Pilgrimage Day 2: Before Christ Rose, He Was Dead Before Christ Rose, He Was Dead: The truth of Holy Saturday is that God is with us, even in our mortality An essay reflection by Travis Ryan Pickell Note: This essay was first published in the April 2020 edition of Christianity Today. Deep down, I knew I had cancer before the doctor delivered her diagnosis. Still, the news came as a shock. I was 27 years old. My wife and I had just moved to a new town where we knew hardly a soul. We felt very much alone. Of course, we knew and believed God’s promise to “never leave or forsake you” (Deut. 31:6). In church the following week we sung the chorus, “O love that will not let me go.” But this knowledge was mostly intellectual. Beneath these affirmations we were, for the first time, trying to understand the meaning of God’s presence in our newly unmistakable mortality. The question of God’s presence in mortality is central to a significant, but seldom recognized, day in the church’s yearly calendar. Holy Saturday is that odd day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday during which Jesus Christ—life himself! (John 14:6)—lay dead in a tomb. Before my diagnosis, I had never much pondered the significance of this fact. The church has had little difficulty fixing its attention to the dying of Christ, and even less to the rising of Christ, but the being dead of Christ has found relatively little expression in its theology and liturgy. Holy Saturday, however, has an integrity of its own. If the church can attune her ear to its frequency, so easily drowned out by the dominant tones of Good Friday and Easter, she may be able to hear a profound word about human living and dying between the cross and resurrection. Christ the Superhero Christians have found two primary ways to understand how and why Christ descended ad inferos (literally, “to those below”). The predominant interpretation of the early church, what we might call the classical view, stressed Christ’s glory and power in his descent to the underworld. The fourth-century monk Rufinus of Aquileia was one of the first church fathers to write about it: It is as if a king were to proceed to a prison, and to go in and open the doors, undo the fetters, break in pieces the chains, the bars, and the bolts, and bring forth and set at liberty the prisoners . The king, therefor, is said indeed to have been in prison, but not under the same condition as the prisoners who were detained there. They were in prison to be punished, he to free them from punishment. Here Christ’s divine power, rather than his human suffering, takes center stage. Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, a Roman Catholic theologian, calls Christ’s descent “the beginning of the manifestation of his triumph over death and the first application of the fruits of redemption.” Anastasis icon of the Maesta Altarpiece (13th century), Duccio di Buoninsegna As a visual representation, consider the anastasis icon of the Maesta Altarpiece (13th century). Altarpieces like this one are traditional pieces of artwork that are placed on the altar behind where the elements of the Eucharist are kept and they are collections of images that typically depict the entire life of Christ, from Gabriel’s announcement to Mary, to Christ’s ascent and reign in heaven. The anastasis portion (named for the Greek word for resurrection) depicts Christ being raised from the dead. In this version, painted by Italian artist Duccio di Buoninsegna, Jesus breaks the doors of bronze, trampling the devil under foot. Think Jesus as Superhero, Jesus as Schwarzenegger, Jesus as Rambo, infiltrating an enemy camp to rescue POWs. Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, wrote that “Christ descended into hell not as the devil’s victim but as Conqueror.” The Eastern Orthodox worship service known as the Matins of Great Saturday expresses this sentiment beautifully. The gathering begins with a grave (epitaphion) erected as the focal point in the middle of the church, and includes a reading of Psalm 119, a customary funereal psalm. The typically mournful tone associate with this psalm, however, is subtly overturned through a series of exultant responses, climaxing with the singing of the Paschal troparion (“Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life”), which signals the beginning of paschal joy. In fact, the dominant theme of the service is Christ’s glorious and powerful triumph over death and the devil; the Matins of Great Saturday is clearly an anticipatory celebration of Christ’s resurrection. But the shortcoming of the classical take on Christ’s descent, for all its theological richness and truth, is that it plays too much to our collective desire to move past suffering into glory. In its eagerness to express Easter joy, it threatens to eclipse, and therefore obscure, the theological integrity and significance of Holy Saturday. Christ the Sufferer During the Protestant Reformation a different view gained prominence. Though this view had precursors among Medieval mystics and in Martin Luther’s writings, it’s leading proponent was John Calvin. Calvin rejected the notion that Christ saved souls from limbo (“Nothing but a story!” he scoffed). Instead, he interpreted the descent into hell as a metaphorical expression of the fathomless depths of Christ’s suffering, especially spiritual suffering, endured on the cross. This interpretation reflected Calvin’s emphasis on Christ’s substitutionary atonement. Drawing on Gregory of Nazianzus’ ancient axiom, “what Christ has not assumed, has not been healed,” Calvin boldly asserts that our spiritual healing requires that Christ suffers not just biological death, but also the “pangs of death” (Acts 2:24), the “terrible abyss” of feeling “forsaken and estranged from God.” For Calvin, the descent into hell is the obvious theological next step of Christ’s cry of dereliction from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). If Christ is triumphant, according to this view, it is only through his passion. This “passionate view” finds artistic expression in the famous Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1214-1216), painted by German artists Nikolaus of Haguenau and Matthias Grünewald. Like the altarpiece from the previous section, this collection of images also depicts scenes from the life of Christ. A notable feature of this altarpiece is that it opens like a cabinet, with two sets of doors, or “wings,” that are painted with vivid imagery from the Gospels, so that they can be opened or closed to display different images for different times during the church year. Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1214-1216), Nikolaus of Haguenau and Matthias Grünewald On most days of the liturgical year, the Isenheim Altarpiece’s wings are closed, displaying the above image of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Few graphic representations depict the extent of Christ’s physical and spiritual agony like this one. Open the wings, however, and we encounter scenes that emphasize Christ’s divinity, such as the annunciation to Mary, the Nativity, and Jesus’ resurrection. Open an additional set of wings and we see images of the church in eschatological glory, represented by gilded saints. The church’s glory is hidden in the divinity of Christ, but the divinity of Christ is hidden in his very human suffering and crucifixion. If the Orthodox liturgy of Holy Saturday is essentially an anticipatory celebration of Easter, in many Protestant denominations the absence of attention to Holy Saturday makes it into an extended observance of Good Friday. The PC(USA) Book of Common Worship, for example, concludes its Liturgy for Good Friday with the instructions, “All depart in silence. The service continues with the Easter Vigil, or on Easter Day.” This practice is thoroughly in line with Calvin’s emphasis on the cross as the center of salvation. For Calvin, as with the Book of Common Worship, the “action,” so to speak, occurs on Friday. For this reason, the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once claimed that Calvin had more-or-less rendered Holy Saturday “superfluous.” Of course, a liturgical gap—a pregnant pause—could be a meaningful way to attend to the meaning of Holy Saturday. In practice, however, we tend to treat the extended silence of Good Friday as a way to simply “move on.” Hearing Holy Saturday Both of our most common approaches to Holy Saturday miss its full meaning. I would like to highlight a third line of interpretation, which stresses the fact that God in Christ takes on our mortal nature and thereby makes it his own. Because it focuses on Christ’s suffering with us, we might call it the compassionate view. In addition to victory and suffering, this approach adds a radical reaffirmation of the totality of the incarnation, which is not suspended in any way during the hours between cross and resurrection. God was indeed in Christ (2 Cor. 5:19) even while Christ lay dead in a tomb. This (admittedly inconceivable) thought, according to the late Reformed theologian Alan Lewis, “forces us to think at deeper levels yet, of who God is and how God works: present-in-absence, and absent where most present; alive in death, and dead when most creative and life-giving.” The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (c. 1520-1522), Hans Holbein the Younger The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (c. 1520-1522), painted by Hans Holbein the Younger, an acclaimed 16th-century German painter and printmaker, is a rare attempt to depict Jesus Christ in the tomb on Holy Saturday.