On Good Friday, the church accompanied Jesus in his passion, torture, crucifixion and death. On Holy Saturday, we mark his passage into the tomb as the world parties on over the long weekend.
The events leading up to Jesus’ death on Golgotha were brutal and tragic. They violated justice, the rules of evidence, and the integrity of the human person.
On a Friday the church marks as “good,” the Son of Man was bound, whipped, crushed, nailed and suffocated to death, for our sakes.
In the aftermath of that suffering, the lifeless body of Christ was bound again and placed in a tomb, at first glance appearing like the final seal of defeat. To those that follow Christ, Holy Saturday might feel like the first day in the life of a lifeless people.
Living with our first world problems and the sometimes real limitations those problems might impose on us (the cost of living crisis being the most visceral felt by many) still will not compare to the bindings imposed on Christ.
Nor do they compare to the scores of newly unemployed, newly rendered-homeless, the migrant workers or the victims of ongoing warfare or ongoing religious persecution, those members of the Body of Christ who face contemporary crucifixions in our day.
That being said, the limitations to our designs and aspirations are still not so frivolous as to fade into insignificance. In their own small way, even our inconveniences can be meaningfully connected to the Passion, and play some part in the drama of redemption.
Drawing on the Gospel of John, the ancient theological school of Alexandria provided the important insight that the Passion was the all-important time of Jesus’ glorification. In this context, the scriptural motif of Jesus as the Second Adam becomes especially illuminating.
Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians makes a number of parallels between Adam and Jesus. These Scriptural references live on in the writings of Church Fathers like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and John Chrysostom. It also lives on in our day in the fifth paragraph of Vatican II’s Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium.
These sources tell us that as the first Adam slept in the Book of Genesis, God created a woman out of his side. They also tell us that in a new Genesis of the Passion, as Christ the Second Adam slept the sleep of death, God created another woman from Christ’s side, who Sacrosanctum Concilium calls “the wondrous sacrament of the whole church.”
Furthermore, if Jesus the Second Adam was meant to complete what was left incomplete in the first Adam, this means that during Christ’s Passion, the Second Adam marries the church upon its creation from his side.
This is why, in speaking of the Passion, John Chrysostom ended one of his homilies with the rhetorical question: Do you understand then, how Christ has united his Bride with himself?
The Passion is glorious because it is a wedding. It is glorious because the Second Adam brings about a new Genesis and unfolds a new Eden within history. It is glorious because the tomb is a crucible in which the old order is overturned, and from which new life springs forth.
As members of Christ’s church, many might in varying ways feel that all we are doing is entering the tomb and sleeping the sleep of indeterminate waiting with Christ, hovering at the threshold between life and death. However great or however small our sufferings, they are not meaningless. They are occasions to tarry in the tomb with Christ.
While the world parties on, we might in this Paschal season learn where our own interior tombs—spiritual, psychological and emotional—are found. We might enter into those tombs and join ourselves to the Second Adam, and in so doing join in his awakening, join in his manifesting that new Genesis in our day.
Lying in these tombs on Holy Saturday might be the first day where a people, Christ’s people, await him to say, in the words of the unnamed ancient homilist on Holy Saturday, “I order you O sleeper, to awake.”