Hans Holbein the Younger, The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1520-1522..

Alone.

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Resurrection, and, for some, tonight will feature The Great Vigil of Easter. I’m relatively tight about my calendrics, so I’ll not post an Easter message today. I’ll not post one tomorrow, as Bishop Eaton has issued one, and I commend it to you.

Today is Holy Saturday, an oft neglected day on the calendar that is probably more observed in our parishes by altar guilds changing the paraments, making sure the lilies are symmetrically arranged, and double checking the communion supplies. Choirs may be getting their last practice in for the big day, and pastors are putting the finishing touches on their sermons as they dream of the clerical sabbath of Easter Monday. Yet, amid all that, let us not forget that Christ was dead.

I know, you’re probably thinking, we did that yesterday (and we talked about it on Palm Sunday and maybe on Maundy Thursday and…and…and…). I’m not talking about Christ dying. I’m talking about Christ being dead. There is a grammatical difference between to die and to be dead, and, if I were speaking instead of writing, I would put a little verbal emphasis on the be: to be dead. Christ could have died and immediately lived again. I suppose one might argue that to die must conclude at the point of being dead, but Christ’s death is no fleeting moment when the heart is not beating (or, to be much more textual, when there is no respiration). Christ dies and remains dead until the resurrection on the third day.

Being dead, he is carried to a tomb and is laid in it. He does not walk to the tomb; he does not lie down in the tomb. He is dead, and others do for him because the dead do not do for themselves. He is laid in the tomb, and those who carried him there depart, for the sabbath approaches, and there, after thirty-three years of doing for humanity what humanity could not do for itself—humanity being dead in sin—he has his sabbath.

Consider this tomb. It is a new tomb, a tomb in which no one has been laid. This is no place for the living. The living, having not even completed the final acts of devotion due the dead, abandon him, and, this being a new tomb, he lacks even the company of the dead. If a psalm could rise in such a place, would it not be Psalm 88?

My friend and my neighbor
You have put away from me;
     And darkness is my only companion.

The morbid melancholy that could surround this day may obscure the hope buried in apparent hopelessness. Yes, we know how this story ends. We know that Christ is risen from the dead. We know how this story will end yet again. Christ returns and the graves give up their dead. Yet, there is hope for us even here, in the tomb. In Christ’s burial, in his being dead, he joins us even when it seems that we are utterly alone. It is insufficient to say that he lived as one of us. It is insufficient to say that he suffered as one of us. It is even insufficient to say that he died as one of us. He was dead, and, if Christ can be dead, I can be dead too. I need not fear the tomb for where Christ has led the way, I can follow. Even as I am laid in the grave, I will find him there waiting for me, and, even in that darkness when all others have departed, he will be my companion.

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
     Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend to heaven, thou art there!
     If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!

Søren Kierkegaard, in this Works of Love (1847), wrote,

We should learn from God what love is. He is indeed the one who first loved us - and thus is our first teacher, who by loving us taught us love so that we could love him. And when at last the couch of death is prepared for you and you go to the bed never to get up again, when the stillness grows around you, when those close to you gradually leave, stillness grows because only those closest to you remain, and then when those closest to you leave quietly and the stillness grows because only the most intimate ones remain, and when the last one has gone - then there still remains one by the deathbed, he who was the first - God.

✠Riegel