Theological Journal - April 11: Toward the 8th Day (Holy Saturday)

“The knowledge of Easter does not relax but maximizes the need to follow its antecedents in their narrative order. Then the grave of Jesus becomes a boundary preventing forward movement until one has first looked back, without the light of Easter, at the cross and seen its cataclysmic extinguishing of every light. In fact, there is no boundary, only a no man’s land. With no remarkable tomorrow on the horizon to give that sabbath special identity and form as an interruption between old and new, the interment of Jesus is shapeless and anti-climactic. It is simply the day after terminal rupture. This is the end of a man, a mission and a message; the end of the God of whom the message spoke, from whom the mission came, and to whom the man was Son; and the end of the world for all whose future hung with the coming of the Father’s kingdom.

 (Alan E. Lewis, “The Burial of God: Rupture and Resumption as the Story of Salvation,” Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 40, No. 3 (1987), 345-6)

Alan Lewis wrote a most remarkable book Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday in 2001 as he was dying of cancer. Face-to-face with his own personal rupture and in hope of the resumption of his life Lewis lived the dynamic of Holy Saturday about which he wrote. The quote above comes from an earlier essay that fed into the book. It is well worth spending some time and prayer over this Holy or Easter Saturday.

Failure to face this “rupture,” this “shapeless and anti-climactic” day of Jesus’ interment, this “end,” leads to a shallow, simplistic, theology of glory, unable to deal with God or his world with the courage and hope the suffering servanthood Jesus enjoins on his followers requires.

Failure to face this “rupture” has rendered the innocuous “Protestantism without Reformation” Bonhoeffer complained of.

-The Protestantism unable to mount any credible resistance to the Nazi face of German nationalism or the Corporate Capitalistic face of American nationalism.

-The Protestantism unable to make disciples of Jesus’ followers but only leave them “children” vulnerable to “every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming” (Eph.4:14).

-The Protestantism unable to form a church of any more substance than that of a “vendor of religious goods and services” or a spirituality deeper than “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”

Bonhoeffer himself described Protestantism without Reformation like this:

“American theology and the American church as a whole have never been able to understand the meaning of ‘criticism’ by the Word of God and all that signifies. Right to the last they do not understand that God’s ‘criticism’ touches even religion, the Christianity of the churches and the sanctification of Christians, and that God has founded his church beyond religion and beyond ethics. A symptom of this is the general adherence to natural theology. In American theology, Christianity is still essentially religion and ethics. But because of this, the person and work of Jesus Christ must, for theology, sink into the background and in the long run remain misunderstood, because it is not recognized as the sole ground of radical judgment and radical forgiveness. The decisive task for today is the dialogue between Protestantism without Reformation and the churches of the Reformation.” 

I take our kind of Protestantism to be one which has never taken seriously Holy Saturday as described by Lewis as an entering into the rupture, that death, that end of all religion and ethics Bonhoeffer referenced, that death that means the end of us and what possibilities we might possess, that we may then enter into the reality of the new life of resurrection we celebrate on Easter Sunday.   

We cannot get to Easter Sunday without going through immersion (with all that Lewis describes it as) in Holy or Easter Saturday. That alone makes what happened on Friday “good” for us and for the world. Alan Lewis gets the last word for us this Holy Saturday:

“It is a very different God, and a very different power, that we have discovered in the story of divine self-emptying, God’s capacity for weakness, the ability – without loss of Godness – to suffer and perhaps to die. This is the triune God of Jesus, fulfilled, majestic, glorified through self-expenditure in the lowly ignominy of our farthest country. There is power here, resurrecting, death-destroying, Devil-defeating; but it is the power of love, defying human expectation, which flowers in contradiction and negation, allowing sin its increase and giving death its day of victory, but only the more abundantly to outstrip both in the fecundity of grace and life. To live in the face of death an Easter Saturday existence, trusting in the weak but powerful love of the crucified and buried God, is itself to be objective, turned outward, away from self-reliance and self-preoccupation, away from our own determination to conquer death, which is in fact self-defeating and destructive. Instead, we are invited bravely and with frankness to admit or own defenselessness against the foe and entrust our self and destiny to the love of God which in its defenselessness proves creative and victorious.”

(Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 431.)