Fr Paolo Consonni, MCCJ
PALM SUNDAY – Year A
Though a few months have passed by, and Macau is back to normal with its bustling streets crowded with tourists, we still have strong memories of what happened at the beginning of this year: the inability to contain Covid, the easing of the zero-cases policy, and unfortunately, the high number of deaths, most of them were elderly. The news reported that January was the deadliest month on record in Macau. A total of 798 people died in the first month of the year, a figure four times higher than the previous year. Funeral homes were congested. Because of Covid restrictions, families were unable to be present at the passing of their beloved ones. Death can be a solitary place.
This weekend, with the celebration of Palm Sunday, we begin Holy Week by listening to the long proclamation of the Passion of the Lord, this year taken from the Gospel of Matthew (Mt 26:14 – 27:66). The Gospel ends with Jesus’ body wrapped in linen cloth and laid in a tomb sealed with a heavy stone. Jesus, too, faced the solitude of death. We will end Holy Friday with this feeling too.
Then, we usually “fast-forward” to the Easter Vigil, already tired of the long liturgies of the previous days, and get busy to prepare for the joyful celebration of Christ’s Resurrection. Unfortunately, caught up in all this busy-ness, many of us will miss the spiritual significance of the Holy Saturday, the Church’s day of the Great Silence.
The Apostle’s Creed proclaims that Christ, after His burial, “descended into hell”. This is the mystery we celebrate during Holy Saturday. Some explanations are needed. The Bible uses the word “hell” not only to describe the place of eternal suffering of the damned, but, more in general, as “the abode of the dead” (shêol in Hebrew or hades in Greek). Those who died before Christ’s resurrection, were still deprived of the vision of God and therefore not in a state of beatitude, hence the word “hell”. Jesus, like all human beings, experienced death and in his soul joined all the others who died before Him in the realm of the dead. Christ, however, descended there as the Savior, proclaiming to the spirits, imprisoned there, the Good News of the triumph of love over evil, of life over death (cf. CCC 632-633: to be clear, Jesus did not descend there to destroy the hell of damnation, but only to free the just who had gone before Him).
Holy Saturday testifies that God, in Jesus Christ, not only shared our dying but also our remaining in death, a place where there is no hope and no future. By descending into the realm of death, he reached the point of entering humanity’s most extreme and absolute solitude, the place where —without God— not a ray of love enters, where total abandonment reigns without any word of comfort, as Pope Benedict XVI once said. By remaining in death, Christ passed beyond the door of this ultimate solitude to lead us into life.
Children who are afraid to be alone in the dark can only be reassured by the presence of a person who loves them, and takes them by hand into the light. This is exactly what we celebrate during Holy Saturday: the loving voice of God resounded in the realm of the dead to lead them out. After Jesus’ descent into Hell, in the hour of supreme solitude after our death, we are assured that we shall never more be totally alone.
Many contemporary spiritual masters have recently rediscovered the symbolism of Holy Saturday also to describe our modern times. God seems to be absent from the scene of the world and impotent in front of the tragedies of history. Some philosophers proclaimed that “God is dead”. As in the episode of the Gospel when the Apostles on the boat were caught in the storm, while Jesus was sleeping, we often cry out to Him: “Teacher, do you not care if we perish?” (Mk 4:35-41). Caught in a spiral of desperation, we sometimes feel that our lives are exactly like “hell” and that God is far away. But even in the tomb, apparently absent, Christ is instead actively working for our salvation. The liturgy of Holy Saturday is a powerful reminder to keep alive our hope even in our darkest moments.
If you feel that your life of faith is like a never-ending Holy Saturday —in between death and life, an alternation of hope and despair, or a long dwelling into spiritual desolation while the dawn of Easter has not yet appeared on the horizon—, let’s not be afraid. Christ, who descended into hell, is also present and active in all our fears and even in the depth of our darkness. Let’s remember it, while preparing for Easter.
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