Holy Saturday - Part 1
The Day That Jesus Went To Hell
This past week was Holy Week for the majority of Christians.1
Yesterday was Good Friday, the day we remembered the passion of Christ. Today the word passion often refers to any strong emotion. However, historically, it simply meant, “suffering,” as passion is derived from the Latin word for suffering, passio. On Good Friday, Jesus was arrested, falsely tried, severely beaten, crucified, and ultimately, humiliated. Before nightfall, he was hastily embalmed and entombed.
Tomorrow is Easter, the day the majority of Christians celebrate the resurrection of Christ.2 Following the Gospel accounts, and as determined by the Council of Nicaea (325), the Western church celebrates Easter the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs on or after the Spring equinox. Thus, it is a movable feast that may occur anytime between March 22 and April 25. It is a feast because Easter is a day of victory. Jesus conquered sin, death, hades, and the Evil One.
But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.” —Matthew 28:5-6
Today is Holy Saturday, a day to which few Christians in the modern age pay much attention. In the primitive Church, however, Holy Saturday was known as Great, or Grand, Saturday, Holy Saturday, the Angelic Night, the Vigil of Easter, etc.3 There were no special services on Holy Saturday in the early church, but it was the only Saturday on which fasting was permitted (Constit. Apost., VII, 23). And, dating from the time of Irenaeus, it was a fast of special severity—an absolute fast from every kind of food for the forty hours preceding the feast of Easter.
In our modern Easter narratives, however, we generally jump right from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. But there is a real day in between those two days. It is the day that Jesus was actually dead, was really buried, and literally went to Hell.
In his letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul recounts the narrative this way:
Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. -1 Corinthians 15:1–5
Christ died for our sins on Good Friday, he was raised from the dead on Easter, but he was buried on Holy Saturday. Technically, the act of burying his body was accomplished on Good Friday, but on the day in between the act of the disciples burying his body and God the Father raising his body, he remained buried.
But why is this significant? What happened on Holy Saturday? Why should we pay attention to this day? And what is this business about Jesus going to Hell?
Beginning with the least significant happening on this day—at least in terms of eternal significance—consider this is the day the Jewish leaders secured a guard for the tomb of Jesus.
“The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, “Sir, we remember how that impostor said, while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will rise.’ Therefore order the tomb to be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and steal him away and tell the people, ‘He has risen from the dead,’ and the last fraud will be worse than the first.” Pilate said to them, “You have a guard of soldiers. Go, make it as secure as you can.” So they went and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard.” -Matthew 27:62–66
Fearing Jesus’s disciples might pull a fast one and steal the body, the Jewish leaders appealed to the Roman government to seal the tomb and set a guard to watch for impending grave robbers.
Next, the death and burial of Christ is significant because Jesus was not only fully God, he was equally and fully man. And, as a man, he died for our sins. His body was buried in a tomb and his soul departed to the place of the dead, i.e., Hades (Gk.) or Sheol (Heb.).
The death of Jesus is the curse of a sinner. Although he had no sin of his own (Hebrews 4:15), he died among sinners as a sinner. He died dishonored and left to decay in a grave with the wicked, not as an innocent, but as peccator pessimus, the worst of sinners, cursed for our sins, as noted by Martin Luther. He is Isaiah’s suffering servant, suffering for sinners.
“He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people? And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.” -Isaiah 53:3–9
But what of Jesus’s soul? Why do we say he descended to Hell?
In the Apostle’s Creed, we confess:
I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the Holy Ghost, and born of the virgin, Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into Hell (Hades). On the third day He rose again from the dead, ascended into Heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.
While many modern evangelicals object to the descensus statement in the Creed, a close reading of Scripture, and the fact that the church has confessed that Jesus “descended into Hell” for the last two millennia, should serve as an adequate refutation of their doubts and objections.
Said another way, Scripture and church tradition both teach that “Jesus experienced human death as all humans do—his body was buried, and his soul departed to the place of the dead—and, in so doing, by virtue of his divinity, he defeated death and the grave.”4
In a sequel to this post, which will hopefully drop tomorrow (on Easter), I’ll address what is meant by He descended into Hell.
The Orthodox traditions follow a different calendar than Western Christianity, whose adoption of the Gregorian calendar further distanced the celebrations. For the Orthodox churches, Easter always falls after the Jewish Passover since the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ took place after he entered Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. Orthodox Easter generally takes place sometime between April 4 and May 8, following the first full moon after Passover.
Because the word Easter does not appear in the original language of the NT, but is associated with Eostre (Ishtar), the Anglo-Saxon spring goddess, some Christians refuse to use the word, and insist on “Resurrection Day.” This falls into the realm of preference, but is a bit pedantic, in my humble opinion. True, the word Easter is etymologically, and thus, indirectly, culturally derived from the Germanic pagan celebration, but has been attested as early as the eighth century A.D. when the gospel was reintroduced to the Germanic tribes (e.g., Boniface). The word Easter later came into common use as the celebration of the resurrection of Christ, largely because of the King James Version of the Bible, the first “authorized” Anglo-Saxon translation, published in 1611. The KJV merely followed the Tyndale, Coverdale and others, by rendering pascha (Passover) in the common Anglo as Easter in Acts 12:4.
Henri Leclercq, “Holy Saturday,” ed. Charles G. Herbermann et al., The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church (New York: The Encyclopedia Press; The Universal Knowledge Foundation, 1907–1913).
Matthew Y. Emerson, “He Descended to the Dead”: An Evangelical Theology of Holy Saturday (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic: An Imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2019), 23–24.