Holy Saturday

The Hiatus

Arnold Böcklin, The Deposition

If without the Son no one can see the Father (John 1:18), nor anyone come to the Father (John 14:6), and if, without him, the Father is revealed to nobody (Matthew 11:27), then when the Son, the Word of the Father is dead, then no one can see God, hear of him or attain him. And this day exists, when the Son is dead, and the Father, accordingly, inaccessible. Indeed, it is for the sake of this day that the Son became man—as Tradition has shown us. One can, no doubt, say: he came to bear our sins on the Cross, to take up the account-sheet of our debt, and to triumph thereby over principalities and powers (Colossians 2:14f): but this "triumph" is realized in the cry of God-forsakenness in the darkness (Mark 15:33–37), in "drinking the cup" and "being baptized with the baptism" (Mark 10:38) which lead down to death and hell. Then the silence closed around, as the sealed tomb will close likewise. At the end of the Passion, when the Word of God is dead, the Church has no words left to say. While the grain of corn is dying, there is nothing to harvest. This state of being dead is not, for the Word made man, one situation among others in the life of Jesus—as if the life thus briefly interrupted were simply to resume on Easter Day (though certain sayings of Jesus aimed at consoling his disciples about the "little while" may sound like that). Between the death of a human being, which is by definition the end from which he cannot return, and what we term "resurrection" there is no common measure. In the first place, we must take with full gravity this affirmation: in the same way that a man who undergoes death and burial is mute, no longer communicating or transmitting anything, so is with this man Jesus, who was the Speech, the Communication and the Mediation of God. He dies, and what it was about his life that made it revelation breaks off. Nor is this rupture simply the quasi-natural one of the dying man of the Old Testament who descends into the grave, returning to the dust from which he was made. This is the plunging down of the "Accursed One" (Galatians 3:13) far from God, of the One who is "sin" (II Corinthians 5:21) personified, who, falling where he is "thrown" (Apocalypse 20:14) "consumes" his own substance (Apocalypse 19:3); "Thou hast made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin" Isaiah 25:2):

Terror, and the pit, and the snare

are upon you, O inhabitant of the earth!

He who flees at the sound of the terror

shall fall into the pit:

and he who climbs out of the pit

shall be caught in the snare.

(Isaiah 24:17f; =Isaiah 48:43f)

This is the essence of the second death: that which is cursed by God in his definitive judgment (John 12:31) sinks down to the place where it belongs. In this final state, there is no time.

The danger is very real that we, as spectators of a drama beyond our powers of comprehension, will simply wait until the scene changes. For in this non-time there appears to be no possibility of following him who has become non-Word. In Hymn 35 Romanos ho Melodos sang of Mary at the foot of the Cross, and, in the dialogue between Mother and Son, he has the Son explain to his Mother how, like a doctor, he must strip off his clothes, so as to reach that place where the mortally ill are lying, and there heal them. The Mother pleads to be taken with him. He warns her: the whole creation will be shaken, earth and sea will flee away; the mountains will tremble, the tombs will be emptied . . . Then the dialogue is broken off, and the poet directs his prayer to the Son as "the owner of agony." We are not told whether all that remains is the anguished following gaze of Mary as her Son disappears into the inaccessible darkness where no one can reach him. The apostles wait in the emptiness. Or at least in the non-comprehension that there is a Resurrection and what it can be (John 20:r; Luke 24:21). The Magdalen can only seek the One she loves—naturally, as a dead man—at the hollow tomb, weeping from vacant eyes, groping after him with empty hands (John 20:11, 15). Filmed over with an infinite weariness unto death, no stirring of a living, hoping faith is to be found.

The poet makes Christ say:

I descended as low as being casts its shadows its shadows. I looked into the abyss, and cried, "Father, where are you?" But I only heard the everlasting ungovernable storm . . . And when I looked from the unmeasurable world to the eye of God, it was an empty socket, without foundation, that stared back at men. And eternity rested on the chaos, gnawing at it ruminating.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale,
 translated by Aidan Nichols, O.P.