Holy Saturday Reflection

Matthew 27: 56-66

Christians are the only people on earth who believe that death is a sign of victory. No other person would dare to make such a bold, if not foolish, claim about something so ominous. “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise,” as St. Paul rightly says.

Christians can say such things with a straight face because we know that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ. As a real, fleshy person Jesus lived as any one of us do today. He walked through every stage of life and experienced every range of human emotion. He even suffered death. Holy Saturday is about death. As the Gospel of Matthew tells us, Joseph of Arimathe’a took Jesus’ lifeless body and “wrapped it in a clean linen shroud, and laid it in his own new tomb. . .” (27:59).

Paradoxically, Holy Saturday is also about the gospel – the good news of Jesus Christ. Two places in the New Testament speak of Christ’s descent into the bowels of death.

· “When he [Jesus] ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive,” after having first “descended into the lower parts of the earth” (Eph. 4:8-9).

· Jesus “went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison” and then went “into heaven and is at the right hand of God” (1 Peter 3:18-22).

It is the character of God revealed in Christ to take the menacing, definite, all-consuming power of death and transform it from the inside out. Neither death nor hell has been left untouched by the redeeming hand of God. The mystery of Holy Saturday is that God walked among the dead and proclaimed to them the hope of the gospel.

You see, God’s rescue operation was to reclaim every square inch of creation for Himself. That meant Christ had to be dragged down to the pit of death, not only to liberate its captives, but to take its prison doors right off the hinges. He left them next to the stone after it was rolled away.

Christians journey through life backwards. In baptism we start by dying with Christ and then we move toward our final destination, which is participating in Christ’s resurrection life. The mystery of Holy Saturday quickens our Christian imagination. It trains our eyes to see the sheer victory of Christ in all things – even death.

Prayer:

Father, nothing is beyond your reach. Nothing is too broken for you to fix. No despair is so grave that you cannot breathe the fresh air of hope back into its lungs. Even death could not escape the grasp of your redemption. Good Father, by the power of the Holy