Christianity Today: The Scandal and Grace of Christ’s Saturday in the Grave, by Hardin Crowder:
If we are honest, many of us do not know what to do with Holy Saturday.
Good Friday is terrible, but it is also dramatic and full of passion. Easter Sunday is triumphant, radiant, and full of song. But Holy Saturday is quieter and thus harder for us to inhabit. It asks us to remain near the tomb and to resist the urge to hurry toward resurrection before we have reckoned with the weight of Christ’s death and burial. …
We move quickly from the agony of Good Friday to the alleluias of Easter morning, as though the silence of the tomb were only an inconvenience between sorrow and joy. We prefer resurrection in full bloom to the hard fact that our Savior lay in the grave. But the church, at its best, lingers here. …
[The] instinct to rush from cross to empty tomb helps explain why Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb struck the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky so deeply. Holbein was a 16th-century German painter of the Northern Renaissance, remembered for his striking realism and unsparing eye for detail. Dostoevsky, the great 19th-century novelist, was famous for his exploration of themes of suffering, doubt, guilt, and the hard-won hope of Christian faith.
When Dostoevsky saw Holbein’s painting in 1867, according to the later recollection of his wife Anna, he stood before it as if transfixed, and she feared the shock might provoke one of his epileptic seizures. This story has been told and retold so often that it now feels almost legendary. But the deeper point is not that Holbein nearly destroyed Dostoevsky’s faith but that this painting forced Dostoevsky to look straight at one of Christianity’s hardest claims: that God entered death fully before conquering it.
I believe that is why Holbein’s painting impacted Dostoevsky so deeply. The painting does not soften the death of Jesus. It offers no halo of serenity, no early hint of Easter radiance. Art historians and theologians alike have noticed the same thing: Holbein refuses the pious instinct to make death look already defeated. Christ’s face is not peaceful. It is lifeless and spent. Holbein does not preserve what scholar Mia Mochizuki calls the “comfortable fiction of sleep.” Rather, he chooses to present Christ as unmistakably dead, and the painting’s long, narrow format makes the tomb feel claustrophobic, almost coffin-like. Christ’s body is gaunt, wounded, discolored, and hemmed into the narrow confines of the tomb. Put plainly, Holbein paints what Christian confession requires, though Christian sentiment sometimes resists: If Christ truly took our nature, then he truly entered our mortality. When Holbein paints Christ in the tomb, he paints a corpse. …
Holy Saturday is the day between promise and sight. Good Friday has done its work. Easter morning has not yet dawned. The body of Jesus lies in the tomb, and the church waits in silence. It is the day when believers must reckon with the full weight of Christ’s death before they can speak of resurrection. Holbein paints that day with unnerving severity. And Dostoevsky understood, perhaps better than most modern writers, that many people live much of their lives there. …
[T]he painting did not make Dostoevsky less Christian. It made him less sentimental. It drove him toward a sterner, deeper theology of incarnation, passion, and resurrection. It confirmed that Christianity cannot be an anesthetic, an ideology, or a moral improvement program for the already capable. It is the announcement that the Son of God has entered the grave itself and come out the other side in victory. …
Holbein’s dead Christ did not drive Dostoevsky away from the gospel. It drove him deeper into it. The painting stripped away every religious nicety and forced him to reckon with the awful realism of redemption: The Son of God truly took our flesh, truly bore our griefs, truly suffered under the curse, and truly entered the darkness of death.
But that is not the end of the Christian story. Holy Saturday gives way to Easter. The body Holbein painted so starkly is the body that did not remain in the tomb. The one who lay there cold and lifeless is the same Lord who rose in glory on the third day. That means the gospel speaks not only to the tasteful and the composed but also to the guilty, the grieving, the doubting, and the undone.
Christ has gone all the way down into the worst we fear, and he has come back with death’s keys in his hand. Because he truly died, sinners can truly live. Because he entered the grave, the grave is no longer the end. And so, even in a world that often looks as bleak as Holbein’s painting, the church still dares to say that Jesus Christ is risen, mercy is stronger than judgment, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
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