by CCW | 16 April 2022 10:00
Nathan’s word convicts David of his sin. It leads to his confession. “I have sinned against the Lord.” Sin is death in contradiction to life. But life is greater than death. This is something which the quiet of Holy Saturday reveals as we gather at the tomb. The full meaning of Christ’s death on the Cross begins to be explored through our quiet watching at the tomb in the readings for this day. What we contemplate is Christ’s death as the means of God’s overcoming of all that separates us from God and from one another. Holy Saturday points to the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of his sinful creation. Such is the meaning of the creedal teaching known as the “descent into Hell.”
We are meant to see ourselves in our sins in Christ. As 1 Peter 3 puts it, “Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit.” The fuller extent of that mystery is that this is, in principle, universal, for all, because “he went and preached unto the spirits in prison,” the prison of death, picking up on the imagery of Zechariah at Matins. “As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit” (Zech. 9.11). The Epistle points to this as a “figure” symbolising baptism. It is the transition from death to life “by the resurrection of Jesus Christ” which we await.
The Gospel reading continues the Holy Week theme of persecution, namely of us as the persecutors of God in Christ. It is the attempt to seal the tomb against the thought – the conspiracy theory of us as persecutors – that ‘they’, the disciples, might come to steal the body and then say, “He is risen from the dead.” Such is the extent of the violence of persecution even in the vain attempt to kill the idea already present that there is something different, something unique, something compelling and transformative in Christ’s crucifixion and death, something greater than death.
Such is the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of sinful creation. As the second lesson, again from 1 Peter puts it, Jesus “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of your souls.” In going and preaching unto the spirits in prison, we have the idea of being gathered by God’s Word who is light and life. God, as Thomas Aquinas, puts it, is “the beginning and end of all creatures but especially rational creatures.” Such is the deeper meaning of Holy Week. Only God makes a way for us to him through death. But it means confronting ourselves as dead in our sins that we might become alive in Christ.
We watch and wait both now and at the vigil. We watch and wait expectantly upon God, the principle of all light and life. Our watching is our waiting upon that perfect union of God and man in Christ which makes us one with God and which is greater than sin and death.
Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday 2022
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2022/04/16/sermon-for-holy-saturday-9/
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