Holy Saturday: “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
The quiet and silence of Holy Saturday is in marked contrast to the noise and confusion of the Passion of Christ on the previous days of Holy Week, especially Good Friday. We have had our way in the folly of sin and evil, thinking that we could kill God. All the forces of sin and evil have spent their force. All is done.
Not just by us, but in Christ. What remains is what belongs to the special quality of Holy Saturday. That is the further and deeper contemplation of sin and love which has been our Holy Week theme. What belongs to this morning is a profound awakening to the credal doctrine of The Descent into Hell as the final chord in the Symphony of the Passion. We have done all that sin and evil can do but God is not done. Already we have seen that eternal life flows out of the side of Christ crucified and dead.
The fullest sense of that life is seen in the lessons for Holy Saturday morning that highlights the universality and completeness of Christ’s sacrifice. It is for all. His suffering gathers into itself all the forms of human suffering, past, present, and future. His death gathers all our deaths into himself. Holy Saturday recalls the peace of Paradise but in another register. It is the peace, not as the world gives, but only as God gives, a peace that comes out of all our discord and disarray, out of all our evil and what it means in terms of suffering and death. Death is our way yet God makes life out of death, out of our folly and pretense of thinking that we can control and remake the very world of which we are a part, the folly of presuming that we are God.
Holy Saturday bids us wait at the tomb of Christ and contemplate the fury and rage of ourselves and its consequences. All is done and we are left empty. All our rage and spite is past and gone but can’t simply be ignored or forgotten. But 1 Peter recalling Zechariah – yet again, for John ended his account of the Passion with Zechariah’s words about our looking upon him whom we pierced – indicates something more that belongs to the radical meaning of Christ’s crucifixion. It is universal so much so that Christ goes and preaches to the spirits in prison, in Sheol or Hades or Hell understood not as the image of punishment but as an image of the place of the dead. He preaches to them in order to bring them to himself.
This is captured in Eastern Christian Iconography in what is known as “the harrowing of Hell,” a kind of gathering up or rescuing of the souls of all who have gone before Christ in the pageant of revelation in what Christians call the Old Testament. Images from the Hebrew Scriptures have been a powerful part of the Passion story which in some sense is incomprehensible apart from them. Holy Saturday belongs to the transformation of the images of scripture in the figure of Christ and in the radical meaning of human redemption accomplished in his sacrifice. The icon shows Christ reaching down into the grave and bringing up Adam and Eve and by extension the whole host of the children of Abraham, symbolic of our humanity.
That he goes and preaches to them is significant. Not only is Christ’s Passion and Death for all but it testifies to the truth of our humanity. His going and preaching recalls them and us to the truth of our humanity as made in the image of God precisely as rational beings even in spite of the folly of sin and disobedience. But our sin and disobedience cannot trump God’s will and purpose for our humanity. That is just our folly.
The Epistle from 1 Peter along with the 1st Lesson from Zechariah and the 2nd Lesson also from 1 Peter at Mattins show us the universality of God’s love and the divine will to be reconciled with the whole of sinful creation. This is part and parcel of the radical redemption of our humanity. It doesn’t eclipse the folly of human sin.
The Gospel reading from Matthew shows us two things. First, an act of corporal mercy towards the body of Christ by Joseph of Arimathea who takes his body, “wraps it in a clean linen cloth,” and lays it in his own new tomb. Athanasius remarked that Christ borrowed a body that he might save our humanity, here he borrows a tomb from Joseph of Arimathea. Secondly, we have already the beginning of the various conspiracy theories that seek to cover up the follies of human sin and evil. The chief priests and Pharisees go to Pilate asking for a watch of Roman soldiers to guard his tomb “lest his disciples come by night and steal him away.” It is all part of an attempt to cover up and deny what cannot be denied about our actions, an instance of the ongoing nature of our hearts and minds in wilful disarray. It already anticipates the Vigil of Easter Eve – our waiting not just in silent contemplation in the peace of Holy Saturday but upon the making visible of the reality of the life that is Christ in his Resurrection, the life that is the moving force and presence in all of the events of the Passion.
We are pierced in our souls, strange as it may seem, through the silence and peace of Holy Saturday, which awakens us to the radical meaning of Christ’s sacrifice in reconciling the whole of our sinful humanity to God. In a wonderful way, we see yet again, how “the thoughts of many hearts are revealed” even in the “harrowing” or rescuing of souls in Hell, and, yet again, we are pierced and moved by the sheer wonder of divine love in Christ.
“A sword shall pierce through thy own soul; that the
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
Fr. David Curry
Holy Saturday, 2026