Reflection on Holy Saturday with Fr Robin Gibbons - 30 March 2013

Holy Saturday - Ria

I’ve often meditated on that phrase in the Apostles Creed: ‘ he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead’. Whether you translate that as ‘descended to the dead’ or retain the starker version of hell (infernos) the inference is clear for the first part of Holy Saturday. The death of Christ was real, neither a mirage nor some cover up.

There is finality about his death on the cross with the hurried ad hoc burial that followed. My own meditations have taken me into some curious places, to think of hell itself and scripturally how can it be that we have created the medieval devil and an underworld of torments? I struggled with the clash between the loving gift of Christ’s atoning salvation and eternal punishment and wrestled with the knowledge of a loving God and the image of a punishing judge.

But these hold little terror for me, the silence of Holy Saturday like those comforting words of Lady Julian of Norwich speaks that ‘all shall be well’. The decent into death, to the ultimate ends of death, the hell which is the absence of God’s life, is necessary. For only then can Christ truly be said to have trampled down death itself and given life to those in the tomb. That is why Holy Saturday is a time of absence, we seek, we hope and we wait!

Into this darkness comes the glimmer of a new dawn. The Great Vigil of Easter, the celebration of the feast of feasts starts with the most elemental of comforting symbols, the lighting of fire and the kindling of lights to guide us in the dark and banish fear. The Exultet triumphantly shouts out the proclamation that in this night, ‘Christ our morning star, who came back from the dead’ sheds his light on all humankind. The vigil readings walk us through the pilgrimage of salvation, retelling the stories of old and reminding us that this history is ours but is also being fulfilled today.

The joyful chant of the Alleluia leads us to the proclamation of the great Gospel of Luke, where the terrified women discover, as we do so often in life especially when we stop to think, that absence does not necessarily mean nothing exists, the words ‘ why look for the living among the dead’ take us, as they take the women to another and greater dimension of life, that where death has no dominion.

If we have any newly baptized we see in sign and symbol another rising to new life the growth of the family of God. We proclaim our faith and with joyful hearts shout: ’Christ is risen. He is truly risen!

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain.