You are Clothed in Christ – a Holy Saturday meditation

Holy Saturday marks the fifth of Acting Bishop Dorsey McConnell’s series of six daily meditations during Holy Week.

“The meditations address a question that was posed at Synod, Who Are We?, and are based on six images used by Saint Paul to describe the Church in his second letter to the Corinthians (2 For. 2:14-5:21),” says Bishop Dorsey. “Each is linked to a particular moment in Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, beginning with the Triumphal Entry, and ending with the appearance of the risen Lord to Mary Magdalene. Each concludes with an appropriate collect.

“I invite you to use these for your own devotions as we move day-by-day more deeply into the Mystery of Mysteries. Please also consider the daily reflections and resources in our Lent Course already posted on our website.

“I hope these may provide you with sustenance and encouragement as we together walk the Way of the Cross.”

Holy Saturday, 30 March – You are Clothed in Christ

“[After the Lord was crucified] Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciples of Jesus…came and took away his body.  Nicodemus also, who had at first come to him by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds weight, and bound it in linen. Cloths with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews.  Now in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb where no one had ever been laid.  So…they laid Jesus there.” (John 19: 38-42)

“The women who had come with him from Galilee followed, and saw the tomb, and how his body was laid; then they returned and prepared spices and ointments. On the sabbath they rested according to the commandment.”  (Luke 23:55-56).

“We do not lose heart.  Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day….  Here indeed we groan, and long to put on our heavenly dwelling…; not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal is swallowed up by life.”  (2 Corinthians 4:16, 5:2,4).

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”  (Romans 6:3-4)

They buried him quickly, with darkness closing in and the Sabbath upon them.  The accounts are a bit breathless, with confusion about who was there, who did what.  Wrapping his body in a hundred pounds of costly spices sounds like the sort of stop-gap measure a man in a hurry might do.  But the women in Luke know their business: they take note of how the body was laid, and go home to prepare the proper ointments, planning to return. Perhaps both are true, the friends of Jesus, both women and men, honoring his body in their own way.

What is certain is this: they all sit with Christ’s death.  All through Saturday he lies in the darkness of the tomb, his body filled with the stillness of death.  In the homes of his friends, there is also something dark and still: the absence of their Teacher, their grief over his murder.  They do not run from it, or seek distraction. From hour to hour, they take it in.  They say the prayers they have always said, but add the mourners’ Kaddish. They eat the bread of the sabbath. They rest according to the commandment, steeped in the unknowable purpose of God. They can not imagine what is coming.

All day, this day, God sits with our death.  Even more: God inhabits it.  The body of Jesus will be transformed, but not yet.  First God must extend his heart of love into every dark and still corner of our mortality.  Christ’s body, torn and pierced, his brow frozen in pain, now become God’s home.  By filling his Son’s death, God fills our death, taking it into himself.

We have been baptized into Christ’s death, says Saint Paul.  We were buried with him, wrapped with his body.  At first the thought is terrifying, suffocating, macabre— until we see that there is nothing to fear in this.  It simply means that the thing we thought was the end— darkness, stillness, the abyss— is only the beginning.  To be swallowed up by life, we must first sit with our death, and let God clothe us.

God does not do this quickly.  He wraps us with infinite tenderness and care.  And what we are clothed in is no mere bundle of spices, but the life God will make out of our death.  We may have more ailments than we can count, sadness that we are sure will never go away, regret and despair that we know are killing us. All this is now, today, wrapped into the death of God’s Son, under the care of the Father.  Even if we are convinced we have one foot in the grave, we know what is on the other side. We know we are about to be clothed in Christ, clothed in his life, as we have been joined to his death. We can scarcely imagine what is coming.

O God, Creator of Heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.