Holy Saturday 2025: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”
Christ’s first word from the Cross in Luke’s Account of the Passion and in what has become the classical ordering of the Seven Last Words of the Crucified has carried us throughout Holy Week. It brought us to the Cross and now carries us to the tomb of Christ.
There is a wonderful silence and a sense of peacefulness to Holy Saturday, especially after all of the confusion, noise, and chaos of Good Friday. It suggests a kind of purgation of all of the disorders of our passions. We have had our way with God in seeking to annihilate him from the very reality of our lives, not understanding that he is the reality. Truly, we know not what we do. The peace and silence of Holy Saturday belong to our reflections on the Passion and to a deeper understanding of the divine forgiveness of the Cross. It reveals something more than what we think we know about life and death.
The Scriptural readings are profound. They point us inescapably to the creedal doctrine of Christ’s Descent into Hell which is really but the further extension of the forgiveness of sins and to what belongs to human redemption. Christ, we are told by way of images from Zechariah and 1 Peter goes and preaches to the souls in prison. This suggests the importance of the idea of coming to know things more fully which were not fully known before. What the Descent into Hell signals is the furthest possible extent of the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of our sinful humanity: past, present, and to come, we might say. As such we are being drawn more completely into the life of the Trinity, into the essential life of God which overcomes all death, all sin and all evil.
The doctrinal idea is captured in the Icon of the Resurrection in Eastern Orthodoxy which depicts Christ as drawing Adam and Eve out of the tomb, out of the place of death, Sheol, Hades, Hell. That image along with the Scriptures speaks to the radical idea of our being restored to the image of God which is the truth of our being. The image of God, the image of Christ, the image of the Trinity are all the same in a way and speak to the ultimate end or purpose of our humanity as found in the life of God.
On Holy Saturday we come to the tomb of Jesus. We come to honour the dead, to pay our respects to those who have died but especially to honour the one who has died for us. But our waiting at the tomb in a spirit of respect and honour already signals that our humanity is about more than death. We are more than our bodies, though not less, and as such we are more than our deaths as well. From that perspective our waiting at the tomb on Holy Saturday morning segues into the Vigil of Easter Eve, our waiting upon God’s new creation, the Resurrection which is simply, if I can put it that way, testament to what we both know and do not know. “As dying, we live,” Paul says. We have yet to learn that life is greater than death and even arises out of death.
But such is the point of our text about the forgiveness of God in Christ’s Passion and Death. It ushers us into an understanding of things we do not fully comprehend. Forgiveness is infinite in its extent. It is life in the midst of death.
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, 2025