by CCW | 4 April 2015 11:00
What is there to see on Holy Saturday? Christ is dead and buried. Nothing to see here, nothing to look upon except the closed tomb. We gather in the presence of the absence of Christ crucified.
But there is another sense to our looking upon him whom we have pierced. It is about our reflection upon the meaning of his crucifixion. The lessons for this day remind us about two things; the bodily reality of Christ’s death and burial, and the creedal concept of the descent into Hell. Both speak to the Passion as the radical meaning of divine love. Both speak to the meaning of redemption. God wills to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation.
Holy Saturday would have us look upon things which cannot be seen but only understood. If there is any image at all, it is one which belongs to Eastern Orthodoxy in an icon for this day, the icon which depicts Christ raising Adam and Eve from the grave, capturing the idea offered to us in Zechariah and the Epistles of Peter about Christ preaching to the souls in prison. God’s love seeks to redeem and restore the whole of our sinful humanity.
I love the idea of Christ’s descent into hell and to his preaching to the souls imprisoned there. Why? Because it says so much about the nature of our humanity, that we are rational souls with bodies and that both matter and they matter in terms of our relation to God.
Holy Saturday celebrates the peace between God and man, between God and his creation. It is paradise regained and yet this is but an interlude before the greater business of our looking upon Christ crucified and contemplating the mystery of human redemption. The greater business is the fruit of Christ’s passion in the radical new life which flows out of his reconciling love. For that we can only await in the peaceful quiet of this day, keeping vigil at the tomb in solidarity with Christ and his death for us, and then, this evening waiting and looking in expectancy for what God and God alone makes out of the realities of human sin and death.
Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, 2015
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2015/04/04/sermon-for-holy-saturday-3/
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