God in the grave

Did God die on a hill outside Jerusalem? Was it not only Jesus of Nazareth but somehow God himself who was hung on the cross and laid in the tomb? Christian theology has answered yes to these questions, and then struggled to articulate what this strange claim means.

Alan E. Lewis takes up the task by meditating on a day of the church year that often goes unmarked--Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter. On the boundary between cross and resurrection, Lewis contends, Christians can best contemplate the decisive events of the Christian story. On Holy Saturday, Christians look forward to celebrating the ultimate victory of God over sin and death, but remain vividly aware of the penultimate horrors of the cross. On Holy Saturday, Christians prepare to sing of Jesus' triumph over the grave, but cannot deny that the stench of death is emanating from the tomb of an innocent man, tortured and executed by an imperial power.

Lewis's theology of Holy Saturday is a theology of the cross, a challenge to any version of Easter faith that would ignore the awful silence of God as encountered in the cancer ward, or at the bedside of a dying child, or in the killing fields and extermination camps. Though the Easter gospel affirms that the forces of evil and death will be finally defeated, it does not deny that in the meantime those forces win an awful lot of battles.