NewCreation

Homily for Holy Saturday, years ABC

The Homily for Holy Saturday Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for Holy Saturday. Some of you may be surprised by this. For Catholics, Holy Saturday is an a-liturgical day. There is no liturgy, no mass. People can pray, people can read; there are texts for all of those, but it's the un-liturgical day because it's before the dawn of creation, which is going to be celebrated on Saturday night. But for those of a more Reformation mind, some friends have asked me to comment on the readings held as the Gospel for Holy Saturday. Actually, the readings are only — it's very, very short — it's just John 19:38 to 42, starting with Joseph of Arimathea. But I think that it's misleading to have just that. And I'm going to use as the texts for Holy Saturday the passage immediately before that, which is a strict parallel. The two are a diptych: they go together, they start the same way and they are due to finish the same way, come to a midpoint which is absolutely central, and they both come immediately after Jesus breathing out his last. In other words, if on Good Friday the celebration ends — boom — with Jesus's expiration, as it should, then everything else is, if you like, a pre-description of what's going to go on on Holy Saturday, the day of rest, the liturgical day before the new creation. So, Jesus expires and immediately it says: "Since it was the day of preparation, the Jews did not want the bodies left on the cross during the Sabbath, especially because that Sabbath was a day of great solemnity." Okay. The day of preparation, meaning that it was the day before the Passover. So it was the day on which the lambs were slaughtered, because the idea was that on the day before Passover families took the lambs to be slaughtered, then took them home and prepared them with spices, amongst other things, to be eaten the next day. So Friday was the day of preparation. The Jews didn't want the bodies left on the cross during the Sabbath, and this was because in the Book of Deuteronomy it says clearly that you shouldn't leave dead criminals exposed, because it defiles the whole land. They must be taken down before nightfall. So if that was something in the law anyhow, you can imagine how much more important that was on the eve of the Passover. They didn't want anything obscuring that fact. Now, normally I could imagine that Romans executed people when they wanted to and left bodies where they wanted to. But on this particular occasion, The Jews went to Pilate, the governor, and asked him to break the legs of the criminals so that they would die quickly, because the form of death by crucifixion was essentially suffocation, and for as long as your legs were able to support you, to hold you up, you could still breathe. With broken legs people died very quickly. So they asked Pilate to have the legs of the crucified men broken and the bodies removed. Perfectly understandable request to the Roman authorities, saying please, on this occasion, respect our feast. Then the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and of the other who had been crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out. He who saw this has testified, so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth. So what had come out of Jesus on the cross? That had come out: the breath, the spirit, the water, and the blood. This is not what normally comes out of dead people — not the water and the blood. The blood signifying atonement, and the water that which was promised at the time of Ezekiel as flowing from the new Temple. So what does this indicate? This indicates that this dead Jesus is the new Temple. And furthermore, it's a complete re-founding of Zion, such that the coming out of the blood and water looks like afterbirth, so that Jesus's wound was often depicted in medieval art as a vulva from which water and blood came out, indicating that Jesus had given birth to the new Zion. This is an extraordinarily important moment in the Gospel. It's John's most emphatic: "He who saw this has testified, so that you also may believe. His testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth." He's saying: yes, what I saw on the cross was God himself, the holy place opened up, revealing himself as dead Jesus, who had thus given us the spirit — so that no longer was death something to run us or keep us away from holiness — the blood, so that we can be sprinkled and set free from all our sins, and the water, so that we can be part of the new Temple together with him, extending to the ends of the earth, as in the vision of Ezekiel. All that, just in these little phrases. And then John gives a little hint as to what's going on here: "These things occurred so that the Scripture might be fulfilled: none of his bones shall be broken." And there's a wonderful irony in that, because the "none of his bones shall be broken" is sometimes assumed — and perfectly reasonably assumed — to be the sign that Jesus was the Passover lamb, because the instructions in Exodus and Numbers concerning the Passover lamb is "you shall not break its bones." But the quote actually refers directly to Psalm 34, where it talks about the death of the righteous: "not one of his bones shall be broken." The passive — "not one of his bones shall be broken." And part of what John is doing here is to show simultaneously that dead Jesus on the cross is simultaneously the definitive Passover lamb and the definitive righteous one, the Son, the only begotten Son. So he has fulfilled the whole sacrificial history of Israel in one go. And he brings this out again, and says, "again another passage of Scripture says they will look on the one whom they have pierced." This is Zechariah. It's hugely important, not least because of a difference in the text which we don't often get to see, where it says: "I will pour out a spirit of compassion and supplication on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so that when they look on me whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him as one weeps over a firstborn." The only child, the firstborn — the references to the Davidic son and heir, understood as part of the prophecy of "God will provide" to Abraham: the firstborn, the beloved. So here all of that has been fulfilled. This is the most striking apotheosis: the piercing, the not breaking the bones, the taking down from the cross. And now we have two other people — no longer the Jewish authorities. Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. First of all the Jewish authorities had gone to Pilate; now Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple, but clearly someone who wanted to show his love and respect for Jesus even in Jesus's death. He clearly thought of him as dead, but he plucked up courage to do something which was very brave: he was going to take down the body, which would mean that he would be impure. He would not be able to celebrate the Passover. Did he know that the definitive Passover had already arrived, and that therefore it really didn't matter that he wouldn't be able to celebrate the Passover? We don't know. It's the sense of somebody on the border. But remember, the disciples who had followed Jesus in the light had all run away. So Joseph of Arimathea — not at all a bad person; on the contrary. He's showing as much faith and love as he can. Pilate gave him permission, so he came and removed his body. So he's prepared to be impure so as to honor Jesus. Nicodemus, who had first come to Jesus by night — in other words, someone from the Jewish authorities but who himself was frightened of them — also came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes weighing about 100 pounds. And here we have again one of these wonderful ironies. So Nicodemus, who remember would first have been frightened, then later during a row in the Temple concerning Jesus had actually stood up for Jesus and demanded due process for him according to the law, and now he comes, and he comes bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes. Except that here's where things get interesting, and it says weighing about 100 pounds — in other words, no small supply of myrrh and aloes. Now, it wasn't common for Jewish people to embalm the bodies of people who had died, but if they were going to, these were the spices with which they would do so. Why? Because when you wrapped the body in the spices, as the body began to decompose, so the spices — their smell was released, their embalming effect began to occur — and they would glue the shroud to the body, so it would become a hard, sticky mess which would keep down the smell of decomposition. So this was something that was very expensive, and it was only done for very rich and important people. So here Nicodemus is actually making a very great show of devotion to Jesus in embalming him. But of course, myrrh and aloes also appear in the Song of Songs as that which is put into the bedroom to prepare for the nuptial gathering. The bride prepares the bridegroom's suite in this way, and vice versa. Myrrh and aloes are part of the preparation for the marriage. So two things are going on at the same time here, with the suggestion that Nicodemus and Joseph don't really get what's happening — but whether they are aware of it or not, they are doing something much, much greater than it seems. "They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen clothes according to the burial custom of the Jews." Well, actually it says that they bound it with spices, and includes the binding — the idea of that was that it should be taut, for the reasons which I've described. That was how you got the spices firmly against the decomposing body so that it would counter the smell and solidify the remaining flesh. So this is being bound. But linen again would be very special. Lazarus had been bound — same word — in swaddling clothes, in clothes which Jesus then told other people to unbind from him. Of course, no one had bothered to embalm Lazarus, so there was the fear that he would smell. Linen clothes was also what the high priest would wear in order to go into the Holy of Holies, starting with Aaron. And of course the high priest would take in incense, just to give a special smell. And this is exactly what's happening here. The high priest who has not sacrificed, not taken in the blood of bulls and sheep or goats, but his own blood, as it says in the Epistle to the Hebrews, is now going in to the Holy of Holies. Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and of course the garden is a reference to the paradise, which is another way of referring to the Holy of Holies. The paradise, the garden, even in our story about Eden, starts first in the book of Ezekiel as a reference to the Holy of Holies and an evil priest who was thrown out. But everyone, or at least those in the know about priestly law, knew about this. So the garden with the Holy of Holies was something which the priest could go in to and then come out of to feed the flock. Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. In other words, here is this completely new place where no human had ever been in it before. That's going to be the Holy of Holies, the definitive Holy of Holies, the one into which Jesus takes by his own blood the offering. This is the living out of the atonement. And so, because it was the Jewish day of preparation and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there. And this is an important thing: there's a deliberate air of casualness about this. There happened to be a garden close to the place of crucifixion, and there happened to be a new tomb. So, amazingly, yet again, almost carelessly, the Holy of Holies was opened up very close to the cross, in such a way that the one true great high priest was able to be laid in what might be a tomb but might also be the nuptial bed, with myrrh and aloe. And of course the importance of that linen robe and the binding is going to be hugely important on Easter morning, because as you know, one of the things that enabled John to believe was that they saw the clothes laid there. And what did that mean? It meant that the person who had been bound had himself taken them off, and furthermore there was no stickiness, so there had been no corruption, which meant that the psalm had been fulfilled: "Thou wilt not let thy holy one know corruption." Endless verses from the Song of Songs had been fulfilled. This is one of the glories of this passage — how much of the scene, what's going on here, and the scene with Mary Magdalene on "Easter morning is here, my beloved has gone down to his garden, to the bed of spices, to pasture his flock in the gardens, and to gather lilies." So one of the ways we can celebrate today is to think of the Lord going down to his gardens to pasture his flock, usually referred to as the harrowing of hell, and so opening up for us the beginning of our peace.