Why Holy Saturday is important

At various spots all over the English-speaking world are humorous plaques of the kind used to mark the location of historical events with the inscription: "ON THIS SITE IN (such and such a date), NOTHING HAPPENED."  Holy Saturday can kind of feel like that. We were in church Thursday night and Friday night, and tomorrow there will probably be a sunrise service and an Easter breakfast before the main service at the usual time.  But today- the day we commemorate the time Jesus spent in the tomb- nothing happens. Holy Saturday, as Rodney Dangerfield used to say, "don't get no respect!"

Actually, quite a bit was happening on that first Holy Saturday. There is only one obscure passage in the Bible, 1 Peter 3:18-19, that mentions it, but Jesus descended in spirit to hell on this day, not to suffer (that ended with the words "It is finished!") but to proclaim His victory over sin, death, and the devil in the very stronghold of the Enemy. It was like MacArthur accepting Japan's surrender in Tokyo Bay, although I doubt that Old Scratch signed any documents.  Once He uttered the words, "It is finished!" the battle was over. Every human sin had been paid for, and every human being who had ever lived or ever would had been redeemed. Easter was "in the bag," so to speak. It was, as they say, all over but the shouting. The passage is explicit enough that while there some churches (usually the more liberal ones) say that Jesus "descended to the dead" when they recite the Apostles' Creed, the traditional and preferable phrase is, "He descended into hell."

But the disciples knew none of this. All they knew was that their Master and Friend had been taken from them. They had watched Him die a slow and painful death. All their hopes for the coming of the Kingdom seemed to lie in ruins. Of course, nothing had actually happened that Jesus hadn't predicted. But in the grand tradition of Christians which we carry out until this very day, the fact that they had certain and clear promises from Jesus that this was a necessary and temporary step on the way to the coming of the Kingdom rather than its defeat, the disciples still managed to feel dejected and depressed and to listen not to the words Jesus had spoken to them, but to their own dejection and fears.

Personally, I've always thought that we should have church on Holy Saturday, too (well, actually, the ancient church did; the Vigil of Easter is one of the most beautiful services in the Christian liturgical tradition, but alas, it goes on for hours and modern Christians, whose attention spans are short, would never sit still through it).  Holy Saturday is the perfect analogy for the time in which we live- the time between the day that Jesus departed and ascended into heaven and the day when He "comes again in glory, to judge the living and the dead."

Jesus is in our midst. He hasn't abandoned us; in some ways, He drew closer on Ascension Day than ever before.  But we can't see Him- at least with fleshly eyes.  He ascended "to fill all things," and even in His human nature can be found wherever He pleases, wherever two or three are gathered together in His name; wherever the Sacrament of His body and blood is celebrated; wherever a Christian needs to talk to Him, or the devil is laying plans against us. He has told us to seek Him in our neighbor, in His Word, and in His Supper. But like the disciples on Holy Saturday, we forget His promises. We resort to all sorts of human gimmicks to add spiritual excitement to a life in which, if we but had eyes to see, Jesus Himself is walking beside us every step of the way!

We may become Enthusiasts. A pastor I once heard pointed out that there is nothing unusual about people filling the stands of a high school football stadium on Saturday night, yelling and screaming and cheering on the home team to victory. But if we went there, say, on Wednesday night, and the stands were full, and people were carrying on that way, and there was no game being played on the field...

Somewhere we get the idea that to be a Christian is to be in a constant state of "joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart." We imagine that other Christians are always happy and at peace and experience nonstop victory over all their troubles (they don't). Because we suffer and have worries and struggles and even because we don't feel what we somehow think we ought to feel, we may even doubt that we're true believers. Or we may wind up metaphorically in the stands down at the high school on Wednesday night, trying to work up excitement about a game that isn't even being played because we feel guilty or fearful about not being excited, and want so much to convince ourselves that we really are believers, and really do see a football game being played down there.

Every year several candy companies market milk chocolate crosses at Easter time. The very idea makes me wince. It's hard to think of anything more inappropriate! Crosses are not things we enjoy. By their very nature, they hurt. They hurt Jesus, and they hurt us. But even though we tell ourselves that peace and joy and victory are the marks of a Christian life, Jesus insists over and over that exactly the opposite is the case. The mark of a Christian life is the cross. Jesus says that a student is not greater than his Teacher,  nor a servant than his Master. If the world and the devil hate the Teacher, the Master, the surest sign that we belong to Him is that they hate us, too.

Those who belong to Jesus, like Jesus Himself, are finally victorious. But Jesus is the Master of spiritual jujitsu. For those unfamiliar with it, jujitsu is a Japanese martial art which was developed in order to enable people who are normally clothed and lack weapons to defeat heavily armored, much stronger, and well-armed opponents. Instead of bringing force to bear on one's opponent, the key to jujitsu is to use one's opponent's own strength against him.

The greatest jujitsu move in all of history was when Jesus allowed the powers of darkness to make Him their prisoner and to torture Him and to put Him to a slow and painful death- and use that very act to utterly defeat and destroy the powers of darkness. At least two great Easter hymns reflect on the scene in hell as the devils rejoiced over the Crucifixion- only to be cast into utter despair and defeat as Christ rose from the dead and revealed that He had destroyed their power forever!

Let a person become a Christian, and his life will not become easier or more pleasant. Quite the opposite. The devil and the world and his own flesh will descend upon him with all their fury. That is a state of affairs they cannot abide! Far from being a sign of spiritual weakness the cross, and not constant joy and victory, is the mark of a true believer! Jesus told us that over and over again. But like the disciples on the first Easter Saturday, we manage to forget that.

We all love "mountaintop experiences." We may even become confused enough to think that they're "the main event." in the Christian life. But like the disciples on the Mountain of Transfiguration, we find that the glow fades and we're forced leave the mountain and come back to the hum-drum world of the ordinary.  And that's the real problem, isn't it? There's a certain romanticism in the idea of suffering for the Faith. It's easy to take comfort in the idea of the devil singling us out for special attention because we are believers. There's actually a kind of glamor in suffering for the faith; it can flatter our egos by making us feel like heroes. Well, all the apostles except John would eventually suffer martyr's deaths, and John would live out his old age as an exile on a tiny island. But I doubt that "dungeon, fire and sword" were nearly as serious assaults on their faith as Holy Saturday was.

Mountaintop experiences are wonderful. They give us strength. They are things from which to draw resources in times of spiritual drought. And yet it's that drought which is the common factor in the life story of all the greatest saints- including Martin Luther and Phillip Melanchthon and John Bunyan and St. Therese of Lisieux and St. Ignatius Loyola and the other great Christians whose life stories leave little doubt that they suffered from OCD!  And yet God made use of that affliction, that cross, to enable them to be more useful to Him than most Christians can imagine themselves being.

"The Dark Night of the Soul" is a theme of a great deal of great devotional literature. When you think of it, It shouldn't be a surprise when we experience it. It puts us in some pretty good company.  And we can't live on a diet of spiritual cotton candy. We need to eat our liver and spinach and Brussel sprouts if we're going to grow. As C.S. Lewis points out, a child will never learn to walk if her father, walking beside her and holding her hand so that she doesn't fall, doesn't let go at some point.

In another place, Lewis has his fictional demon, Screwtape, write to his nephew, an apprentice tempter, that "Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."

Such was the case with the disciples on the first Holy Saturday. And such is the case with us. It is easy to rejoice in the promises of Christ while we're enjoying the glow of His presence and the excitement that accompanies a spiritual "high."  With some maturity and reflection (sadly, more than most of us- including me- are sometimes able to muster), it's comforting to remember that Jesus warned us that a servant is not greater than his Master, that the devil and the world treat those who belong to Jesus just as they treated him, and that far from being cause for discouragement, the cross is the very mark of His ownership and the ground of all our hopes.

But I think the hard thing for most of us is to feel nothing. It is to live mourning our loses, surrounded by sorrow and injustice, frustrated in our hopes, our faith beset by doubt. Can you imagine what it must have been like for the disciples on the first Holy Saturday? For three years, they had accompanied Jesus day after day as He raised the dead, healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, gave hearing to the deaf, gave strength to the legs of the lame, and worked miracle after miracle, all the while speaking those wonderful words about the coming Kingdom. But now, He was gone, the hopes of a coming Kingdom apparently dashed, and in place of miracles, there was merely the numbing routine of a world which seemed depressingly non-miraculous and utterly unchanged by Jesus having walked upon it.

And that's why we really ought to have church on Holy Saturday- not simply in anticipation of Easter, but as an occasion to contemplate the state in which the normal Christian life is actually led, the victory of Jesus invisible to fleshly eyes while sin and death and sickness and suffering and evil of every kind remain appallingly obvious.

We need to be reminded that appearance is not reality, and neither is emotion. We need to be reminded that God chose the Blessed Virgin to be His mother not because of her special sanctity or virtue or beauty or talents, but precisely because of her lowliness, her ordinariness. We need to be reminded that Jesus chose to be born in a stable in Bethlehem, not a palace in Rome or even Jerusalem. We need to remember that the first human beings to whom God saw fit to reveal the news of His birth were not wealthy or powerful, but ordinary, poor, ill-regarded and probably smelly shepherds.

We need to remember that He grew up in Nazareth, not Athens, and called Capernaum, not Capri, His home. We need to recall that the men He called to be His apostles were simple fisherman and even a crooked tax-collector.  It's worth bearing in mind that the theatre of His ministry was not the halls of earthly power, but the streets of a backwater nation in a far corner of the Roman Empire. It's not unimportant that the Faith swept through the ancient world not as a trendy philosophy, but as a religion of slaves and outcasts. We need to remember that Jesus never seemed to be as much at home during His earthly ministry than when he was among ordinary, unremarkable people in ordinary, unremarkable surroundings.

We need to remember that the Maker of all things, seen and unseen, chose to become a poor carpenter, an itinerant preacher, in order to fulfill His intentions for His fallen creation. We need above all to realize that His coming, His deeds, His words, and every day of His life all focused on and sanctified not the spectacular and the wondrous,  but the ordinary and the prosaic. We need to recall that He came to serve, not to be served, and above all that the whole purpose of His coming was to meet us exactly where we are, in the midst of the ordinary and the trivial and even the tragic.

As someone once observed, it is not on the spiritual peaks of life that we grow, but in the valleys. Christmas and Pentecost and Easter are joyful times, and we are right to carry them in our hearts. But there is also something to be said for Holy Saturday. It's the day of the Church Year that most reflects the state in which we live our everyday lives- redeemed, yet all too often not acting like it;  feeling the bland, numbing and bearing no obvious mark of sanctity or purpose; more sensible of our sorrows and losses than of the faithfulness of a God Whose presence we would really like to sense more often and more clearly, yet somehow don't.

It is to the doubting and the despairing, not to the happy and the confident and the successful, that He appears as they cower behind closed doors,  disbelieving the news of His resurrection for fear that they might be disappointed yet again,  and says, "Do not be afraid. It is I."  It is the disciple whose very name has come to be a synonym for doubt whom He invited to touch Him and see that He was not a ghost or a hallucination caused by wishful thinking.

Jesus is to be found, not so much in the mountaintop experiences of our lives, but in the valleys- because that is where we most need Him to be. If only those devastated disciples knew how near He was, and how close to fulfillment were all the hopes they thought lost!

If only we realized that!

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