the christian calendar on Holy Saturday

Reflection It is striking that after Jesus’ death there are no close companions left to claim his body. All his public followers scattered. Only a secret follower, Joseph of Arimathea, accompanied by...

There are so many things we do not understand⁠ So many ways we long for change and closure⁠ Help us to trust you⁠ even when the situation is desperate and out of control⁠ Help us to follow you⁠ even...

If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth.

Only the one who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved.

We will never know, this side of heaven, what terrible struggles took place in the spiritual world between Palm Sunday and Easter morning.

Merciful and everliving God, Creator of heaven and earth, the crucified body of your Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy day. Grant that we may await with him the dawning of the third day...

Something strange is happening—there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. God has died in the flesh and hell trem...

For the glory of God is most fully revealed in the descent of the Son into suffering, death and the passivity of the grave, that which is the kenosis of all beauty.

On Holy Saturday Jesus entered into the kind of forsakenness and abandonment beyond anything any person could experience. He was not content to deal with our sin problem; his love extended into the wo...

On Holy Saturday I do my best to live in that place, that wax-crayon place of trust and waiting. Of accepting what I cannot know. Of mourning what needs to be mourned. Of accepting what needs to be ac...

[Holy Saturday] means there is no part of human existence to which Christ did not ‘descend.’

To put it positively, the descensus is a thoroughly biblical doctrine, which teaches that Jesus experienced human death as all humans do—his body was buried, and his soul departed to the place of the ...

And because he is God in the flesh, he defeated the place of the dead and the grave by descending into them and then rising again on the third day. In the Christian tradition, this hope is known as th...

Saturday is not a day we commemorate what Jesus did for us, but has been turned into a day we spend preparing for Easter.

When I recite this in church [Jesus’ decent into Hell], I think there is just no place where the encompassing love of God can’t be present. There is no place where God is afraid to go.

To be sure, it was not Easter Sunday but Holy Saturday, but, the more I reflect on it, the more this seems to be fitting for the nature of our human life: we are still awaiting Easter; we are not yet ...

Just as when we were children, we were afraid to be alone in the dark and could only be assured by the presence of someone who loved us. Well this is exactly what happened on Holy Saturday, the voice ...

Every Holy Saturday, the Church waits as it were beside the tomb, meditating on Christ's death while awaiting the announcement of his resurrection. Like John, we can take Mary into our homes and p...

The Holy Saturday moment: when all seems dark & grim and the only thing left to do is wait...on the Lord for tomorrow morning's hope is risen.

In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to reca...

Christ descended into Hades so that you and I would not have to. Christ descended to Hades so that we might ascend to heaven. Christ entered the realm of death, the realm of the strong enemy, and came...

Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still becau...

Do not fear death; the Savior’s death has brought freedom. He endured death and thus destroyed it. He descended into Hell and destroyed it. Even as Hell tasted his flesh he threw it into chaos. Al...

Today is Holy Saturday, the day between the cross and the resurrection of Christ. It’s a day of reflection and waiting. It’s a time to consider further the reality of the cross so as to prepare for th...

Descents are everywhere. From Hercules and Orpheus venturing into Hades, to Harry Potter following the pipes down into the Chamber of Secrets, to the Sheriff and Joyce Byers frantically searching for ...

When the New Testament speaks about “the dead,” it has a specific background, one that affirms “the [place of the] dead” as a location containing the disembodied souls of both the righteous and unrigh...

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Christ lay in death’s bonds given over for our sins, He has risen again and brought us life . . . It was a strange battle, that death and life waged, life claimed the victory, it devoured death. The s...

What, as Christians, can we say to those who face death, either their own or that of their loved ones? We certainly can give them the hope of Christ’s resurrection, if they or their loved one has trus...