Every Holy Week for the past two decades , it seems, I have become completely fixated on the thought expressed below, as I try to understand better and further be appropriated by the Paschal Mystery. Is this gnosis or a modest penetration into the Mystery?
The terminus a quo of Redemption is not a merely ideal possibility, it is the most real actuality. Indeed it is so real that the Saviour in his vicarious suffering had to descend into it in order to experience it from within, and thus to be conformed to his brethren even in this. Jesus is the last of the Old Testament saints to cry to God “Why has thou forsaken me?” No one could utter this cry more intensely than he whose life is to be everlastingly generated by the Father and, in this generation, to see the Father. Now he, too, experiences what it means to lose God, to know him only as the far away Judge. The relationship by which the Father and Son turn towards each other in the eternal dialogue seems to be turned into estrangement and indescribable loss, while, in the hour of darkness on the Cross, there is no light of hope and return at his disposal. Even for the most just of the just there is the iron law that in “the hour of God”, ‘the day of God”, which is the day of judgment and wrath, the good things of the Father, the faith that is experienced and felt, love and hope, are deposited with God so as to remain inaccessible. The heavenly clothes are stripped off, the heavenly images veiled. They all, Isaac, Job, Jeremias, and lastly Jesus, walk naked in extreme poverty and humiliation through the door of darkness.
The reality of the poena damni is spiritual and can experienced only spiritually. The spiritual experience means passing through the gate of hell. Beatitude will follow on Easter Day; on Holy Saturday there is no reason to sing Alleluia. The descent of Jesus into the reality of death that preceded Redemption is part of his humiliations, even though this ultimate humiliation, beyond which no other is possible, is already shot through with the light of Easter night, as for St. John even the Cross itself. For this journey into Hades carries Redemption into it. This track through the trackless way makes an opening where before all had been absolutely closed. For this uttermost loneliness of death of him him who has lost all connexion with the living, whose body lies fettered in its tomb and whose soul lets itself be bound with the bonds of the experience of Hades, introduces everything that is called communication and communion in the eternal sense. For this darkest of all dark nights of the soul sheds an eternal light where, without this vicarious night, there would have been only eternal darkness.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The God Question and Modern Man. p. 132-33
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