THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

Grace
The importance of grace in the New Testament.

Why Easter Saturday?

In the last chapter we touched on the problems the church has had with the incarnation for over 1,000 years, God assuming human flesh and blood with his implied union with dead and buried flesh. Could God still be God if touched by suffering and death? We have seen that Barth more than anyone else broke the mould of traditional teaching in this area, followed by Jungel and Moltmann and later by others. Of these, it is Jungel who is the theologian of the grave of Jesus Christ. With Moltmann he interprets the very being of the Trinity from the standpoint of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection, but it is in his major volume, God as the Mystery of the World, that he, in effect, identifies Easter Saturday, the day of the burial of God, as theology’s foundational, defining moment. Somehow, it is the grave, which is the guarantee of the finality of Christ’s death, which silently, and almost unnoticed, presents both a problem and the gospel of Christology. The problem lies in discerning what was really happening in the tomb. Was God in Jesus really dead?[48] And if so, what are the implications of this? There are mysteries here that I do not profess to understand. However, I will suggest some ideas that do make some sense to me.

[48] I will not attempt to interpret the difficult passage of 1 Peter, 3:18-20. For serious students of such issues, I suggest you check the commentaries of those who are wiser than I for the various ways these verses have been understood, and then take your pick!

First, it is the grave where we find that God’s identity with created humanity reaches its most intense point. It has been a common understanding of biblical teaching that death entered the world as a result of sin (see Genesis 2:17; Romans 5:12). It has often been assumed that if humans had not sinned, then they would not have died physically but would have perhaps been taken eventually straight to heaven. However, the Bible clearly states that only God is immortal (1 Timothy 6:16) and that believers will be “clothed with” immortality only at the resurrection of the dead (1 Corinthians 15:53). This latter verse clearly states that we are mortal in our present state (also Romans 8:11). It may well be that the “death” referred to in Genesis 2 and Romans 5 refers only to spiritual death—separation from God—and that humans, even though they had not sinned, would still have died. Though Bible students of the past such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin all viewed every aspect of death as a consequence of sin, others have held a contrary view. Irenaeus was one, and in contemporary theology both Barth and Tillich reach the conclusion that humans are “naturally” mortal. Barth declares:

Finitude, then, is not intrinsically negative and evil. There is no reason why it should not be an anthropological necessity, a determination of true and natural man, that we should one day have to die and therefore merely have been.

If this should be correct, then maybe what we see is Jesus’ identification with us in every respect, even in our mortality. God did not leave this man’s flesh (and therefore ours) at the moment when the real nature of his creaturehood and fleshliness was most apparent. As Lewis puts it:

That God should say [the] resurrecting Yes to the human body only by first identifying with that body in the grave confirms that it is good and fitting not only to be fleshly, but for our flesh to perish, to come to termination and ultimate decay.

Maybe we see here the most intense example of a theme that runs through the Bible—God’s promise to be with his people. It begins in the Old Testament (e.g. Deuteronomy 31:3-6; Haggai 1:13-15). Matthew begins and ends his gospel with it (1:22, 23; 28:20). It culminates in the renewed heaven and earth (Revelation 21:3).

Of course, all this is totally contrary to the anti-materialistic philosophy common in the Greek philosophy of those days—Stoicism and all the varieties of Platonism—a philosophy which still persists in religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and which has exerted too much influence on the thinking of Christians down the ages. For the Greeks, God’s identification with the Crucified and Buried One was illusory. For the Jews it was blasphemy. For the one it was impossible, for the other unfitting.

Second, the grave underlines God’s identification with us in our sins. The Bible declares that “He was assigned a grave with the wicked…in his death”(Isaiah 53:9). I understand that it was during those awful three hours from midday till three in the afternoon as he hung on the cross that he actually bore the sins of the human race. However, it is the silence of the tomb on Easter Saturday that points us to the full consequences of the powers of evil. The jealousy, the pride, the selfishness, the cowardice, the cruelty, the hatred and all the other sins we can think of that led to the cross had had their say and God had allowed it to happen. He had accepted the verdict upon himself without question or defence and now it is the silence of the tomb that impresses on us both the enormity of human depravity and the lengths to which God was willing to go in order to show his unwillingness to leave us, even in the depths of our guilt. Maybe we are to take from this the fact that even in our moral wretchedness and sin God can still be there. He himself has been a victim of that godforsakenness. Lewis says again:

The Lord of life triumphs over death, the inimical opposite of life, not by cancelling out the adversary but by succumbing to the victory of all that God opposes. Such is the strange story we have heard, the conundrum we find so hard to solve, the shock so difficult to sustain, the abyss we find so hard to bridge, the “scandal of the cross” we would love to render comprehensible and innocuous…Only through the vulnerable victimisation at the hands of sin and death, and not by blocking, crushing, or annihilating those agents of destruction, does the triune God of righteous love flourish yet more abundantly than the luxuriant barrenness of hate and wickedness.

When Nansen was looking for the North Pole, he once found himself in very deep water. His line would not reach the bottom. He took his book and wrote the date and the length of the line and added, “Deeper than that.” The next day he lengthened his line and dropped it again and again. It failed to touch bottom and he wrote down the date and the length of the line, and added, “Deeper than that.” After a few days he gathered all the line that could be found on his ship, tied it together and dropped it down, but it would not reach bottom. His entry was again, “Deeper than that.” However deep a person may sink morally, or however desperate a situation one may be in, the love of God in Jesus, as demonstrated by his cross and grave, is “deeper than that.”

Third, thinking along the lines that we have been doing points clearly to the necessity for belief in the Trinity. If in some real sense God in Jesus “died”, how is it possible for God to suffer the negation of death without being annihilated? Tertullian could say without hesitation, “God has died.” Luther could speak of “God’s passion, God’s blood, God’s death”. Jesus himself declared, “I was dead” (Revelation 1:18). I believe Moltmann has got it right when he suggests that, though it is the Son who died and not the Father or the Spirit, because of the principle of perchoresis, the mutual indwelling of the Father, Son and Spirit in each other that I have spoken of above, there is a very real sense in which death has entered into God. Death and its division does pierce the life and heart of the triune family. Taking death into the Godhead was the only way to put death to death. Jesus “suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Hebrews 2:9). Yet it is the Spirit, whom Bishop John V. Taylor called the “Go-Between God”, which somehow held the divine community together, while the Devil, by means of death and hell, does his best to tear it apart. To quote Lewis again:

For the Spirit holds the Father and the Son together in their separation, proving still more powerfully creative than death is powerfully destructive, so that in the sundered family’s reuniting, the loving arms of God close over our death in an embrace of life, cancelling its fearfulness for evermore.

If it is God’s absence on Easter Saturday that appears to underline a total sense of shame and failure, both human and divine, then it is his presence in the tomb through the Spirit that can begin to give us hope that even in the most desperate and seeming hopeless situations God can still be present. Could there be a bleaker situation? Not, at least, for the disciples. For two years or more they had been looking forward to the establishment of God’s kingdom, however dimly they understood its nature, convinced that this Jesus was indeed the one foretold by the prophets. Now their dreams were shattered. Jesus had been no match for either the politicians and soldiers or the priests and moralists. Was the God they believed in so powerless that he could not rescue his Son from the powers that destroyed him? Had God’s love and power found their limit? Was this God’s last, best effort at bringing justice and peace? Had the power of death proved too much for the fragile flower of love and grace? Was Jesus not, after all, the Son of God and promised Messiah? The dreams he had inspired, the possibilities he had hinted at, had come to nothing.

Their despair is vividly portrayed by Luke in his story of Cleopas and his companion walking home to Emmaus. “We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel” (24:21). Now that hope was gone, possibly forever. The known end of previous Jewish liberation movements, and the fate of their claimed messiahs, would not have helped! Perhaps we can see here why God allowed the silence of Easter Saturday. We cannot ignore all those contrary signs—evil’s triumph, the world’s abandonment, the collapse of faith. But if God is somehow present in the worst situation that we can imagine, then he is going to have the last word, even if that last word may come beyond the grave. There are times when we can do little but wait until God speaks. But, however long, speak he will.

Today we are living between Good Friday and Easter Day. There will be times when there seems no ground for hope. But the story of Good Friday and Easter can assure us of two things: when God appears to be most absent, he is most assuredly present, and he will indeed have the last word. What has happened in the past will guarantee our future. As Moltmann says, “God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.” It is the silence of Easter Saturday that focuses our attention on these things and forces us to think through the issues at a deeper level than we would have done otherwise. And this brings us to Easter Day, which is to me the proof of all we have been saying and for which Easter Saturday provided the perfect backdrop.

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