Saturday

John 19:38-42; Job 14:1-14

As waters fail from a lake, and a river wastes away and dries up, so mortals lie down and do not rise again; until the heavens are no more, they will not awake or be roused out of their sleep . . . If mortals die, will they live again?  All the days of my service I would wait until my release should come.  So the writer of Job – taken out of the context the writer intended – plunges us into the stark reality of the death of the Servant, who dies in the service of God’s justice, and waits for God’s vindication.  Holy Saturday is the via negativa: the journey into darkness, despair, hopelessness, death.  The Elves of course have cherry-picked the passages from Job, ending with the Servant’s anticipated release.  If the entire chapter is read, the mourning for loss is profound:  If my release should come, the servant Job says, “[God] would call, and I would answer; [God] would long for the work of [God’s] hands. . . [God] would not keep watch over my sin . . . But the mountain falls and crumbles away, and the rock is removed from its place . . . so you [God] destroy the hope of mortals . . . their children come to honor and they do not know it; they are brought low, and it goes unnoticed. . . .”  By stopping with verse 14, the Elves leave open the possibility for the theological argument about how Jesus descended into Hell to release the souls of the martyrs.  But as far as Jesus’ community of followers was concerned, as of the Sabbath, the powers and principalities had won.  It is important to realize how possible such an outcome is in the 21st Century.
The powers and principalities, the normalcy of civilization, the seemingly inevitable domination of empire and systems of retribution have brought us to the brink of human if not planetary extinction.  To quote Crossan yet again, “ . . . we can do it already in about five different ways – atomically, biologically, chemically, demographically, ecologically – and we are only up to e” (The Last Week p. 171).  Politically, the United States is the first among equals of violent empire, following the drumbeat of military and economic power in pursuit of world domination.  U.S. foreign, domestic, and economic policies are grounded in violent ideology that is deaf to reality, even provable, measurable, physical realities such as global warming, mortal poverty, and ignorance.  We should sit in dust and ashes for a moment, and not skip blithely into Easter’s happy ending.  Without experiencing via negativa, without traveling to the middle of the labyrinth, past the demons, we can never arrive at the fire at the center where the creative response is generated, and the key to the way out into transformation is found.

Without death, there is no life.  This is the law of the Universe.

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