“Be it unto me according to thy word”
The radical nature of Mary’s word in response to God appears not only in the terrible intensity of Good Friday but also in the quiet peace of Holy Saturday. Through her word we have endeavoured to consider the creedal elements of human redemption. The crucified Christ dies and is buried. Holy Saturday reflects on the grave and death of Christ. In way, everything is at peace since all that belongs to the overcoming of all that separates God and man has been accomplished on the Cross. “It is finished,” as Jesus says in John’s account of the Passion.
But there is one further creedal element that belongs to the Passion and which is a further consequence of Mary’s ‘yes’ to God. It is the Descent into Hell. The readings on Holy Saturday take us to the grave but they also present to us this arresting idea and image of Christ “[going] and preach[ing] unto the spirits in prison,” as the Epistle reading from 1 Peter 3 puts it, and of the radical nature of “the blood of the covenant” which “will set your captives free from the waterless pit,” bringing salvation to the “prisoners of hope,” as Zechariah suggests. And as the Mattins lesson from 1 Peter 2 suggests, not only are we healed by his wounds but we are “returned unto the shepherd and bishop of our souls.” The radical nature of that returned is represented to us on this day and in ways that relate directly to Mary’s ‘yes’.
Her word of obedience and acquiescence to the divine will is seen classically in the commentary tradition to redress and counter the disobedience of Eve in the story of the Fall in the Book of Genesis. Her ‘ave’ contrasts and counters the woes of our humanity derived from the folly of the Fall in Eve’s tempting Adam and his yielding to her. In the iconographic traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy, Holy Saturday marks Christ’s Descent into Hell to redeem the prisoners of hope and depicts Christ as raising Adam and Eve out of the pit. Hell here is seen not simply as a place of everlasting punishment but as the place of departed spirits who are in a kind of limbo or holding pattern awaiting the accomplishment of human redemption by God in Christ, waiting in hope for God’s redemption. The whole story of the Old Testament is about a kind of hope for peace, for righteousness, for holiness that is entirely predicated upon the idea of the peace of God, which passeth human understanding, the righteousness of God, which is about God’s ways which are not our ways, and the holiness of God, from which all that is holy derives.
Christ’s Descent into Hell shows the full extent of the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation. That Christ goes and preaches to the spirits in prison suggests, too, that it is always and for all “according to thy word,” the redemptive word who has embraced the full meaning of our sins and our deaths even to the grave and to the depths of the Jewish Sheol or Greek Hades, terms which contribute to the later depictions of Hell. Ultimately, Hell is about our separation and remove from God. The creedal principle of the Descent into Hell emphasizes the divine will to reconcile and redeem and to restore and unite. It shows us something of the total and all-embracing nature of the love of God. Nothing not even death can defeat God’s love. “O death where is thy sting?” Indeed.
In Mary’s Annunciation, as the poet John Donne suggests, Christ wills to “lie in prison, in thy womb.” It is part of the paradox of redemption that God who cannot be contained to the limits of time and space wills to be contained and confined in the womb of Mary. In the imagery of Holy Saturday and Easter, the tomb becomes the womb of new life. Christ enters Mary’s womb even as he enters the tomb and goes forth from both. Life and light triumph over death and darkness. Mary’s ‘yes’ is an instrumental and substantial aspect of redemption and signals the nature of our participation in the pageant of salvation.
On Holy Saturday we gather at the tomb in the peace and the quiet of the day when all the world is at peace with God. But already the full meaning of God’s reconciling love is at work in his Descent into Hell to bring out the prisoners from the tomb and to gather all things into his love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. It is, we may say, all “according to thy word” by which God reconciles himself so fully and completely with our sinful humanity and indeed with the whole world.
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, 2012