FIRST MEDITATION

With increasing insistence one hears in our time about the death of God. For the first time, in Jean Paul, it is only a nightmarish dream: the dead Jesus announces to the dead, from the roof of the world, that on his journey into the afterlife he has found nothing, neither heaven nor merciful God, but only infinite nothingness, the silence of the gaping void. It is still a horrible dream that is put aside, groaning in awakening, like a dream, even though one will never be able to erase the anguish suffered, which was always lurking, gloomy, in the depths of the soul. A century later, in Nietzsche, it is a deadly seriousness that expresses itself in a shrill cry of terror: 'God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!" Fifty years later, it is spoken of with academic detachment and preparations are made for a 'theology after the death of God', we look around to see how we can continue, and we encourage people to prepare to take God's place. The terrible mystery of Holy Saturday, its abyss of silence, has thus acquired an overwhelming reality in our time. For this is Holy Saturday: the day of God's concealment, the day of that unprecedented paradox that we express in the Creed with the words 'descended into hell', descended into the mystery of death. On Good Friday we could still look upon the pierced. Holy Saturday is empty, the heavy stone of the new tomb covers the deceased, all is past, faith seems to be definitively unmasked as fanaticism. No God saved this Jesus posing as his Son. One can be reassured: the cautious who had previously been a little hesitant in their hearts as to whether perhaps it might be different, were instead right.

Holy Saturday: day of God's burial; is not this in a striking way our day? Does not our century begin to be one big Holy Saturday, the day of God's absence, in which even the disciples have a chilling emptiness in their hearts that grows wider and wider, and therefore prepare themselves full of shame and anguish to return home and set off gloomy and broken in their despair towards Emmaus, not realising at all that he who was believed dead is in their midst?

God is dead and we have killed him: did we really realise that this phrase is taken almost literally by Christian tradition and that we often repeated something similar in our viae crucis without realising the tremendous gravity of what we were saying? We have killed him, enclosing him in the stale shell of habitual thoughts, exiling him in a form of piety without the content of reality and lost in the round of catchphrases or archaeological preciosities; we have killed him through the ambiguity of our lives, which has spread a veil of darkness over him as well: for what could have made God more problematic in this world if not the problematic nature of his believers' faith and love?

The divine darkness of this day, of this century that is increasingly becoming a Holy Saturday, speaks to our conscience. We too have to deal with it. But in spite of everything it has something consoling about it. The death of God in Jesus Christ is at the same time an expression of his radical solidarity with us. The darkest mystery of faith is at the same time the clearest sign of a hope that has no boundaries. And one more thing: only through the failure of Good Friday, only through the silence of death on Holy Saturday, could the disciples be brought to an understanding of what Jesus really was and what his message really meant. God had to die for them so that he could truly live in them. The image they had formed of God, in which they had tried to force him, had to be destroyed so that through the rubble of the ruined house they could see heaven, he himself, who always remains the infinitely greater. We need God's silence in order to experience anew the abyss of his greatness and the abyss of our nothingness that would open up if he were not there.

There is a scene in the Gospel that anticipates in an extraordinary way the silence of Holy Saturday and thus appears once again as the portrait of our historical moment. Christ sleeps in a boat that, battered by the storm, is about to sink. The prophet Elijah had once mocked the priests of Baal, who in vain cried out for their god to let fire descend on the sacrifice, urging them to cry out louder, just in case their god was asleep. But is God not really asleep? Does not the prophet's mockery ultimately also touch the believers of the God of Israel who travel with him in a sinking boat? God is sleeping while his things are about to sink, is this not the experience of our life? Does not the Church, the faith, resemble a small boat about to sink, struggling futilely against the waves and the wind, while God is absent? The disciples cry out in extreme despair and shake the Lord to wake him up, but he is astonished and rebukes their little faith. Is it any different for us? When the storm has passed, we will realise how much our little faith was laden with foolishness. And yet, O Lord, we cannot help but shake you, God who is silent and asleep, and cry out to you: wake up, do you not see that we are sinking? Awaken us, do not let the darkness of Holy Saturday last for ever, let a ray of Easter fall on our days too, accompany us as we set out in despair towards Emmaus so that our hearts may light up at your nearness. Thou who hast led in hidden ways the ways of Israel to be at last a man with men, do not leave us in the dark, do not let thy word be lost in the great waste of words of these times. Lord, give us your help, for without you we will sink.

Amen.

SECOND MEDITATION

God's hiding in this world constitutes the true mystery of Holy Saturday, a mystery already hinted at in the enigmatic words that Jesus "descended into hell". At the same time, the experience of our time has offered us a completely new approach to Holy Saturday, for the concealment of God in the world that belongs to him and that should with a thousand tongues proclaim his name, the experience of the powerlessness of God who is nevertheless the Almighty - this is the experience and misery of our time.

But even if Holy Saturday in this way has come closer to us, even if we understand the God of Holy Saturday more than the powerful manifestation of God amid thunder and lightning, of which the Old Testament speaks, the question of knowing what is really meant when it is said mysteriously that Jesus "descended into hell" remains unsolved. Let us say it with all clarity: no one can really explain it. Nor does it become any clearer by saying that here hell is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word shêol, which simply means the whole realm of the dead, and thus the formula would originally only mean that Jesus descended into the depths of death, really died and participated in the abyss of our destiny of death. For the question then arises: what really is death and what actually happens when we descend into the depths of death? We must pay attention here to the fact that death is no longer the same thing after Christ has undergone it, after he has accepted and penetrated it, just as life, the human being, are no longer the same thing after in Christ human nature was able to come into contact, and indeed did come into contact, with God's own being. Before, death was only death, separation from the land of the living and, albeit with different depths, something like 'hell', the nocturnal side of existence, impenetrable darkness. Now, however, death is also life, and when we cross the glacial solitude of death's threshold, we always meet again with the One who is life, who wanted to become the companion of our ultimate solitude and who, in the mortal loneliness of his anguish in the Garden of Olives and his cry on the cross "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", became a sharer in our solitudes.

If a child were to venture alone into the dark night through a forest, he would be afraid even if he were shown hundreds of times that there is no danger. He is not afraid of something definite, to which a name can be given, but in the darkness he experiences insecurity, the orphan condition, the sinister character of existence itself. Only a human voice could console him; only the hand of a loved one could drive away the anguish like a bad dream. There is an anguish - the real anguish, lurking in the depths of our loneliness - that cannot be overcome through reason, but only through the presence of a person who loves us. For this anguish has no object to which we can give a name, but is only the terrible expression of our ultimate loneliness. Who has not felt the frightening sensation of this condition of abandonment? Who would not feel the holy and consoling miracle that a word of affection arouses in these circumstances? Where, however, there is such loneliness that can no longer be reached by the transforming word of love, then we speak of hell. And we know that not a few men of our time, apparently so optimistic, are of the opinion that every encounter remains on the surface, that no man has access to the ultimate and true depth of the other and that therefore in the ultimate depth of every existence lies despair, indeed hell. Jean-Paul Sartre expressed this poetically in one of his dramas and at the same time expounded the core of his doctrine on man. One thing is certain: there is a night in whose dark abandonment no word of comfort penetrates, a door that we must pass through in absolute solitude: the door of death. All the anguish of this world is ultimately the anguish caused by this loneliness. That is why in the Old Testament the term for the realm of the dead was identical to the term for hell: shêol. Death in fact is absolute solitude. But that solitude that can no longer be illuminated by love, that is so deep that love can no longer access it, is hell.

"Descended into hell": this Holy Saturday confession means that Christ has passed through the door of solitude, that he has descended into the unreachable and insuperable depths of our condition of loneliness. This means, however, that even in the extreme night in which no words penetrate, in which we are all like children cast out, weeping, there is a voice that calls to us, a hand that takes us and leads us. Man's insuperable loneliness was overcome from the moment he found himself in it. Hell has been conquered from the moment that love has also entered the region of death and the no-man's-land of solitude has been inhabited by him. In its depths man does not live by bread, but in the authenticity of his being he lives by the fact that he is loved and allowed to love. From the moment when the presence of love is given in the space of death, then life penetrates death: to your faithful, O Lord, life is not taken away, but transformed - the Church prays in the funeral liturgy.

No one can ultimately measure the extent of these words: 'descended into hell'. But if we are once given to approach the hour of our ultimate solitude, we will be allowed to understand something of the great clarity of this dark mystery. In the certain hope that in that hour of extreme loneliness we will not be alone, we can already now presage something of what is to come. And in the midst of our protest against the darkness of God's death we begin to become grateful for the light that comes to us from this very darkness.

THIRD MEDITATION

In the Roman breviary, the liturgy of the sacred triduum is structured with special care; the Church in its prayer wants, so to speak, to transfer us into the reality of the Lord's passion and, beyond words, into the spiritual centre of what happened. If one were to attempt to mark the prayerful liturgy of Holy Saturday in a few lines, then one would have to speak above all of the effect of profound peace that transpires from it. Christ has penetrated into concealment (Verborgenheit), but at the same time, in the very heart of impenetrable darkness, he has penetrated into security (Geborgenheit), indeed he has become the ultimate security. By now the psalmist's bold word has become true: and even if I wanted to hide in hell, you are there too. And the more one goes through this liturgy, the more one sees shining in it, like a morning dawn, the first lights of Easter. If Good Friday places before our eyes the disfigured figure of the pierced man, the liturgy of Holy Saturday draws rather on the image of the cross dear to the ancient Church: the cross surrounded by rays of light, a sign, in the same way, of death and resurrection.

Holy Saturday thus reminds us of an aspect of Christian piety that has perhaps been lost in the course of time. When we look at the cross in prayer, we often see in it only a sign of the Lord's historical passion on Golgotha. The origin of the devotion to the cross, however, is different: Christians prayed to the East to express their hope that Christ, the true sun, would rise over history, to express therefore their faith in the return of the Lord. The cross is at first closely linked with this orientation of prayer, it is represented as a banner, so to speak, that the king will raise in his coming; in the image of the cross, the advanced point of the procession has already arrived in the midst of those who pray. For early Christianity, the cross is thus above all a sign of hope. It implies not so much a reference to the Lord past, as to the Lord who is to come. Certainly it was impossible to escape the intrinsic necessity that, with the passage of time, our gaze should also turn to the event that took place: against every flight into the spiritual, against every misrecognition of the incarnation of God, it was necessary to defend the unimaginable prodigality of God's love who, out of love for the wretched human creature, became a man himself, and what a man! It was necessary to defend the holy foolishness of God's love, who chose not to utter a word of power, but to tread the path of powerlessness in order to pillory our dream of power and overcome it from within.

But then have we not forgotten a little too much about the connection between cross and hope, the unity between the East and the direction of the cross, between past and future that exists in Christianity? The spirit of hope that hovers over the prayers of Holy Saturday should once again penetrate our entire being as Christians. Christianity is not only a religion of the past, but, to no lesser extent, of the future; its faith is at the same time hope, since Christ is not only the dead and the risen, but also the one who is to come.

O Lord, enlighten our souls with this mystery of hope so that we may recognise the light that is radiated by your cross, grant us that as Christians we may go forward into the future, towards the day of your coming.

Amen.

PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, in the darkness of death Thou hast made light; in the abyss of deepest loneliness dwells now forever the mighty protection of Thy love; in the midst of Thy hiddenness we can now sing the hallelujah of the saved. Grant us the humble simplicity of faith, which does not allow itself to be misled when Thou callest us in the hours of darkness, of abandonment, when everything seems to appear problematic; grant us, in this time in which a mortal struggle is being fought around Thee, sufficient light so that we may not lose Thee; sufficient light so that we may give it to those who need it even more. Let the mystery of Thy paschal joy, as the dawn of the morning, shine in our days; grant that we may be truly paschal men in the midst of the Holy Saturday of history. Grant that through the bright and dark days of this time we may always with glad hearts find ourselves on the way to Thy future glory.

Amen.

[Pope Benedict, excerpt from "The Sabbath of History"; https://www.sabinopaciolla.com/benedetto-xvi-il-mistero-terribile-del-sabato-santo/]