Holy Saturday is the day of God\u2019s concealment, as one reads in an ancient homily: \u201cWhat happened? Today there is great silence upon the earth, great silence and solitude. Great silence because the King sleeps \u2026 God died in the flesh and descended to make the kingdom of hell (\u2018gli inferi\u2019) tremble\u201d (\u201cHomily on Holy Saturday,\u201d PG 43, 439). In the Creed we confess that Jesus Christ \u201cwas crucified under Pontius Pilate, died and was buried; he descended into hell (\u2018negli inferi\u2019), and the third day he rose again from the dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dear brothers and sisters, in our time, especially after having passed through the last century, humanity has become especially sensitive to the mystery of Holy Saturday. God\u2019s concealment is part of the spirituality of contemporary man, in an existential manner, almost unconscious, as an emptiness that continues to expand in the heart. At the end of the 18th century, Nietzsche wrote: \u201cGod is dead! And we have killed him!\u201d This celebrated expression, if we consider it carefully, is taken almost word for word from the Christian tradition, we often repeat it in the Via Crucis, perhaps not fully realizing what we are saying. After the two World Wars, the concentration camps, the gulags, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our epoch has become in ever great measure a Holy Saturday: the darkness of this day questions all those who ask about life, it questions us believers in a special way. We too have something to do with this darkness.<\/p>\n
And nevertheless, the death of the Son of God, of Jesus of Nazareth, has an opposite aspect, totally positive; it is a font of consolation and hope. And this makes me think that the sacred Shroud acts as a \u201cphotographic\u201d document, with a \u201cpositive\u201d and a \u201cnegative.\u201d And in effect, this is exactly how it is: The most obscure mystery of faith is at the same time the most luminous sign of a hope without limits. Holy Saturday is the \u201cno man\u2019s land\u201d between death and resurrection, but into this \u201cno man\u2019s land\u201d has entered the One, the Only One, who has crossed it with the signs of his passion for man: \u201cPassio Christi. Passio hominis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a> from Benedict XVI.<\/p>\n #HolySaturday<\/a>, Sabbatum Sanctum, the day of the entombed Christ, suspended between two worlds, darkness and light. An in-between space where grief and rest can settle upon our hearts. May it be so for us, as it was for the disciples. pic.twitter.com\/jUHjc181vh<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Melanie Harrington (Clark) (@revdrmelclark) April 11, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n