Holy Saturday 12 noon

Saturday
12.00 noon

While we rest

For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight people, were saved through water. (I Peter 3. 18-20)

The disciples were forced to rest and to wait. But was Jesus resting? St Peter in his First Letter suggests otherwise, as does the tradition for this Holy Saturday. In the Apostles’ Creed we say that he ‘descended into hell’, and it must have been on this day that all this happened. Like a super-hero, Jesus enters the place of our greatest fears, that prison in which humankind had been kept, from which there was no escape, and brings those lost in death to life. This is called ‘the harrowing of hell’. Christ breaks into hell and, in the tradition, finds our first parents Adam and Eve, and the righteous souls from the Old Testament and brings them out into the new life that his death has secured for us. This was no day of rest for Jesus – the work of resurrection had begun. But we, with the disciples, must wait.