“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Mary’s fiat, her “be it unto me according to thy word,” has provided the mantra for our Holy Week meditations on the Passion of Christ. Now all is done. All is at peace. Christ lies in the tomb, a borrowed tomb at that. It is finished. Holy Saturday recalls the sabbath rest of God in the Genesis accounts of creation. All we can do, it seems, is rest ourselves in the peace of this moment to ponder the mystery of human redemption.
The trauma and the horror of Good Friday is past and there is that sense of psychological release in us, perhaps, that gives way to a contemplative possibility in us to think about what Christ’s Passion and Death mean. Holy Saturday provides us with that possibility now become our necessity, the necessity of trying to make sense of it all. The word that we wait upon is the word of Christ in the tomb, the word in death. Holy Saturday emphasizes the reality of the death of Christ at the same time as it points to the power of the divine word. The word that defines our contemplation is perhaps, Peter’s word, drawing on Zechariah’s imagery, that “he went and preached unto the spirits in prison.”
The Epistle from 1st Peter reflects on Christ’s death in terms of the Noahic Covenant which is extended to become a simile for Christian baptism. Wonderful but what is going on here in this extended Scriptural reflection? What is the underlying insight? It is simply this. Holy Saturday reminds us of the radical meaning of human redemption accomplished by Christ’s death on the Cross. It is universal; it is for all. God seeks the reconciliation of the whole of our sinful humanity. This provides a necessary counter and check on our all-too-human judgements about one another as to who is saved and who is not. Not for us to know anything more than the Comfortable Word, that “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
“Look to Jesus,” Calvin tells us, ”he is worth to me more than a thousand testimonies.” He is our predestination. Human redemption is about the divine love of God’s own truth and righteousness that cannot be contained or constrained to the limits of finite reasoning, to the realm of the temporal, the world of past, present, and future. No. It is all about how time is gathered into eternity and itself is nothing more than the moving image of eternity, to use a famous Platonic image taken up by the metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan.
Here on Holy Saturday, our good is to contemplate that Word going forth and preaching to the souls in prison, a lovely image captured in the icon of the Resurrection in the Eastern Orthodoxy where Christ is depicted as drawing Adam and Eve out of the grave. Such is an image of human redemption. Nothing is but what is in God. The Scripture readings of Holy Saturday point us to the hidden actions of God’s Word and Son. God’s rest is not our rest, a kind of doing nothing. It is activity, the pure activity of God as God drawing the whole of his sinful humanity back to himself.
The Gospel, to be sure, hints at the disorders of human activity. On the one hand, we see the touching actions of Joseph of Arimathea about the burying of Christ, itself a work of corporal mercy that is enjoined upon all of us with respect to the death of stranger and loved one alike; on the other hand, there is already at work the conspiracy theory that will see the resurrection as a kind of conjuring trick, the body being stolen away by the disciples. Thus, we have in the Holy Saturday Gospel one of the earliest testimonies to an important part of the narrative, the sealing of the tomb with a great stone and the setting of a watch.
But Holy Saturday in its peace and quiet has already alerted us to the eternal motions of the Divine Word and Son, going and preaching to the souls in prison, in Hell, in Sheol, in the place of the dead, to use the various terms and images that belong to the creedal doctrine of the Descent into Hell. The point is clear. Nothing lies outside of the embrace of God’s desire to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation. The Crucifixion is that reconciliation but it has to be communicated, has to be made known. Thus the Word is ever in motion in spite of us. This is the good and the comfort of Holy Saturday. Here is the peace which Christ brings, a peace which passes human knowing. It recalls the original harmony of Paradise. All is done. All that there is for us is the true meaning of Paradise, to rest in the sabbath rest of God, to contemplate the peace of God towards us.
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, 2018