Holy Saturday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons

I've had an interesting Lent and a very quirky Holy Week, it all happened as things do, when in my prayer time a thought came unbidden in my head, it suggested that I take a different route than normal, start my Lent and Holy Week from the point of view of the Resurrection and hold on to that image throughout. It's certainly shifted my perception of `Lent and in fact challenged my views of the liturgies of Holy Week. Why? I suppose because it takes me back to the early community when Lent was either a time of preparation for baptism or didn't matter and when the triumph of the resurrection was an all-present motif, permeating Christian life in a way it perhaps doesn't with us.

There are echoes of this, particularly in the ancient eastern churches where in Lent the Sunday remains firmly one of resurrection triumph and where "Alleluia" is not hidden from the soundscape of worship, but it's in these last three days that I've encountered a newness in my own faith, for instance the Gospel of the washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday took me over, not the Eucharist, the mixture of stubborn Peter and dissembling, (but oh so like myself) Judas, and in my own heart a question as to what the Holy Eucharist meant if I do not wash, in whatever way that command might come in my life, the feet of others?

The Passion Liturgy of Great Friday (that I've taken from the East) makes little sense to me unless I see the cross as the squaring of sin and pain in a triumphant image, which is a tapestry of all our bad and good points seen in all those whose stories are told in that great narrative. This year I felt another and older power than simply the sorrow and commemoration of Christ's passion and death, that has happened, it is not repeated in our reenactments, but through our querulous, fractious celebrations of victory over sin and death, and thanks be to the Lord Christ , we find our salvation in the life giving Cross.

But now, as we move from moments of suffering to a grasp the silence of Holy Saturday, what there have I found? Something profoundly simple, a meditation on Hell, that tells me all those who use God and hell fire as weapons against others are wrong, they have missed the point, for the harrowing of `Hell is when Christ having truly died, reaches into all living deaths and smashes down the gates of all tombs and hellish places, to liberate all life, and through his rising breathes forgiveness and mercy into everything. So as we wait for the solemn proclamation of that resurrection, I know in my heart that it is real, for I too am resurrected in so many little ways-which point to that great and glorious day when all shall be in all! Death and Hell have no power over the Lord Christ who has vanquished them harrowed them forever!

Lectio

Holy Saturday

Or The Harrowing of Hell

Holy Saturday!

Such a day like this is difficult to grasp.

For the faithful a mixed day of supposed nothingness,

A supposed day when nothing much happens in church,

But in the world outside, depending where you are at,

Plenty is going on.

There are the holiday-makers out in the countryside,

The families paddling at the sea-side,

The trippers taking in their stride,

the shopping malls, hunting for who knows what-

Consumables? Or those necessary and important things-

Which we then soon forget!

On the surface then, it seems a Saturday of many things, but it is not!

For we have forgotten a darker, deeper 'thing',

A 'thing' too serious to contemplate on a sunny day in Spring,

And yet we must, we really must.

For on this 'thing' so many other 'things' connect.

It's a "happening", a once-for-all-great-cosmic-'shout'-

Whose echoes clatter nosily through liturgy and hymn,

Shake the stained glass windows in our ancient church

and shatter the sacrificial gifts which we all bring-

to dust! .

No wonder this is a non-worship day (or supposed to be)

For the disturbance of this Christ event,

Makes all our celebrations incomplete.

It leaves us with a greater question:
Do we ever do what Christ has done,

Do we ever truly follow him?

So let us stop, take a deep breath in our soul

And peer downwards into that chasm of baleful death

And ancient woes,

Of the fears piled up in our human memories,

Of the giant under the bed,

The ogre in the cupboards of our lives!

What is there?

What means those simple words-

We speak so often?

Glossing over them to Spirit talk -we hurry past their pointedness.

They say, "He descended into Hell',

Maybe its 'underworld', or 'death', or 'dark', it cannot be Hell-

Or can it be so monstrous an idea,

Our minds unable hold fast to a drop of mercy

Falling from the Cross of Christ to the gates shut fast forever?

On the Cross, he gave the thief a paradise invitation,

"Today" he said, "today you will be with me".

We like that, it shows kindness on the Lord's part to us sinners,

Mercy yes, but Hell?

There in that shadow black of darker colours,

Darkest than before Creation's start,

The void beyond all voids where we too must descend,

There the Christ went to death,

to empty out himself beyond all emptiness-into nothing,

And find there Hell,

That rotten core of human strife and life, and hate, and war,

and cruelty-beyond all cruelty.

If Christ as God could not defeat this, who can?

Groping in that dark-he hears a shuddering cacophony of cries,

Of anguished souls who cannot see anything at all,

Knocking at that blackened set of gates,

Banging on them with his bloodied hands

He shouts one word: "Open!"

Satan answers: 'Go away!

You cannot enter here, You are not wanted, You do not belong!

You of all those humans in this world of sin

-have done no wrong!".

"That is why"; the Christ shouts out in joyful sound,

"That is why I smash these gates-

And trample them and death into the ground!"

Turning then, he stretches out his hand-

And gentler than the softest rain

And whispering breezes,

Forever, with his drop of love,

Hell's torment now unfreezes!