In the small Methodist church where I grew up, we made much of Good Friday and Easter, with a somber, reflective service on Friday night—one year’s structured by the many verses of “Were You There”—and a sunrise service and community breakfast on Sunday, complete with all of the egg casserole and cinnamon rolls my heart (and stomach) could desire. But what of the Saturday in between, when we seemed to return to our regular activities with little acknowledgement of the cosmic importance of the surrounding days?
I left home to attend a large state university and found myself in a more “evangelical” church and campus ministry than my mainline upbringing. It was a hard transition, and I was hurt by suggestions, implicit and explicit, that my heritage of faith was somehow illegitimate. In my more private spiritual life, I returned to the liturgical practices and prayers of my upbringing. As Holy Week approached, I began to contemplate Holy Saturday again, allowing it to take up space in my imagination and shape my understanding of that challenging season.
To me, Holy Saturday offered a paradigm for making sense of the in-between-ness of life. As a college student, I felt the tension of being in between adolescence and adulthood—I no longer had the structure and certainty of my nuclear family and public school routines, but I was also not yet completely responsible for paying my own bills, ensuring I had food on the table, making strides in a “sensible” career, or buying my own toilet paper (a signpost of adulthood that seemed so undeniable that I included in my high school graduation speech). The transient space of a university community made it hard to put down roots—friends who may be close one semester didn’t have time for me when our schedules didn’t overlap the next, and there was always the risk of finally trusting someone only to have them graduate and leave the state.
Admittedly, this is likely nothing compared to the tension experienced by Jesus’ friends and followers on the day between His death and resurrection. This man, this supposed Messiah, on whom they’d pinned their lives, was dead. They were still living under the boot of empire—Jesus had come proclaiming a different kind of Kingdom, but how could it be true without Him? They were living in fear for their lives, and they couldn’t even care for Jesus’ body because it was the Sabbath. Talk about the uncertainty of the in-between.
Even though I knew the end of the story in a way that those on the first Holy Saturday did not, this under-examined day of the Christian calendar offered me hope within the liminal space of university life. And perhaps it offers hope within the in-between of the Christian life, too—in our current reality that Christ has died, Christ has risen, but Christ has not yet come again. The powers of darkness and despair still permeate our world. The Kingdom is breaking in, and we get to participate in that, but we are still waiting for Jesus’ return to make all things new. Perhaps all of life is Holy Saturday.
At some point, I turned my attention to the central character in this story—what was He doing on Holy Saturday? This was the first time that I had really encountered the Christian doctrine of the Harrowing of Hell. I had grown up saying the Apostles’ Creed corporately at church, and it’s in there:
I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
Born of the Virgin Mary,
Suffered under Pontius Pilate,
Was crucified, died, and was buried;
He descended to the dead.
I don’t know what I thought “He descended to the dead” meant, but it had never occurred to me that Jesus had spent the time between His death and resurrection in Hades, or Sheol, and proclaimed His kingdom to the dead. And that little-known middle of the story offered me hope that I didn’t know I was missing.
I cannot begin to explain the exegesis behind the Harrowing of Hell; I leave that to others with more letters after their name than I have. Based on an internet research rabbit hole undertaken while procrastinating writing an essay for a 200-level English class, there’s support for it in the New Testament. For me, it’s enough that our spiritual fathers and mothers enshrined it in their core declaration of faith that has come down to the present day. I can sum up what draws me to the Harrowing in an Andy Gullahorn lyric that I encountered around the same time as my dive into Holy Saturday:
“It was sad and quiet
On that Saturday
He had somewhere to visit
Before the stone rolled away
Yeah, He went straight to Hell
Where He knew He would go
So in the worst of our darkness
We are never alone.
Even Hell is not a God-forsaken place.”
In that season of my life, I so desperately wanted to believe that there is no place where the Spirit was not breathing life. And I did believe that, in my head. But it was hard to live like it was true when my lived experience was filled with tension, loneliness, anxiety, and occasional panic attacks—not to mention the systemic despair and injustice that had weighed on me in adolescence but felt more real outside of my small-town community. The Harrowing reignited my hope that there is nothing, nowhere, no one, that God has forsaken. Even Hell.
The next year, just as I was beginning to find a healthier Christian community at my university, the COVID-19 pandemic began. I once again began to spiral, and while the challenges of the pandemic were not unique to (and certainly not most acutely felt by) me, I again felt far from God. My dreams of studying abroad, my budding community, and my plans for my internship were dead. I felt forsaken. It was in this season that the Spirit led me to an excerpt of C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters: “Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” Despite my grief, I wanted to be that human. I wanted to still obey.
Holy Week came shortly thereafter, changed drastically from the 19 previous in my life, and Holy Saturday once again felt weighty. I was living in the tension of a new in-between; I would emerge from the pandemic different from the person that I was when it began. I was trying desperately to find Jesus in my grief and cling to the belief that He had not forsaken me, that He had not forsaken our world. One thing that had not changed, though, was that after Holy Saturday came Easter, with the hope of Jesus’ resurrection and ultimate victory over sin and death. Sometimes in this Holy Saturday life, in the now-and-not-yet of Christ’s Kingdom, all I have is the hope that He’s here, that He hasn’t forsaken us. And for me, that’s enough.