The Christ is dead; the corpse of the Son of God lies on a cold slab in a suffocating, lightless tomb.
Holy Saturday is a difficult day to keep holy. My parish marks it with morning prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours, but most churches don’t do anything, which is certainly appropriate; Jesus Christ is liturgically dead. And so I’ve taken to my own observances. Last year after the Good Friday communion liturgy, my wife and I watched The Passion of the Christ, and on Holy Saturday we kept things low-key while listening to Bach’s Matthäus-Passion and Johannes-Passion as well as Mozart’s and Verdi’s Requiems.
But life goes on. Our young kids (almost 5 and 3) can’t help but play, sometimes cooperating, sometimes protesting in shrill tones some grave injustice the other has perpetrated by encroaching on (say) a Thomas the Tank Engine track layout. My mother will host Easter dinner, and so we will prepare some food for that. And for many people, even those who will be in Easter Sunday services tomorrow, Holy Saturday is another Saturday filled with shopping, yardwork, fishing, and the like.
Holy Saturday started to hit me differently a few years ago. I suspect it had to do with three major events occurring within a period of several months. First, I turned 35, which meant my life was half over, as I’d count myself blessed to make it to seventy. I began to feel life was now downhill. Second, our son Hans was born, and as those of you who are parents know, having children entails epistemological paradigm shifts: we see the world differently. Third, just a few weeks after Hans’ birth, I buried my father. And so I came to the existential realization that life was short and moving ever faster and that we play for keeps.
Sensitive now to the fragility of human life and the grave responsibilities laid upon us by God and Nature and newly alive to the joys and terrors of life in this beautiful and horrible world as a member of a glorious and murderous race, Holy Saturday punched me in the gut.
They killed him. They really did.
Many Christians in modernity, I think, have a conception of the crucifixion restricted to a legal version of penal substitutionary atonement: Our problem is guilt, for which God must punish us, but loving us and desiring to forgive us, God punishes Christ in our place.
True enough as far as it goes, but when compared to classical soteriologies, whether Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant, it doesn’t go very far. For it leaves the horror of the human condition outside of us, as this model concerns merely our legal status, and thus leaves no remedy for the wretched realities ruining us.
What about sin as a condition within us, in our very natures? What about the our four traditional enemies of Sin, Death, Hell, and the Devil, those hypostasized forces which animate mortal and demonic violence against us, often from within us?
Sin, Death, Hell, and the Devil afflict us from within and without. Our problem isn’t only God’s posture of wrath towards us, which can seem far away, terrible as it is. Our problem is that the we and the World are both fallen and afflicted, evil within, evil without, near us.
The cross isn’t just a component in the economy of our salvation, something God needed to do to Christ to acquit us. The cross also reveals the hatred of the human race towards God. They killed him: God comes into the World in Jesus Christ, and Jew and Gentile conspire to cooperate in killing God for reasons of convenience.
The World stands guilty of deicide.
And so on Holy Saturday I feel generally sick to my stomach. The one man who could have helped us, we hammered him to a cross. And that means two things: Deep down, I’m capable of murder and I’m liable to being murdered. We mustn’t deceive ourselves about our capacity for sin, and that of others.
Most people have a theologia gloriae, a theology of glory in which we bypass the cross as we affirm ourselves and affirm God for affirming us in a circle of moral therapeutic deist bilge. True theology, as Luther so rightly and so often stressed, is a theologia crucis, a theology of the cross in which God’s murderers are saved by God through the very instrument of His murder. Our salvation cannot consist in self-improvement; our salvation consists in our own crucifixion.
God doesn’t affirm us; God saves us.
But not yet, not today. Tomorrow.
We killed Him. Kyrie eleison.
[Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared on CWR on March 30, 2013.]
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“No good deed goes unpunished.”
And yet the self-donating Christ was fully in charge, submitting willingly: “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father” (John 10:18).
Yours truly is unable to locate in “The Diary” of St. Faustina where Christ reveals of His total Passion: “If I could have suffered even more for you, I would have.”
Thanks! I was just going to post John 10:17, 18. So, instead, here’s Matthew 26:53: “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?”
Peter, it seems to me that Jehovah was continually involved in the Passion. All things had to be accomplished ‘as it was written’, and that writing was in Jehovah’s charge since Gen 3:15.
That implies that the suffering also was foreordained and not subject to Jesus’ or anyone else’s desires. (By that I don’t mean any supernatural intervention. A man of his age and general health, allowing for the extreme cruelty exercised by his jailers, would be expected to suffer and die in a certain number of hours. The acccounts indicate that “it is accomplished” did happen thus. Didn’t need his legs broken.)
Not being Pharisaical here, just trying to keep down the emotional level in a discourse about an already emotion-filled scene.
And John 10:18 is a telling reply to Pilate’s gang of thugs. I always took it to show the voluntary nature of his instant agreement back in Genesis 3;15. Good for us poor sods down here, eh? (Cf. John 18:37. Wrong answer to give to this vice-Caesar.)
Also, from my reading of some of the mystical writers like Faustina, and their assigned ‘confessors and guides’ I can tell you that that passage may not have been in the original but was added to accommodate someone’s personal attitude. Beware of non-biblical sources. 🙄
Dr Huizenga captures the fundamental outlay of the two natures and crucifixion of Christ. The God who indeed is in charge expressed in the divine nature, and the obedient son who cries out, My God, Why have you forsaken me?
“Many Christians in modernity have a conception of the crucifixion restricted to a legal version of penal substitutionary atonement”. The God in charge is in charge throughout, the Son merely a form of puppet without real living experience, without really suffering pain and doubt, without a soul. Christ’s crucifixion was not a sideshow to add theatrical drama to his passion, and for us to indulge our presumptuousness during Lent. It’s for us, as Huizenga rightly isolates, to recognize our guilt and the real price paid in the pouring out of his precious blood, not as in a playact, to redeem us.
So we can say we killed God in killing Christ the Son of Man. A great mystery we can never fully fathom. Except that the shedding of blood that forgives sin can only be repaid by the shedding of our own blood figuratively or real. That our collective condemnation of God in Christ speaks to our despisal of pure love. That repayment can only be with the true coin of love.
The author comes too close to saying, “The Jews killed him. They really did.”
No, he doesn’t. The essay states:
Seriously.
Yeah, he kinda does. There is no “they” in “mea culpa”. What is lacking from the article is the acknowledgement that each of us can RIGHTLY claim to be the chief of sinners, let alone the memory of having cried out, “CRUCIFY HIM!” on Palm Sunday.
The responsibility for the evil of the Crucifixion does not fall solely on the Jews, nor solely on the Romans, nor on them combined, nor is it even shared by all of humanity as some sort of collective. It falls entirely and without division on each of us. Saying “we” (as he does later) is a little better than saying “they” (as he does at first), but it is still an evasion.
Seriously.
Why do you constantly post ego driven, argumentative, petty posts on this site? What’s the game plan? Seriously.
There is a personal judgment and a general judgment. Nations will be judged at both levels and so will each one of us. Damnation or Merit.
The fierceness of eschatological judgment is not to be underestimated. Christ decreed that the Mosaic law is not abolished but perfected.
Christ also perfected Fear of the Lord and brotherly piety. I wish you well.
There is not a single thing in this essay which blames Jews for Jesus’s death.That particular accusation of antisemitism is a figment of your imagination. Although His crucifixion certainly took place because of the machinations of Jewish religious leaders of the time. Every Christian knows ( or should know) that our own sins played just as real a part in the death of Jesus as anyone else’s, including the Jews. But there is no way to pretend the Jews played NO part in his death
And yet, we completely forget the 2nd reading on Good Friday. We forget that the veil of the temple was torn in two, exposing the Holy of holiest. We remember the cross, but Jesus’ sacrifice was done once for all time, and as a result, I don’t take a “gut punch” on Good Friday. I remember, and “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace.” There can be no cross without an empty tomb.
And, FWIW, ‘once for all [time]’ _is_ scriptural.
We read: “The World stands guilty of deicide.” Hey, Dr. Huizenga, get with the program! Behold the new Litany of Moveable Goal Posts!
“WHERE particular “moral judgments” are superseded by autonomous “decisions” under the Fundamental Option, consequentialism, and proportionalism (the obsolete Veritatis Splendor)?
WHERE the blessing of “persons” is replaced by the middle-ground non-blessings of situations and “irregular couples”?
WHERE the “permanent council” of the non-synod Der Synodale Weg is stalled, only to be replanted in Rome as a continuous “forum,” under mutating synodality?
WHERE the Second Vatican Council is superseded by synodality; where synodality is eclipsed “experts;” and where experts are eclipsed by “study groups”? The personal and institutional responsibility of Apostolic Succession and guardianship is totally eclipsed by theologians and laity?
WHERE sacramental ordination was redefined as “presiders” and where, soon, as non-ordained “deaconesses”—maybe at the Gospel and homilies, but reassuredly only under limited circumstances?
WHERE study groups will harmonize (!) a middle-ground “relationship between charity and truth;” and where the moral virtue of “prudential judgment” is harmonized into a mongrel middle ground between “innocent as a dove and sly as a serpent;” and, where the truth, charity, and clarity of Veritatis Splendor is sequestered away from “pre-moral” “situations”?
WHERE Jesus Christ—as in Nestorian times—is again schizophrenic: the concrete Jesus versus the horribly idealistic Christ? And, where even the clarity of Council of Nicaea, rather than discerning dogmatically the Triune Oneness, was really only the first step of “walking together” into a more fluid synodality without contours?
AND, yes, where the full Scandal of the Cross did “happen,” but maybe only later as more of a pious overlay? Hyperbole? Such that, today under an ambiguous “pluralism” of religions, Christianity itself is harmonized down into an encysted dhimmi within both Secularism and Islam. A peripheral “special case,” a polyhedral (c)hurch within a polyhedral world—not unlike continental Africa as now eclipsed within the Church by Fiducia Supplicans?
Not, “who am I to judge”—but, rather, who are we Not to “decide”! Or, was it Deicide? Or, whatever. . .
Lord Jesus Christ You are our One Master and our One Faith.