Holy Saturday: silence and triumph

Over six weeks ago, we began what felt like an endurance test of penances: a Great Fast, intense prayer, spiritual reading, and almsgiving. The strangeness of time, the suddenness with which it’s over, startles. It makes us pause in wonder and awe at today’s silence: Holy Saturday. After their one Lenten meal, monastics nightly practice the great silence. After the last prayer, the monks retire and speak no word until awakening to the next new day. Their rest is more than practical. Father Steve Grunow writes: “But deeper than this, the great silence is not just a time of rest, of passivity, but the time where, while human labor ceases, God remains active and working, though unseen and most often unheard, speaking in the stillness with the eloquence of his Eternal Word. The monks rest, knowing that God in the great silence abides.”Just so, our churches are silent. Mass has been prohibited since Good Friday, the tabernacles emptied of our precious Lord, and we faithful ponder the incomprehensibility of Jesus’ descent into hell.

Did not our century mark the start of one long Holy Saturday, the day God was absent, when even the hearts of the disciples were plunged into an icy chasm that grows wider and wider, and thus, filled with shame and anguish, they set out to go home, dark-spirited and annihilated in their desperation they head for Emmaus, without realizing that he whom they believed to be dead is in their midst? God is dead and we killed him: are we really aware that this phrase is taken almost literally from Christian tradition and that often in our viae crucis we have made something similar resound without realizing the tremendous gravity of what we said? We killed him, by enclosing him in the stale shell of routine thinking…

…only through the failure of Holy Friday, only through the silence of death of Holy Saturday, were the disciples able to be led to an understanding of all that Jesus truly was and all that his message truly meant. God had to die for them so that he could truly live in them. The image they had formed of God, within which they had tried to hold him down, had to be destroyed so that through the rubble of the ruined house they might see the sky, him himself who remains, always, the infinitely greater. We need the silence of God to experience again the abyss of his greatness and the chasm of our nothingness which would grow wider and wider without him…
The Anguish of an Absence

And so we wonder at the strangeness of these last forty days:

Six weeks contains many hours- 1008 of them: did I use that time as well as possible?”

“Were the fruits of the fasting more than merely looser clothing?””

Did I do enough?”

Although I know I can never do enough, and that all successful penances are due to grace, I ask anyway.When pondering this Holy Saturday, of where Jesus went and what he was doing, our ignorance is vast. The future Pope Benedict, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, declares, “But even if Holy Saturday has drawn deeply near to us in that way…a question remains unresolved – that of knowing what is really meant by the mysterious phrase that Jesus “descended into hell”. Let’s be clear about it: no one is really capable of explaining it…”

Moreover, citizens of the 21st century can’t comprehend the extent of the degradation, indignity, and complete extinction of a person through ancient Roman crucifixion. Father John Riccardo explains:

“Crucifixion as a means of execution in the Roman Empire had as its express purpose the elimination of victims from consideration as members of the human race. It cannot be said too strongly: that was its function. It was meant to indicate to all who might be toying with subversive ideas that crucified persons were not of the same species as either the executioners or the spectators and were therefore not only expendable but also deserving of ritualized extermination.“Therefore, the mocking and jeering that accompanied crucifixion were not only allowed, they were part of the spectacle and were programmed into it. In a sense, crucifixion was a form of entertainment.

Everyone understood that the specific role of the passersby was to exacerbate the dehumanization and degradation of the person who had been thus designated to be a spectacle. Crucifixion was cleverly designed—we might say diabolically designed—to be an almost theatrical enactment of the sadistic and inhumane impulses that lie within human beings. “Victims of crucifixion lived on their crosses for periods varying from three or four hours to three or four days…“Death could not devour our Lord unless He possessed a body, neither could hell swallow Him up unless He bore our flesh; and so He came in search of a chariot in which to ride to the underworld. This chariot was the body which He received from the Virgin; in it He invaded death’s fortress, broke open its strong-room and scattered all its treasure!”And He did all of this for us. How Death Was Undone

The triumph of the Cross

Surrealist Salvidor Dali’s magnificent Christ of St. John of the Cross was created after the artist’s return to the Catholicism of his youth. Dali discovered the writings of Saint John of the Cross along with a sketched image the saint saw in a vision. Saint John of the Cross’ pencilled drawing showed the crucified Christ from above, from the perspective of God the Father.

Saint John of the Cross’ image inspired Dali to create his cosmic Christ. Instead of the saint’s image of the excruciatingly ruined body of Christ, Dali’s painting expresses the Lord of Creation and his triumph over death. Dali’s absence of nails, the perfected body of Christ, magnificently reveals the Triumph of the Cross: He has conquered death for all of humanity and his creation

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The greatest sinner may now be saved; the blackest sin may now be blotted out; the clenched fist may now be opened; the unforgivable may now be forgiven. While they were most certain that they knew what they were doing, He seizes upon the only possible palliation of their crime and ignorance—“they know not what they do.” If they did know what they were doing as they fastened Love to a tree, and still went on doing it, they would never be saved. They would be damned.

It is only because fists are clenched in ignorance that they may yet be opened into folded hands; it is only because tongues blaspheme in ignorance that they may yet speak in prayer. It is not their conscious wisdom that saves them; it is their unconscious ignorance. 

The Cries of Jesus from the Cross

What better way to break the silence?

Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei