Holy Saturday

 April 8, 2023

 

I seem to say this every year on Holy Saturday morning.

 

I LOVE this service.

 

I love its simplicity.

 

I love its solemnity.  

 

I love this time to gather and just be quiet.

 

I love the fact that, after all that we’ve been through liturgically in these last few days and all that we will still go through liturgically in the next day, here we are.

 

Here we are in a church stripped of everything symbolic.

 

The cross hangs before us, veiled in black.

 

The altar is stripped.

 

The sanctuary light, which gently reminds us of the sacred Presence, is extinguished and has been taken away.

 

For those of us who delight in the Presence of God—who strive and long for the Presence of God—who find our purpose and meaning in the Presence of God—today is a bleak day.

 

That Presence seems…gone.

 

Or, at least, hidden from us.

 

For now, in this moment, on this Holy Saturday morning, time seems to sort of stand still.

 

We are caught in this breathless moment—between the excruciating death of Jesus on the cross yesterday and the glorious Light that is about dawn on us tonight and tomorrow morning.  

 

For now—in this moment—we are here.

 

And Jesus…

 

Where is Jesus?

 

We imagine his body lying there in the dark stillness of the tomb, wrapped and broken and bloodied.

 

But where is Jesus?

 

Not his body.

 

But…him?

 

One of the reasons I love this service is because it gives me that opportunity to speak about one of my favorite Christian subjects—the so-called “Harrowing of Hell.  

 

The Harrowing of Hell is that wonderful concept in which we ponder Jesus’ descent to hell to bring back those captured there.

 

For me, it is so packed full of meaning.

 

Hell.

 

That place we thought was the end all of end-all’s.  

 

That place that we dread and fear and cringe from.

 

That place in which lies every one of our greatest nightmares and the most horrendous things we could even possibly imagine.  

 

That black, bleak, miserable place.

 

But, we have to remind ourselves that for Jesus and the people of his time, there really was no concept of “hell” as we have been told regarding it.

 

For Jewish people at his time, there was a term that was used for the place where dead people go.

 

“Sheol.”

 

Now, Sheol has come to be used as another term for hell in popular Christian understanding.

 

But ultimately, again, we need to understand, that a Hebrew understanding of death from the time of Jesus just simply does not show this to be the truth.

 

For them “Sheol” was simply the place where all the dead go when they die.

 

To put it even more simply, “sheol” could simply mean “the grave,” the “pit” in which one is buried.

 

We get an idea of this thinking in the Psalm 6, wherein we hear the psalmist say in death there is no mention of God’s name, and in the grave no one praises God.

 

Essentially, for them, the grave itself was hell—the place wherein our existence ends and cease to “be.”

 

Even for Jesus, when he talks of “hell,” he actually uses the word “Gehenna.”

 

Genehnna is an actual place on earth, the so-called Ge Hinnom or valley of Hinnom, referenced in 2 Chronicles Chapter 28 in which in which King Ahaz did “evil” int eh sight of God by sacrificing children int eh fire to the pagan gods.

 

It became a dump, where they burned garbage.

 

It was cursed ground.

 

He is being descriptive in his use of imagery here.

 

But, there is no place of eternal metaphysical torment in the Hebrew scriptures.

 

And Jesus would have had no comprehension of our modern-Hellenistic, neo-Platonic understanding of “Hell” as a cavern “down there” in which souls are tortured for all eternity.

 

In fact, most of our current, popular understanding of hell comes actually from, yes, a poet.

 

Dante’s Inferno is very much the source of so much of our views of hell.

 

And it is some great poetry.

 

But Jesus himself as well as his first followers would be shocked and confused by such descriptions of the afterlife. 

 

So, when we talk about the Hallowing of Hell, we are really simply talking about Jesus going into the grave, into the place wherein all people who die go.

 

For the Jews of Jesus’ time and for Jesus’ first followers Sheol was the place where Adam and Eve and all their deceased ancestors went.

 

It was simply the place where the dead go.

 

And let’s face it, we fear this as well.

 

We fear the grave.

 

We fear “Sheol.”

 

We fear death and nonexistence and the end of “being.”

 

Death scares us.

 

What I love about today and this concept of the Harrowing of Hell is that the fear of this place is broken.  

 

The fear that there is a place where we will go when we die.

 

The grave.

 

And the grave seems to us like a place in which God’s love and light might not be able to descend.

 

But what this morning’s liturgy is all about is that even in the grave we cannot escape God’s love.

 

Why?

 

Because even God’s chosen One, Jesus, God’s very Son, Jesus the Messiah, went there. 

 

But by raising Jesus up from that place, God has “harrowed” Sheol.

 

In Christ, God has raked “hell” over.

 

Even death and the grave and “Sheol” have no power over God and God’s love.

 

What seems to be death’s ultimately victory and God’s defeat is, in the fact, the exact opposite.

 

Now, this image carries over into our own immediately lives.

 

Yes, we fear the grave.

 

We fear separation from life and light and all the good things we have known or hope in.

 

But we have to remember that such things are not only something after one’s death.

 

Hell, for us, is not necessarily that metaphysical place of eternal punishment.

 

Hell can be right here, in our own lives.

 

In our own minds.

 

In our own day-to-day lives.

 

Hell can be depression or severe anxiety or abuse or chronic physical pain or any of the prisons we may find ourselves in in this life.

 

We all experience multiple deaths in this life.

 

We all know what our own hells are and how isolating they can be.

 

We know how impenetrable they seem.

 

What today shows us that there is no such thing as an impenetrable hell.

 

At least not for God.

 

No matter how dark, how terrible our hells might be, God is stronger than any hell.

 

Sheol or the grave or eternal death are not part of God’s plan for us.

 

Yes, Jesus went down into the grave, into Sheol, into that place in which all the dead go.

 

But he did not stay there.

 

God raised him up from that place.

 

And because God did that for Jesus, God will do that for us as well.

 

In that famous ikon of the Harrowing of hell, what do we see?

 

We see the tombs broken open.

 

We see Jesus being raised.

 

And as he is raised, in one hand he is grasping Adam’s hand and in the other hand is grasping Eve’s hand.

 

And below them is a skull and bones.

 

God’s raising of Jesus broke open the hold of death.

 

It shattered Sheol.

 

The grave was not the end, after all.

 

Even there, God’s love descends.

 

Because that is what God’s love is able to do.

 

Nothing can separate us from that love.

 

Not even the deepest hell.

 

Not even the dank darkness of a grave.

 

It is incredible when we think of that.  

 

And, for me anyway, it fills me with such hope, such joy, that even the bleakness of this morning doesn’t seem so bleak.

 

Oh yes, Jesus has died.  

 

He truly died—he truly tasted death and partook of it fully.

 

He went into the grave.

 

He descended into Sheol.

 

And we too must die as well.

 

We too will taste death and partake in it fully.  

 

But the fact is that, not even death can separate us from God.

 

That place wherein we find ourselves, lost, lifeless, without hope, even there  we cannot escape God.

 

In the hells of our lives, even there God shows us that just as Jesus was raised from that place, so too will we.  

 

No matter how far separated we might seem from God, God will cover that great distance and come to us.

 

Even there.

 

Even there Christ will find us and give us new life.  

 

Christ will grasp us by the hand and will pull us out from our hell.  

 

That is what Holy Saturday is all about and that is certainly why I love this day.

 

 So, on this Holy Saturday, when all seems bleak and lost and without purpose, let us remember: God is at work even in those moments when we think God is absent or distant from us.  

 

The Presence of God is with us even when it seems furthest from us.  

 

In the darkest moments of our lives, the bright dawn is about to break.

 

Let us wait patiently and breathlessly for it.