Christianity Today: The Scandal and Grace of Christ’s Saturday in the Grave, by Hardin Crowder:
Read moreIf 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.
