Sermon for Holy Saturday Morning

admin | 26 March 2016

“One thing is needful”

There is a certain quality of peace and quiet about Holy Saturday. All of the fuss and bother, all of the rage and spite, all of the agony and pain of the preceding days is past and gone. Christ is dead and buried. We meet at the tomb of Christ. Why? What is the one thing needful? To contemplate the meaning of Christ’s death.

The point is that his death and therefore all deaths are not meaningless. His suffering on the cross and therefore our sufferings too are not meaningless. Something has been accomplished. “It is finished”, he says, in John’s Gospel before “bow[ing] his head and [giving] up his spirit”. What has been accomplished? What is finished? All that belongs to the reconciliation between God and man. All that belongs to human redemption.

What does that mean? It means that there is something more than the reality of our separation from God that accounts for suffering and death. God has done something in and through the humanity of Christ. There is atonement. The scriptures constantly call our attention to the idea of Christ dying for us. And through the eyes of John our attention is constantly drawn to his dying for us as belonging to his living for the Father. “I have come to do the will of him who sent me”. What is that will? To achieve our peace. To overcome our sin. To open us out to more than death.

The idea of reconciliation requires the recognition of separation. Sin and suffering, sin and death are all interconnected. We suffer as a result of our own sins. We suffer because of the sins of others. We suffer because it is the condition of our humanity. In the humanity of Christ, God suffers for us to redeem us. What is that redemption? The revelation of the absolute goodness of God which is far greater than all and any form of evil. Holy Week reveals to us the absolute goodness of God which seeks our good out of the very nature of the divine goodness itself. What Holy Saturday shows us is the fullest extent of the divine will to be reconciled with his sinful creation.

As with everything about Holy Week, we are meant to learn this. The Passion of Christ is about his sufferings for us. In some sense, his sufferings are our sufferings as a result of our separation from the truth and goodness of God. All sin is about that separation. The cross is the overcoming of it. It establishes a kind of peace and harmony, a restoration of Paradise, if you will. Something of its fuller meaning is signalled in the readings at Morning Prayer that illumine the Epistle and Gospel for Holy Saturday. Together they recall us to the creedal doctrine of the Descent into Hell.

This is apt to trouble us. Hell? Here it means the place of departed souls and not necessarily the place of endless torment. Yet, to be apart from the truth and goodness of God is the real torment for our souls. Part of the struggle of our lives is to realise that our humanity is radically incomplete without God. Holy Saturday shows the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation past, present and future. Thus we have Zechariah’s prophecy about restoration and redemption. “Because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit. Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope”. The lesson from 1 Peter recalls us to the purpose of the sufferings of Christ. “Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps”. Christian life is about our participation in Christ’s life; he in us and we in him. It belongs to our baptismal profession. “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness”. And there is the profound spiritual insight that “by his wounds you have been healed”. The Epistle reading also from 1 Peter expands on the theme. “Christ also hath once suffered for sins [meaning our sins since 1 Peter is very clear that “he committed no sin, no guile was found on his lips”], the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God”. To bring us to God.

That is the one thing needful and which belongs so completely to the purpose of the Passion. The fuller extent of that purpose is seen in what cannot be seen but only understood as belonging to the nature of reconciliation. Christ “being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit” undertakes that fuller extent of reconciliation by going and “preaching unto the spirits in prison; which sometime were disobedient”. Through the word of God preached to them by God’s Word and Son all who have gone before Christ in the pageant of the Scriptures are brought into the wonder of Christ’s redemption of the world, a redemption that in some sense is universal and yet requires our hearing and believing it. God will not save us without our wills. He has surrendered himself into our hands and we have done our worst. His goodness is more and always more.

An icon of the Eastern Orthodox Church depicts Christ pulling up Adam and Eve from the grave. It is a marvelous image that teaches us about the reconciling love of God for our humanity as borne out of his superlative goodness. Against that stands our recalcitrance and cynicism and despair. The Gospel tells us, in Matthew’s account, that the Chief Priests and Pharisees come to Pilate seeking to have a guard placed over the tomb of Christ. Why? “Lest his disciples come by night and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead”. Already the Gospels alert us to the arguments of doubt and denial about the purpose and meaning of Christ’s passion; in short, to a conspiracy theory. Once again, we glimpse something of the goodness of God at work even in the face of human evil.

We wait at the tomb in solidarity with the Christ who has died. So we participate in his reconciling love for us and the whole of our broken humanity.