For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.
St. Paul – 1 Corinthians 15:3-5

The gospel story can be compressed to three days – Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Christ’s relation to each day is expressed in Paul’s summary of the gospel: Christ died on Good Friday, Christ lay in the tomb on Holy Saturday, and Christ rose on Easter Sunday.

During Holy Week, Good Friday and Easter Sunday usually receive the bulk of our attention. Holy Saturday is generally ignored, primarily because we fail to see its significance.

Alan Lewis’ Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday is a powerful treatment of the significance of Holy Saturday. Holy Saturday exists between “Good Friday’s terror and abandonment and Easter Sunday’s impossible new possibility” (ix). It serves as a boundary between the days, and like all good boundaries, it conjoins what it also divides. (66)

It is the “empty space” of Holy Saturday that brings together the extremes of Cross and Resurrection:

Faith’s supreme drama tells of three days which form the center and the turning point of history. Yet, ironically, the center of the drama itself is an empty space. All the action and emotion, it seems, belong to two days only: despair and joy, dark and light, defeat and victory, the end and the beginning, evenly distributed in vivid contrast between what humanity did to Jesus on the first day and what God did for him on the third. (1)

Holy Saturday is significant because it exists “as that day between the days which speaks solely neither of the cross nor of the resurrection, but simultaneously remembers the one and awaits the other, and guarantees that neither will be heard, or thought about, or lived, without the other.” (Lewis, 2001, 4)

Hearing the Gospel Story in Both Directions

In order to truly hear the story of the gospel we must listen to it in both directions. In other words, we must hear it in chronological order as if for the first time, and we must hear it again in light of its ending.

Perhaps this illustration will help: When we see a movie for the first time, we see the events play out in order. Since we are unaware of how the movie will end, we are not quite certain about the significance – the full meaning – of each scene. However, when we watch a movie for a second or third time, each scene takes on a different significance and meaning, for we see the scenes in light of the end. Thus, with each repeated viewing, we enjoy and derive deeper meaning from the story.

The same is true for the gospel. The gospel is a different story when its events are heard without prior knowledge of their outcome. The awful finality of the cross is more pronounced. The emptiness and hopelessness of Holy Saturday is more vivid. And the sheer graciousness and unexpectedness of Easter’s resurrection is unspeakably gloriously.

In order to regain the significance of Holy Saturday, we must view it as if for the first time, apart from the triumph of Easter Sunday. From this perspective, Holy Saturday is not “holy” at all, but an “empty void”:

And the day that follows it is not an in-between day which simply waits for the morrow, but it is an empty void, a nothing, shapeless, meaningless, and anticlimactic: simply the day after the end. There is no remarkable tomorrow on the horizon to give that Sabbath special identity and form as the day before the Day of Resurrection. These were anonymous, indefinite hours, filled with memories and assessments of what was finished and past; and there was no reason to imagine that an imminent triumph might render those judgments premature and incomplete. (31)

The hopelessness of Holy Saturday must be given full weight. On that day, “Jesus lay dead in the grave of the wicked, not strictly as a blasphemer but as a rebel and subversive, a usurper and pretender” (49). From the perspective of Holy Saturday “[t]he death of Jesus yesterday was the death of a sinner; he rests today, dishonored and decaying, ‘in a grave with the wicked’ (Isa. 53:9).” (45)

We are left with two terrifying possibilities: Either Jesus has failed God, or, even more terrifying, “in his death God has failed him. Then this sad Saturday would not be a Shabbat of the Lord, still less the final, messianic Day of the Lord, but the worst, most diabolic day in history, truly the day of the Devil” (54). For, “How could a Father be fatherly and yet forsake the supposedly beloved Son?” (55) This is either a

failure of divine love…[o]r… a failure of divine power… Either way, the worst accusation of all, this second day, is that by failing the Son, the Lord of all has failed the world and all who share the Son’s humanity. If the Son himself has been delivered up to destruction, what hope is there for the rest of us? (55)

This experience of this terrifying possibility does not go away because of the resurrection. The resurrection does not negate the meaning of the cross and the grave.

Does the resurrection free us from thinking of the cross as it was before the resurrection? To answer No is to say that this is a story which must be told and heard, believed and interpreted, two different ways at once — as a story whose ending is known, and as one whose ending is discovered only as it happens. The truth is victim when either reading is allowed to drown out the other; the truth emerges only when both readings are audible, the separate sound in each ear creating, as it were, a stereophonic unity. (33)

Descent Into Hell

Because we often race from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, and because we tend to view Good Friday in light of Easter, we undermine the significance of God’s identification with us into the hopelessness of death and the grave. Contrary to what many liturgies imply, Jesus did not survive the grave!

Easter Saturday says that Jesus was gone and finished, subjected to death’s power for a season. So Christ himself did not — despite centuries of popular theological and homiletical deceit — survive the grave! He succumbed to death and was swallowed by the grave — his Sabbath rest in the sepulcher a dramatized insistence that his termination was realistic and complete, a proper subject of grief and valediction. (428)

In Christ, God identifies with men and women to the point of death and beyond. Jesus “drunk the cup of mortality to its last, most hellish drop” (38). This identification is at the very heart of the Christian gospel. Lewis asks,

[W]ould there be a Christian gospel were it not true that God has been found among the dying and the dead, where the absence of all life and hope and light proclaims that even God has gone away? Would there truly be forgiveness for the guilty, healing and wholeness for the broken, a home for the rejected, and a coming day of laughter for a world of tears, did God not know how to weep the tears of fear and loneliness, to endure the torments of hunger and disease, and to be identified with godforsakenness and transience? (90)

Now, the “why’s” of Good Friday and the hopelessness of Holy Saturday can be voiced before God: “Is the cry of the Crucified, ‘Why?’ not echoed by every victim of oppression, accident, and disease, as they plead for meaning in the midst of the world’s absurdity? And the silence [of Holy Saturday] that greets his question is the same sorrowing stillness of the cancer ward and the concentration camp” (56).

The Uniqueness of Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday is the necessary bridge between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It serves as a boundary between the days, and like all good boundaries, it conjoins what it also divides. It is unique in its placement and places us in the tension of real life: “How is it possible for there to be a day in history which is both the day after the end of life and the day before the end of death, the day which remembers Christ’s failure and his Father’s, and the day which hopes for his and for God’s future and therefore for our own?” (66)

For the most part, we live in Holy Saturday. We find ourselves between Cross and final Resurrection. We experience times when we feel forsaken, when we cry out “Why?” We know the heartbreak of hopelessness, the empty void that seems to stretch forever. And yet, we look forward with hope to the “impossible possibility” – the absolute surprise of grace that is resurrection.

When we view the three days of the gospel from both sides of the story, we come to realize that all three days – Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday – hang together as one story. We discover that hope finds its source in darkness and disappointment. We learn that resurrection does negate the humility and surrender of the cross. Indeed, it redefines suffering, humility, and self-giving in a way that reveals divine glory.

At the time, not even the closest of disciples could tolerate or understand the thought of such a denouement to the ministry of Jesus. But faith’s perceptiveness came finally to see that his suffering, cross, and tomb were Christ’s glory and his triumph, the very source and form of his rule and judgment of the world. It was in servitude that his majesty consisted, in humiliation that his glory was revealed. (116)

Quotes excerpted from Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday by Alan E. Lewis
© Richard J. Vincent, 2007