ‘robbing’ and ‘hell’ is not the later Christian understanding of a place of eternal punishment, but Sheol, or Hades, the afterlife place of nonexistence. The tradition comes out of the Jewish understanding that God would vindicate righteous martyrs either before their death (think of the story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den, for example), or after death (think of Jesus) all as part of transforming the world here below. Even though in our day we hear many predictions about God ending the world violently, in Jesus’ day, the predominant understanding was that while God could destroy the world, God wouldn’t, and that the transformation of life here below would begin with Jesus descending into Sheol to liberate all the righteous ones who had died from injustice, and then rising to lead God’s corporate vindication as the supremely Righteous One.2
We see this harrowing of hell tradition not only in the Apostles Creed, but in a few scriptural references in some of the late letters like 1 Peter, and in the art of many of the earliest Christian churches. For example, in Old Cairo, Egypt, there is a fresco in a Coptic Christian church, St. Sargius, depicting Jesus standing upon the shattered gates of Hades drawing out Adam and Even from their tomb.3 And while the harrowing of hell is part of historic Christian tradition, and even predates the gospels; when the gospels were written, however, this emphasis had largely waned. Why?
For one, as contrived as this may sound, it didn’t fit into a neat gospel sequence. The harrowing of hell meant Jesus not only had to rise but also ascend to heaven with all the martyrs, and then come back to earth in order to appear to the disciples. That was a little too much coming and going which didn’t make sense! 4
For another reason, and more importantly, the harrowing of hell tradition was largely lost to the gospels, especially from Mark’s perspective, because it displaced the real reason for Jesus’ death. Instead of Jesus’ willingness to embrace the cross as his passionate witness of love, his proclamation of the realm of God being already present here on earth as the reason for his death; the harrowing of hell proclaimed that Jesus died only in order to descend to the dead and to save and restore the ones who had gone before.
In my mind and heart though, perhaps the most important reason for the silence in the gospels about Holy Saturday, and the reason we can leave as mystery what happened to Jesus on that day – is simply because of the very power of silence itself. And because of the necessity and poignant power of waiting.
As painful as waiting truly is, as awful as waiting can be when the outcome is unknown or unbearable, as fearful as it is when the waiting lags and all hope appears to be lost; there is a depth of healing and discerning that comes only through waiting; only through being broken open by the silence so that new life can begin.
What if we let the Saturday of Holy Week simply be a time of giving ourselves over to that silence? What if we let the Saturday of Holy Week be a day of acknowledging all the times we wait without knowing the answer, a day of affirming all the loss we carry, even though we now wait in the silence on this side of hope and promise, and we know we do not carry that grief by ourselves.
In Borg and Crossan’s book, The Last Week, as they talked about Saturday, they described how for Jesus, the already present kingdom of God was a collaborative effort. In their words: “It was not, as might have been imagined, an instantaneous flash of divine light, but an interactive process between divinity and humanity, a joint operation between God and ourselves. It is not us without God, or God without us. It is not that we wait for God, but that God waits for us. That is why, from one end of Mark to the other, Jesus does not travel alone, but always, always with those companions who represent us all, the named ones who fail him and the unnamed ones who do not.”5
That, my friends is the gift and good news of Saturday. God doesn’t just love us beyond all fathoming; God waits for us. God waits with us. As long as is needed.
Amen!
- The Last Week, Borg and Crossan, p.165
- Ibid p.166
- Ibid p.180-181
- Ibid p. 182
- Ibid. p. 187