Easter 2020: “Christ has died...”
By Joseph Reigle
“Christ has died! Christ has Risen! Christ will come again!” The congregation in my church proclaims these three sentences every Sunday. In the Anglican tradition, we call this the Mystery of Faith. However, this mystery is not the kind that can be solved by a clever detective. We refer to these statements as a mystery because they speak of things that are impossible to comprehend.
The transformations from death to life to the life to come are subjects beyond our experience. By repeating these words each week, we remind ourselves of what we believe, but we also search these words for what we do not fully understand. On Holy Saturday, our minds are drawn toward the time in between death and resurrection, the space in between the sentences “Christ has died!” and “Christ has Risen!”
Radically, Holy Saturday is the one day of the year when Christians affirm that God is dead.
Such a depressing theme is unpleasurable to contemplate. Indeed, we often skip over this day in our minds, racing from Christ’s sacrifice on Good Friday to his revival on Easter. But what would it mean to remain in this eerie space between despair and hope, to sit in the uncertainty of resurrection?
Recently, death has haunted our days. The COVID-19 pandemic has made us all aware of life’s fragility and our own mortality. In January, when the novel coronavirus was only a whisper in the newsroom, I began my semester studying in Rome. Even now that I’m home, all the way in upstate New York, I still receive daily text message updates of cases and fatalities in Italy—Wednesday, April 8: 17,669 total deaths. The number is numbing.
In such times of trial, the assurance that God “will never leave you nor forsake you” can sound hollow. [1] Even Jesus shared this sorrowful sentiment when He cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” [2] To remain in grief is painful. The sheer amount of suffering we are witnessing may feel impossible to bear.
Dr. Shelly Rambo, a trauma scholar at Boston University School of Theology, expresses that to bear witness to extreme loss, we have to admit our inability to understand it. Yet, to know Christ necessarily involves an unknowing. Rambo looks to the gospel of John and suggests that the experience of trauma ought to influence our interpretation of Easter weekend. She asks pointedly,
What if the truths handed over [in John’s gospel] were not truths of what is known but truths about what is not known and not fully grasped? To receive these truths is always, in some way, to be turned back to the event of death, not as something known but as something that calls for a witness to its remainder. [3]
One of the finest examples of bearing witness to what is “not fully grasped” in the Easter story occurred on an Easter Saturday in 1956. The Catholic theologian Hans urs Von Balthazar asked listeners in a radio sermon “What is it that persists between death and Resurrection?” [4] Balthazar then offers the metaphor of a suspension bridge across a gorge (sound familiar, Cornellians?), allowing Christ to pass out of hell back to Earth. But, he dismantles the analogy with distorted pictures— first a thread crossing from death to life, then a rope that is too short to span the distance. The gap between life and death is unbridgeable. Balthazar’s descriptions—a fragile thread, a rope that is too short— preserve an emotional truth which we often elide: death’s finality is inescapable. The endurance of Christ’s love is a desperate journey. Insightfully, Rambo states “the impossibility of a beginning becomes its starting point.”
The Easter holiday is about a hope that extends to heaven but also a despair that remains in Sheol. On Holy Saturday, we acknowledge our pain and bear witness to the fear and suffering of others. For a day, we remain in the place of despair— even hopelessness.
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor notes that it is a peculiar fact of our secular era that time is perceived as a real object of reality rather than a human construal. [5] Even in the age of Zoom and social distancing, we think of time as either a utility or a swamp we have to wade through until the end of quarantine. We use clocks and calendars to organize tasks, produce checklists, and finish homework assignments. The Church calendar adds a layer of mystery to our conception of time. By repeating in ritual the life of Christ, we bring ourselves closer to His place in history. Holy Saturday 2020 is, in a way, closer in time to Easter Sunday 33ACE than any other day.
Perhaps we are especially close on this Holy Saturday. We share with Christ’s disciples the uncertainty of what lies in the days ahead. One of the peculiar pains of our time is that Easter will be celebrated in absence of each other. While feasts will take place at home with family, others will be alone, and friends will inevitably be missed.
The Christian religion is an embodied faith. We come to the communion table to receive the Eucharist bread in our hands, chew it with our teeth, and taste the wine on our tongues. This season of social distancing is one of indefinite longing for reunion with the body of Christ.
However, it is precisely from the location of despair that Christ is resurrected. John’s gospel relates this paradox with its imagery. A Roman soldier pierces Christ’s side with a spear, and water flowed from his wound. It is this same image of water that gives new birth in baptism, the same water that Christ transforms into wine at the wedding of Cana, and that same wine we receive as the blood of Christ. Death is transformed into life, but this story of salvation begins with defeat, not triumph. Like trauma, the death of Christ is too painful to comprehend. On Holy Saturday we remain for a day in this defeat, pay attention to our pain, and bear witness to the suffering of others.
Our mysterious joy begins with Christ’s death.
SOURCES
1. Deuteronomy 31:6 ESV
2. Matthew 27:46 ESV
3. Rambo, Spirit and Trauma. p. 76 (emphasis added)
4. Rambo, pg.139
5. Charles Taylor, The Secular Age. p. 53, quoted in James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular. p. 62