Just Stopping By

Affairs of business have taken me from the Monastery during Lent. I've seen one paper finally in print and another rejected. And again I find myself with far more projects than I can focus on at one time. Oh well. Tomorrow...

But for now, I'll share with you a Holy Saturday meditation of a sort. No, I didn't preach it. I was officiating at Morning Prayer at church, but I had no desire to bore anyone with thoughts hastily scribbled in the wee hours of the morning. And the Gospel, as noted, isn't the one prescribed.

Holy Saturday
Ps. 130
Job 14:1-14
1 Pet. 4:1-8
Mark 7:31-37

In Bede's Homilies on the Gospels , the Gospel appointed for Holy Saturday is Bede's era and circumstance is the healing of the deaf-mute in the Decapolis in Mark 7. Look if you will in the lectionaries of the Book of Common Prayer and you will see discontinuity in the traditions of the Ecclesia Anglicana . The lection on which Bede preaches is nowhere appointed.

I will return to Mark 7 in a moment, but I think the choice of lections is exemplary of the day. The Roman Catholic theologian, Hans urs Von Balthasar, complains, "And yet Holy Saturday stands as the mysterious middle between cross and Resurrection, and consequently properly in the center of all revelation and theology. And here in the center like an unexplored, inexplicable blank spot on the map!"

The core of the Christian message lies in the bridge between the death on Friday and the resurrection in the wee hours of the first day of the week. But Saturday, the day of the bridge, is very much a mystery, poorly theologized and thus poorly understood. And as this day confounds our intellect, so it confuses our hearts.

Should we look forward to Easter and victory? Should we look backward to Good Friday and catastrophe? On Saturday, we do not know whether to mourn or rejoice. For the moment, I would suggest as person on staff at my church put it in the Tenebrae meditation that our attitude to Holy Saturday must begin upon waking with the realization that our friend who was executed yesterday is still very much dead with the rising of the Sun. Time's arrow runs ever forward. The dead yesterday are the dead today. Evil provides this permanence to human affairs. We can take as our examples our siblings in the Greek churches, who are distributed laurels at the close of the Holy Saturday liturgy as a sign of coming victory. They do not receive them at the beginning.

Fortified with the awful and life-annihilating sensation that Jesus is really dead, we now face the texts of the day. And heavy they are. We begin with Psalm 130 whose plaintiveness is nearly unforgettable, "Out of the depths, I have cried to thee..." The depths, like Saturday, are a middle place. They suggest the sea, a place filled in the literature of Israel with alternately the promises of death and fruitfulness. The deep is that primal void in which God slays the Leviathan and renders light from nothing. The deep also is the place of Sheol, the abode of death, the place of alienation from God. And analogous to this cosmic deep is the simple marine deep, filled with hazards, happily bounded by divine law, where sailors throw you overboard to be eaten by whales. But where those who go down to the sea in ships may have great delight in the works of the Lord and face that Leviathan down. Perhaps, the Israelites, akin to yet separate from their more seagoing Phoenician neighbors felt deeply conflicted by the sea. Yet ultimately they resolved their concerns by acknowledging God's hand in the contradiction of the waters. That God could bring a new ethic for humanity out of the drowning of most of it in Noah's flood. That God could complete the circumcision of Israel from Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea, by which the Israelites passed over to dry land but in which were the Egyptians were drowned.

And thus inveigled in the treacheries of the sea of life, the Psalmist begs the Lord to keep the sea as a means of fruitfulness and liberation, not on account of the Psalmist's deserving for, "If you, Lord, were to note what is done amiss, O Lord, who could stand?," but merely on account of patience for relationship, in the faith of forgiveness. In faith that the hand of God will turn the deep to the Psalmist's favor once again.

In the reading from Job, I think the Psalmist's plight becomes universal. Aren't we all in the same sea? Each of us has a brief life, a mixture of frailties. Don't mind the author's slightly inept analogy to the trees, reproduction is no means for us to maintain our individual identity for eternity. Not even the more direct copying available in cloning will preserve us. The stimuli we receive in the womb and in our early years (and indeed throughout our life) individuates us beyond our genes, making us a product of our experiences. And even if we could make a perfect copy of ourselves, we have little guarantee that another one of me is the same as me. No matter the plasticity of our mortal nature, I suspect some part of us always will be separated from the world by death. Whether cut down in youth or age, there is something in us that will never be roused from sleep.

And so Job seeks a solution from God to his conundrum, confident in the hand of God strong and willing to save. And let me tell you, Job's proposed solutions for his problems often are our most universal promises of Christ. In the case of the Hebrew prophets, you can fudge a rather particular Messiah as a political liberator of the Jewish people. The Christ that Job yearns for in his proposed solution will revolutionize our very existence. Job asks, "If only you would conceal me in Sheol, conceal me until your anger is past, and only then fix a time to recall me to mind. I would not lose hope, however long my service, waiting for my relief to come." In the literal sense, Job is requesting that he be placed in Sheol, the abode of the dead, the uncreate deep, in which God is thought absent, so that God's anger may cool toward him. However, Job's longing for this solution also must be read in the context of requests by Job to have an advocate whenever he faces God to account for what he imagines are his grievous sins. In one sense, Job seeks both the order of things before Christ and after Christ, which the final two readings clarify.

Every event of importance in the acts of God toward humankind in the Incarnation must have some literal antecedent in Scripture, because it's quite difficult to see how Jesus' life could be documented otherwise. Imagine if the Gospels never mentioned the Crucifixion. Now I can quote several mystical proclamations of the fact and manner of Jesus' death in the Law and the Prophets, but I don't think you or I would put any stock in that knowledge without a more direct witness from the Evangelists that he died on a cross. In that sense, there is only one part of the reading from 1 Peter that should be of note in that it asserts the gospel was preached even to the dead.

It's not much to go on, especially for an article of the Apostle's Creed. In the Gospels, Saturday is the day of the missing Christ. More glaring in the wake of near-death experiences attested by ancient and modern witnesses. Medicine has a variety of weaker and stronger definitions of death, but Christian doctrine presumes the strongest for Christ. But still we wonder if there is part of us that endures beyond the body's death. And so buoyed by the physicality of the Resurrection and by the continuity of relationships maintained by Christ with the apostles between death and life, in particular the issue of Peter's denials, something of the Christ on the Cross on Friday remained in the risen one confused for the gardener on Sunday. Only in 1 Peter do we have a direct clue of Christ's whereabouts on Saturday beyond Christ's comment to the penitent thief on Friday.

I will not harp on this too much, but it has been a general belief in the church catholic that Jesus in solidarity with us, his friends and family as human beings and images of the divine majesty, descended into the place thought abandoned and untouchable by God (note the Psalmist disputes this in 138). And while there, he taught the dead the Gospel and some or all came with Him to the Father as the Psalmist says, "with captives in his train."

Well, I admit this particular summary of the Christus Victor model of human salvation is deficient in one respect. It suffers from dependence on a dualism between soul and body, in which the soul can be independent and active apart from the body and find the body's concerns irrelevant. This position on the soul should not just be critiqued from the standpoint of ethics (as it usually is) but also from the Scriptural description of human creation in which the soul is simply God's breath in us, no longer part of God but a new thing that when joined to the body is a "living soul." Breath is ephemeral, without constitution, and easily mixed into the atmosphere when released from its container. Not that there is still something peculiar about whatever is permanent about our individuality, but that it is not easily active, coherent, sustained without the body to contain it.

And so we turn to Mark 7. Jesus has entered a boundary place on the Sea of Galilee between mainline Judaea and the pagan cities of the Decapolis. This location brings Jesus into a universal context amidst both Jews and Gentiles and likely among those of one group who would prefer to be part of the other. Jesus is presented to a man both deaf and mute. Both avenues of communication do not exist for this man. He may not be entirely mute, just unable to make himself clear enough to be understood. Jesus puts his fingers into the man's ears, touches his tongue with spittle, looks up to heaven, sighs, and cries, "Be opened." The entire economy of salvation is recited here in a nutshell. What? Really ? Where?


The deaf-mute is us. Living, we feel alienated from God by our sins and so we have trouble speaking to Him and hearing Him. Dead, we are disembodied in the deep, unable to exert the creative power upon it that would bring fruitfulness and material creation, that would restore our bodies to us by our own wills. We are as Aristotle really describes the shades of the dead: mere potential. To the living and the dead, Christ presents himself in the flesh, literally incarnating Himself to the deaf-mute with finger in ear and spittle in mouth. Incarnate to us now in the elements of the Eucharist, the living waters of Baptism, and the Spirit's gifts working in the world in us. Incarnate to the dead in Sheol as one dead like them, touching them by sharing in their being. And like on the cross, the means of the incarnation to the dead, Jesus sighs or groans and inclines Himself to the Father in offering, bringing us assurance of the mercy and power of God in the midst of the depths. John Polkinghorne speaks of salvation and Christian hope in terms of computing, saying that our software will be downloaded into God's hardware until our own hardware is restored at the general resurrection of the dead, the final submission of the ambiguous deep to the hand of God, the last gasp of the muddleness of this Saturday. Paul says likewise of our sympathetic burial with Christ in a life baptized that ours are lives hidden with Christ in God as opposed to being without God in Sheol as Job desired. For from a God who has died like us, there is no alienation final and total between Him and us and thus unto the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be all praise and glory unto ages of ages. Amen.