Dead and Buried

One of the most offensive claims that Christians make about their faith is captured in the next phrase: “Dead and buried.” Gods are immortal. Gods do not die. But Christians claim that God did die. He died on the cross on Friday. He was put in a tomb. He was in the tomb all of Holy Saturday. God was truly dead. For as you remember, we believe that Jesus was truly man and also truly god. So to state joyfully that the Son of God is allowed to die is an extraordinary thing for non-Christian ears to hear. And nothing was done to Jesus without the cooperation of his human will. So we cannot slip into the fallacy that somehow or other his human nature was overridden by his divine nature. If Jesus is fully man then he has free will. He cannot be some kind of a human robot that is directed by his divine will.

Because he’s human he gets to choose. And Jesus chose to cooperate with his father’s plan. He accepted death on a cross as his Heavenly Father’s will for him. He chose death. On Good Friday here at Saint Catherine’s, we have meditations on the seven last words from the cross. And whenever I meditate on those seven last words I am struck by the sense that Jesus was completely in control of things all the way to the very end. Especially when you read the Passion as given to us by Saint John, it’s very clear that Jesus was not a victim in the sense that he had no power, but he was a victim in the sense that he was the offering – the Holocaust – that resulted in the atonement we talked about last time.

And the word “buried” is included in the Creed because it means that he not only died but he stayed dead. We see in the gospels many times where a child is dead but immediately comes back to life when Jesus speaks. In the ttory of Lazarus, the writer makes it clear that the man is really dead because he’s been in the tomb for a number of days. The sister Martha complains that opening the tomb is going to be a bad idea because it’s going to stink. That’s what it means by buried. I hope some of you Monty Python fans are immediately going to the dead parrot sketch. Jesus was not merely pining for the fjords, he was really dead buried in a tomb.

And meditating on this can be very fruitful for us. Holy Saturday is a very quiet day in the church calendar. There’s no Holy Saturday mass. The first Mass after Holy Thursday is the Easter Vigil, and officially that really starts in the middle of the night of Sunday morning. Over the years, church men have gotten used to moving it so that you know it’s dusk on Saturday, but that’s to accommodate for the fact that Father has to get up and do three more masses tomorrow morning.

So we are really invited on Holy Saturday to enter into the quiet bleakness of the day. We know Jesus is dead because we were there on Good Friday when he died. But on Holy Saturday we don’t know that tomorrow on Easter he will rise from the dead. Those of you who are praying the Liturgy of the Hours will find on Holy Saturday one of the readings for the Office of Readings is an ancient sermon describing what’s known as the harrowing of hell, when Jesus went down to the realm of the dead and preached the good news to those who hadnever been able to hear it during the time of the Old Testament. So even on the quiet bleakness of the morning of Holy Saturday, there is this small but growing sense of joy. So he is dead and buried, but he will rise on the third day.