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EVENSONG ADDRESS – EASTER V

Very long pause. Waiting can be incredibly uncomfortable. We – or perhaps I – am perhaps most acutely aware of how uncomfortable this waiting can be in church. We twitch, our minds wander (rather than wonder!), and we do whatever we can to take the edge off. 

Much of my own misspent youth as a slightly over-churchy teenager was spent distractedly waiting in churches, gazing around, memorising the newsletter and perhaps reading the preface to the New English Hymnal for the hundredth time. We grow fidgety when we wait and distract ourselves in the pockets of space that precede and punctuate our worship. 

This evening, we are given Mark’s resurrection account, and it might feel strange to return to the empty tomb so late into Easter when we might prefer to hear more about the excitement of Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances. I’d like to rewind a little further to when the empty tomb had not yet been discovered and think about the waiting, the gap, that Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James and Salome– I’m afraid Simon Peter and John don’t get much of a look in – faced between seeing Joseph of Arimathea bury Jesus and their arrival at an empty tomb on Easter morning. 

They waited to visit the tomb, Mark suggests, on account of the Sabbath. Mark’s account is unique in making clear that they visited to anoint the body of Jesus – in John, the body was already anointed, in Luke they carry the spices but no mention is made of anointing, and in Matthew there is no spice at all. It is also made most clear in Mark that their delay in coming to the tomb was on account of the Sabbath, it being not permitted to anoint the body unless the spices had already been carried, and the body already prepared, a stipulation preserved in the Mishnah.[1]

It must have been a pretty strange sabbath. It can be all too easy to imagine that their rush at first light the next day embodies the same sort of giddy expectation that Christians today feel just before Easter, knowing how it will all end. I think, however, their rush would have been just as uncomfortable as their wait, in the knowledge that their duty remained unfulfilled while the unanointed corpse of Jesus had lain for so long.  The usual serenity of the Sabbath would have been, I’m sure, lost beneath the grief and shock of Jesus’ death, perhaps tinged too with guilt and restlessness, as Jesus’ friends remained painfully unaware of their final ritual obligation. The sabbath would have ended at dusk the previous day – we might imagine that they then went to purchase the aromata, the spices before a few hours’ rest and an early start to visit the tomb. It’s difficult to think they had a restful night. 

While they were subjected to such an imposed and unsteady rest on that Sabbath, however, perhaps the greatest event of human history was accomplished. Jesus had risen from the dead, on their uncomfortable Sabbath, and it had escaped their notice. 

In the West, we’re not especially good at giving Holy Saturday its due. It can all too easily become the day on which we do the easter flowers and vacuum the church. The Eastern church, however, has a much greater tradition, often holding funeral services for the buried Christ in the morning, returning after dusk to vespers of the resurrection. The day is known both as the Great Sabbath, the great day of rest, given that Christ’s body rested in the tomb, but also as Joyous Saturday in the Coptic church and Saturday of Light in the Syriac churches. 

Both East and West share a rich iconographic tradition of the so-called harrowing of Hades, depicting the victorious Christ dragging the damned from hell with his own pierced Hands. Some of my favourite Western images even depict the jaws of hell as belonging to a strange kind of beast, often a fish or a lion, from whose mouth a procession of the now-redeemed emerges. 

The dramatic events of Holy Saturday are captured most evocatively by an ancient homily that the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church gives us to read each year, most likely by the third-century exegete Origen. I hope you’ll indulge my reading some of it to you now. It begins:

"What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.

Truly he goes to seek out our first parent like a lost sheep; he wishes to visit those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. He goes to free the prisoner Adam and his fellow-prisoner Eve from their pains, he who is God, and Adam's son.

The Lord goes in to them holding his victorious weapon, his cross. When Adam, the first created man, sees him, he strikes his breast in terror and calls out to all: 'My Lord be with you all.' And Christ in reply says to Adam: ‘And with your spirit.’ And grasping his hand he raises him up, saying: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.[2]

The author does an excellent job of emphasising the stillness of Christ’s corpse and the expectancy of the earth while Christ descended to hell to redeem fallen humanity. On the cross Jesus had been taunted by a fellow-sufferer who had challenged:

He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. (Mt 27:42)

Jesus doesn’t leap from the cross, and he didn’t give those watching an instant resurrection precisely because they had to wait. The Marys and Salome  had to wait, too – if they hadn’t, if they’d broken the sabbath, they might have anointed Jesus’ resting body and not have discovered the resurrection. They had to wait, and only in waiting do they find something so stunningly unimaginable – so much so that their initial reaction is that of shock and fear - that their lives will never be the same again. 

So often in the gospels Jesus reminds his followers that they will only understand his purposes through patience. The same is true today. We act when we can, but when impositions prevent us from acting, we must remember that when hell was harrowed, there would have been nothing for those disciples to see. The frustrating wait meant that the disciples were able to see the effects of God’s saving work, the empty tomb which prefigures our own vocation to resurrection light, something that they would have missed had they either impatiently returned to the tomb on the Sabbath to anoint the body, or not returned at all.

Jesus sanctified the grave on Holy Saturday, and by so doing he sanctified the uncomfortable wait of his friends.

Daniel and the lions 

As you will have guessed, the Old Testament lesson given today, the familiar story of Daniel and the lions, has traditionally been identified as a type of the resurrection, and it makes sense that it is appointed to be read in Easter. Both are stories about sons of Judah falling victims to envy, both are willing victims of evil plots to put them to death, both are unjustly sentenced by earthly rulers acquiescing to the demands of the mob. Both pray to God, and both are – one alive, one dead – confined by a stole. Both are later discovered, and the miracle of their survival – or resurrection – is made apparent by its effect. So too, just as Jesus does not immediately leap from the cross,  Daniel doesn’t immediately tame the lions, they don’t become his attack-dogs seeking an immediate revenge – even if his enemies will eventually meet their grizzly fate at the lion’s paws – but the sympathetic king has to wait to see God’s power manifest. 

Back to the tomb

I really want to emphasise what we might call God’s creative delay. When we hear ‘the third day’, our mind often goes to the many types of this third day that scripture gives, particularly mindful of Jesus’ resurrection assurance on the road to Emmaus that all must happen according to the scriptures God provides Abraham a ram in place of Isaac after three days in Genesis – God appeared at Sinai on the third day in Exodus. Both Hosea and Isaac promise deliverance from captivity on the third day. Jonah escapes the fishy ‘belly of sheol’ on the third day.  I could go on. All of these third days imply agonising waits. 

In the Apostle’s Creed that we’ve just recited together, you’ll have noticed that it is made explicit that somewhere between the cross and the empty tomb, Christ descended into what we call hell, the Greek simply meaning the depths, a word often associated with Hades, and the verb the creed uses to descend comes from the same root – he went down to the depths. Now, I’m being a bit naught here, as this clause is found in no permutation of the Nicene Creed. The fathers of Nicaea and Constantinople certainly didn’t the existence of hell, and we might treat its omission as a pregnant pause. I’m not going to go into the nature of what happened while the Marys and Salome restlessly waited – much has been said and will be said on this, and as one scholar points out, even my own hero Augustine doesn’t venture to address the question in a homiletic context.[3] Whatever did happen, it was death-shattering, and certainly worth the wait. 

The two Marys and Salome were, in spite of their faithfulness, likely disappointed before they found the empty tomb. ‘We thought he was the one to redeem all Israel’ (Lk24:21), as another would put it. The one for whom they had given up everything and followed was dead. But they still showed up, they still did their duty at the earliest available opportunity. While they waited, Jesus sanctified the grave and opened heaven for all believers. Perhaps spare them, and all those who have waited and who wait now a thought next time you hear ‘on the third day’. For there to be a third day, there must be a second day, and a first day. The drama of the passion is followed by the uneasy rest of the sabbath. It is only after such an uneasy rest that the light and joy of the resurrection is discovered. Amen.