The Great Mystery of Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday has been the subject of profound theological speculation since the last century, as Christians pondered the terrible anguish of the human being living and dying in the darkness of a “world” that was socially constructed in such a way as to exclude God. In the twentieth century, history confronted us with the awful and inescapable question: if the Creator is made to disappear, what hope could there possibly be for the creature (especially the created person)? Nevertheless, there were some Christians who began to realize that God would not so easily let Himself be set aside. They began to ponder the Paschal Mystery of the redeeming event of Christ’s death and resurrection in distinctive ways. Holy Saturday, with its mysterious silence, began to take on a new focus as God “seemed to be silent” in the face of all the individual and corporate violence perpetrated within existentially-totalitarian-secularist societies with their ideologies, wars, concentration camps, gulags, genocides, and countless other forms of agonizing oppression. 

Nietzsche had said, “God is dead,” and many people feared (or hoped) that this was really true. The Christian tradition, however, knew more of the mystery of God’s love for the world and the depths of the salvific suffering of the Father’s Only-Begotten Son. How might this relate to Holy Saturday? Can it be said that the Divine Person of God the Son — who really died on Good Friday in His human nature and endured the silence of “being-dead” on Holy Saturday — made Himself “present” in solidarity to the ultimate depths of human anguish? 

Such speculations are not meant to replace the traditional Holy Saturday theme of Christ going down to the realm of death to rescue the righteous people of Israel and all others who had lived and died in fidelity to whatever light of truth had been given to them. Their souls were all awaiting Christ’s redeeming “descent” wherein He would lead them into the Father’s glory, “opening the gates of heaven” that had been shut by original sin. Rather, these more recent theological speculations sought to encompass this traditionally explicit Holy Saturday theme within the consideration of a more fundamental mystery of how Jesus enters into death itself — how He really, “ontologically (so to speak),” takes our sins and our death upon Himself, repairs the irreparable through His saving love, and opens the way to salvation beyond all human possibilities.

Here there is much that remains veiled in mystery, and prone to misunderstanding or over-mystified expressions. But there appears to be something herein that responds to the unspeakable anguish of human persons in the face of evil and death — the anguish that became especially a stumbling block to belief in God for many people who felt trapped by the limits of a world without transcendence and constructed by human power alone.

As it so happens, one of these theologians articulated his reflections on this theme in a very moving way during a “meditation” he presented while visiting the Holy Shroud of Turin on May 2, 2010. These reflections are of particular interest because the theologian in question was not there in a merely private capacity; he was the Pope making a Pastoral Visit to the Archdiocese of Turin. Pope Benedict XVI was anything but the unimaginative, rigid, reactionary that so many journalists made him out to be. He was a great and profound theologian, and his teachings as Pope continue to guide some of the most important “new pathways” that authentic Catholic theology is called to investigate and ponder today and in the future.

Here is what Pope Benedict XVI said about the mystery of Holy Saturday on May 2, 2010, after he referred to the Shroud as the “Icon of Holy Saturday.” Check the Vatican Website for the full text of this beautiful and powerful reflection. It gives courage to our faith to know that we are so unfathomably loved by God:

“Holy Saturday is a ‘no man's land’ between the death and the Resurrection, but this ‘no man's land’ was entered by One, the Only One, who passed through it with the signs of his Passion for man's sake: Passio Christi. Passio hominis…

“In this ‘time-beyond-time’, Jesus Christ ‘descended to the dead.’ [From the Apostles’ Creed: “He descended into hell.”]

“What do these words mean? They mean that God, having made himself man, reached the point of entering man's most extreme and absolute solitude, where not a ray of love enters, where total abandonment reigns without any word of comfort: ‘hell.’

“Jesus Christ, by remaining in death, passed beyond the door of this ultimate solitude to lead us too to cross it with him.

“We have all, at some point, felt the frightening sensation of abandonment, and that is what we fear most about death, just as when we were children we were afraid to be alone in the dark and could only be reassured by the presence of a person who loved us. Well, this is exactly what happened on Holy Saturday: the voice of God resounded in the realm of death.

“The unimaginable occurred: namely, Love penetrated ‘hell.’ 

“Even in the extreme darkness of the most absolute human loneliness we may hear a voice that calls us and find a hand that takes ours and leads us out.

“Human beings live because they are loved and can love; and if love even penetrated the realm of death, then life also even reached there.

“In the hour of supreme solitude we shall never be alone.”