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Holy Saturday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons


Plaque 5th C  casket British Museum

Plaque 5th C casket British Museum

He descended into Hell....

For some reason this Holy Week has been one of internal struggle for me, not feeling too good hasn't helped. However in compensation new challenges have come into my thoughts which otherwise I may not have dwelt on. Take Holy Saturday for instance, a day which should have no structured sacramental activity except in extremis. A day when those words, 'he descended into Hell' play in the background of my faith as perhaps an uneasy discordant tune! It should be a day of absence, of waiting to see what will happen, but I often clutter it up with the frenzy of preparation, crowding out the silence, the deep silence of death!

From the Eastern Church there come many hints as how we might approach this part of the mystery of the Lord's death and resurrection. Some theologians want the phrase be removed from the Apostles Creed because it doesn't seem to make sense. That might be because for them 'hell' is associated with sin, pain, and absence of the Divine presence. However in the traditions of the East, Christ's going down into death is not an experience of annihilation, but of victory: 'trampling down death by death, and to those in the tomb he has given life'. This is a cosmic event, death is in Christ no more and as our own faith hints, in death we still have that chance to change, for Christ goes into that darkness to preach salvation to all who have gone before him and brings them, as he will us, into his risen life.

That brings me to one of my small 'eureka' moments which happened as I re-read the story of Judas. The British Museum has a wonderful little ivory of the Crucifixion, dating from the early 5th century: Christ, beardless, naked except for a loincloth hangs on the cross of wood, his arms outstretched, not in anguish but calm victory. Beside him the lifeless, clothed, figure of Judas hangs on a bowed tree, the thirty pieces of silver spreading out beneath his dangling feet. That's the image...and the moment?

Simply this, Judas suddenly became for me a figure of my own life, especially as a priest, I can identify with his hope and despair, his thwarted ambition and deceit but also with the joy and excitement he must have had when called by Jesus, and yes, the love he still had, even after that curious betrayal, when he wept bitter tears. We are better now at seeing suicide as something sad and complex which very few people condemn. So for me the Judas tree and the Cross, the two different deaths and their silence come together in that descent to hell, where I like to think, as the Syrian church has done, that Judas was forgiven and changed by his Lord. Christ's resurrection is for Judas too. That gives me hope!

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

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