Beyond All Telling
Suffering forces us into a tight space, like a stone tomb, as the etymology of “anguish” indicates. How narrow is the way of Jesus, into the throat of abandonment and death.
If you have been transfixed by overwhelming sorrow, you have been conformed to the posture of the One who loves to the end. Holy Saturday shows us the truth of our dark nights: we have been forced to be still, for passion must be brought to the pitch of a total and desperate patience for the victory of an impossible love, a love that seems utterly defeated.
The matins of Holy Saturday holds many consolations. From Psalm 4: “When I call, answer me, O God of justice;/from anguish you released me; have mercy and hear me!”
The responsory after the psalms is “Take up my cause and rescue me. –Be true to Your Word, give me life.”
For God to answer these cries from our depths, God must suffer in His depths. Trinity must swallow hell.
The justly celebrated second reading, perhaps the greatest homily ever composed, imagines the descent of Jesus into hell. That is also Jesus entering into each of the hells which might catch hold of us on earth.
Jesus suffers so that Love might attain to the extremity of godforsakenness and thereby gain access to each of our private hells. For the sake of love, Jesus must most surely suffer–though, for the best of intentions, many are denying this truth, especially now. If He did not suffer, then He could not descend into our suffering. By His wounds, He enters our wounds. He “knows” our sorrows: not notionally, but most really and intimately. He knows it by suffering in our suffering. A fantasy that absolves Jesus of suffering would deny the consubstantial solidarity by which the God-man identifies with each of us totally. This is no mere conceptual identification. It is real: metaphysically and existentially. Indeed, He becomes sin, in Saint Paul’s shocking formulation (2 Cor. 5:21).
To deny this is to take up a variation of what I call the “God-guy” soteriology that has Jesus as someone, over there, suffering his own private suffering. The obvious rejoinder by anyone who is not a Christian: “Who cares?” (In the higher Christology version, this suffering of some God-guy over there somehow saves us; in the lower Christology version, a really good guy necessarily ends up being killed by the powers.)
The Christian claim, in its truth, matters because it is addressed precisely to each of us at our most anguished. There is no evangelical power in any another proclamation.
Love is a communion in the heart’s blood. Anything else is too cheap. That is a natural truth that flows from the supernatural truth of the pierced Heart of Jesus, from which flows the Trinitarian torrent.
Jesus suffers every heartache and body torment any human has endured or will endure. (Pascal: “He is in agony until the end of the world.”) He is right there with you.
And on this basis, that beautiful homily on Holy Saturday has Jesus address all those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death:
“I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.”
If you are in anguish, in some narrow place, Jesus calls to you–not from any minimum safe distance, but from within the heart of your agony. Indeed, His voice is one with yours: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” “When I call, answer me, O God of justice;/from anguish you released me; have mercy and hear me!”
Dawn will come, for the sun cannot be quenched. Awake, O sleeper, your lover is at the door.
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