Visibly Dead 2 comments

By Brian Volck

He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended into hell. On the third day, he rose again.

—Apostles’ Creed

As I write this, Easter week has come and gone in the Western Church and the Orthodox celebrate Bright Monday, the day after Pascha. My thoughts, though, linger on Holy Saturday, the neglected Jewish Sabbath separating Good Friday and the Resurrection.

It ought not to come as a surprise that true mystery only grows to immensity when dwelt in, but I’m a slow learner. I treasure Holy Saturday, but my reasons have been superficial at best: the harshness of Lent and Holy Week feel past and nothing’s left but the final touches before the Vigil and the joy of the day to come.

This year, my Lenten reading and reflection helped me feel—in a new, visceral way—the darkness of a tomb not yet empty and the weight of a corpse hurriedly interred. Most of all, I glimpsed the terror of Jesus’ followers left, with no knowledge of Easter, not so much disappointed as crushed, certain a rabbi so thoroughly disgraced was cursed by God.

To live even for a short while in that middle place between cross and empty tomb infuses resurrection stories with new power. For those who, the gospels say, lived through the actual event, Sunday morning comes as a shock. None of the disciples, female or male, were prepared—emotionally, cognitively or even mythically—for a rolled-back stone. Initial responses range from panic to disbelief to slack-jawed incomprehension.

That most famous doubter, Thomas, insists—quite rightly it turns out—that there’s no resurrection without death first, no glorified body without wounds. He recognizes the Lord not in the breaking of the bread, but it the brokenness of the flesh.

I find this dark awareness strangely reassuring. If “that which has not been assumed has not been healed,” then Christ’s assumption of humiliation, abandonment, torture, and death makes room within the Incarnation for far, far more than my unimaginative failures and pain.

There’s more to this in-between time than the God of the Living laid lifeless in a grave. Later reflection on passages in Acts, 1 Peter, and Ephesians led to the astonishing claim that Christ crucified descended into the bowels of hell.

Anastasis icons depict what in English is called “the harrowing of hell” as the very heart of the Paschal mystery. (“Harrow” means to pillage or plunder; it also names a tool used to turn up and smooth hard soil before planting.) In the image, Christ leads our first parents by the wrists through the shattered doors of death.

But, before you rejoice in this image, stop first to think what this means: in death, Christ entered hell itself.

This Holy Saturday, at least, I resisted the understandable desire to move too quickly, to gloss over the reality of Jesus’ death and move directly into Easter. For help, I relied on images as mementi mori. It’s no doubt a profound character flaw, but I found Apollonian Christs of the Italian Renaissance insufficient. I needed an earthier, Germanic vision, something like Bach’s “Haupt voll blut und wunden.”

Crucifixes—the cross still bearing the dead Christ—are so ubiquitous in the Western tradition that even non-Christians forget how shocking the image is. I’m not an art historian, but I think of the Gero Crucifix,made for the Ottonian emperors of the tenth century and now in the Cologne Cathedral, as signaling an important shift in depictions of the crucified Christ. Here, made visible, is the sagging weight of Jesus’ lifeless body. It’s as if the Western imagination suddenly discovered, beneath the triumphant king of John’s gospel, Mark’s abandoned paschal victim.

Mathias Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, painted in the early 1500s, beckons us further into that terror. He ignores chronology and perspective to heighten the effect. In the center, a dead, disfigured Jesus remains nailed to the cross. To his left stands John the Baptist, dead well before the crucifixion. Near the inscription “He must increase; I must decrease,” the Baptist points a bony finger at his dead cousin. To the right, stand John the beloved apostle, Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene. Their respective sizes in the painting reflect relative theological significance rather than their spatial relationship.

No reproduction of the Isenheim Altarpiece, now displayed at the Musee Unterlinden in Colmar, France, prepares the viewer for the size and power of the actual painting. It left me and my then thirteen year-old son speechless. In its original setting, it was displayed for patients in a hospital chapel to contemplate the sufferings of their Redeemer and place their own trials in perspective. Having stood before it, I understand that intuitively.

Hans Holbein the Younger’s Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb takes us into the crypt itself. Holbein surpasses Andrea Mantegna in depicting, with unrelievedly brutal realism, Christ’s dead body on a slab. I could say more, but words fail.

I realize this all sounds morbid, not at all in the spirit of Easter joy. Like Thomas, though, I think it’s crucial to see—perhaps even probe—Christ’s wounds before saying, “my Lord and my God.”

This keeps the Paschal mystery from dissolving into a collage of cute pastels. It reminds me that Easter is no spring celebration of nature’s endless life cycle, but an unprecedented Divine irruption. It’s the triumph of hope, not only over despair, but over despair’s more attractive (and much more dangerous) twin: optimism. For if despair is a form of presumption, of knowing better than God how things will turn out, what then is this cheery certainty that things turn out for the best?

Here is what I was able to remember this Easter: He was dead, really dead. He is alive, truly alive. Because of this, because of Him, we live in hope. And that, I find, is sufficient.