Holy Saturday
Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash
We need to walk together, day by day, through the days of this holy weekend — in the midst of this modern plague. Here I offer my map for that journey.
Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash
Our bodies, entombed and separated from each other by our social distancing efforts, will be stuck in Saturday.
In the midst of so much death, how can we Christians celebrate Easter?
These questions can be paired with questions regarding our own sense of worship on that day. How much have we Christians replaced justice with worship, not taking one into serious relation with the other? Are we accustomed to worship in the total absence of justice?
I drove by a church last week, a few days before Palm Sunday, and read their sign: CHRIST HAS RISEN!
Um, no. No he hasn’t. In the Christian calendar he hasn’t even died yet. But this is an all-too-common phenomenon in Christian Churches.
Why?
Photo via prudkov / Shutterstock
Every Christian knows the story: Jesus was crucified on Good Friday and rose from the dead on Easter Sunday. But what did he do on Saturday?
That question has spurred centuries of debate, perplexed theologians as learned as St. Augustine and prodded some Protestants to advocate editing the Apostles' Creed, one of Christianity's oldest confessions of faith.
Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and most mainline Protestant churches teach that Jesus descended to the realm of the dead on Holy Saturday to save righteous souls, such as the Hebrew patriarchs, who died before his crucifixion.