Harrowing Hell: the significance of Easter Eve

It's not Easter Saturday but Holy Saturday or Easter Eve. This day between Good Friday and Easter is unique. No other day feels quite like this, a day of emptiness, of waiting, of hoping.

For the Jewish community, it's the Sabbath or seventh day of the week (and this year, it's also the first day of Passover). That's an important clue to what it means. In the Genesis creation story, God finished his work on the sixth day and rested on the seventh. St John's account of the crucifixion picks up this theme when he has Jesus speak his last word from the cross, 'It is finished'. He has accomplished the new work of creation. Tetelestai! - it is complete. So Jesus can now be laid in the tomb. He can rest. He can keep the Sabbath.

Early next morning, the first day of the week, the tomb is empty. Jesus is up before daybreak. He appears to Mary in the garden. We hear the echoes of the creation story again, the garden of Eden where God places the man and the woman to look after the world that he is making. But now there is a new world. Life is beginning again on this eighth day, this first day of the rest of history. Everything is transfigured. Nothing is the same again after this Sabbath.  

So on this day we are 'between times': between old and new, between past and future, between expectation and fulfilment. Traditionally, Easter Eve is 'a-liturgical', that is, a day when the church doesn't celebrate the liturgy but enters into the mysterious pause between one era and the next. The altars are stripped after Maundy Thursday, the church is forlorn and bare, its songs have fallen silent. It's like Zion as she is depicted in the Book of Lamentations: desolate, abandoned, void. Nothing stirs; nothing happens. This is the Sabbath of the grave.

I'm speaking symbolically, of course, about the lifelessness of Easter Eve. Yet in medieval theology, it was on Holy Saturday that a great drama was acted out in unseen places. When Christ went down to the grave, it was in order to harrow hell and bring redemption to lost souls who had been condemned to die. The new Adam goes to rescue the old. 'He descended into hell' we recite in the creed. Those words aren't easy to say. Some treat them as no more than a colourful way of talking about his death.

But let's use our spiritual imagination here. One way is to say: the cross has not only personal but cosmic significance. Nothing is beyond the reach of God's redemption, and Jesus goes to the far side of all that is dark and dreadful to achieve it. Even the hells of this world are not beyond the scope of God's loving purposes. How could the gospel have a truly universal dimension without the harrowing of hell?

Back here, Easter Eve may be liturgically a day of rest, but it is also a day of preparation. There is work to do after all. Like Jewish people preparing for the Passover, there is a festival to get ready for both at home and in church. In the Cathedral, rehearsals for the great liturgy of Easter dawn take place. The best vestments are being laid out, the golden hangings are placed on the altar, the church is cleaned, and flowers and decorations are being arranged. The Cathedral will never look more beautiful than it does on Easter Day.

So as we pass symbolically through the grave and gate of death, we wait for the celebration of a new dawn. We shall be there, ready to greet him when he comes to us at first light in the breaking of the bread. Our hearts will burn within us as we hear the voice of our Beloved who calls us by name and tells us not to be afraid.

Here is my translation of a familiar Easter hymn.

Glory to Jesus, risen Son and King,
Lord of life who frees us, your new song we sing.
Radiant in the morning, angels bright come down,
Greet the day that’s dawning, hail the conqueror’s crown:

Glory to Jesus, risen Son and King,
Lord of life who frees us, your new song we sing.

See Jesus meets you, see your Lord appear!
Hear the word that greets you, tells you love is here.
Dance with joy and gladness, people of the Lord.
Banish grief and sadness, tell the news abroad!

Fear flies before him: evermore he lives!
O my heart adore him! peace and joy he gives.
Christ my mighty conqueror, Christ my gracious friend,
Christ my life and glory, till all ages end:

Sunday Trading: a human right?

Sunday trading is back in the news again.  The coalition Government promised that the current relaxation of the Sunday trading laws would be ‘for the Olympics only’.  Now, it seems, they are considering rescinding the legislation for good. 

What do we think about this? 

When it comes to Sunday, I am not a sabbatarian.  For one thing, it isn’t the sabbath (which is Saturday, the seventh day).  For another, there’s no evidence from the New Testament that the early church transferred the Jewish sabbath to the first day of the week, the day of resurrection.  They seemed to have believed that sabbath observance belonged to the ceremonial law of the Hebrew Bible and like circumcision, should not be imposed on gentile Christians. Strict sabbatarianism of the kind you get in the Hebrides is, I think, a misreading of the gospel.  

However, I have a lot of sympathy with those who want to keep Sunday as a day of rest and recreation, and who do not want to see Sunday trading laws deregulated still further. Let me say at once that I am not thinking of the corner shop, the souvenir outlet at a leisure facility, the small-scale operation on the high-street where things are still done on a human scale.  It’s the might of the megastore that concerns me, the gravitational pull of out of town shopping malls that have done so much to suck the life out of many town and city centres.   

Here’s why I am against this idea. 

1.      It isn’t good for human life to be tramlined by the same routines day in, day out. Sunday offers a different rhythm.  It’s a gift that opens up other possibilities for how we spend our time.  Time for family and friendships.  Time for the things we enjoy.  Time to ponder and reflect.  Time for relaxation and renewal.  Time to give to others through volunteering and service.  Time for sport, exercise or culture.  And if we are Christians, time for worship, fellowship, prayer and spiritual growth. 

2.      Specifically, those who work in the retail industry (including many of our poorest paid workers) deserve a weekly break like anyone else.  It is one thing for the legislation to protect the rights of such people.  Experience shows that it can be hard for employees at the bottom of the pyramid to resist strong pressures from the top to work in their free time. The unions are right to point out that if the law is further deregulated, these pressures will increase, risking a high cost to employees’ mental and physical health, and to their relationships and quality of life. 

3.      Most important of all is what such a move would say about our values.  It would carry the strong message that what matters most in life is the freedom to shop when we want for however long we want.  This supposed public appetite for shopping is being elevated almost to the level of a human right.  We should resist this vigorously.  The relentless tide of consumerism is possibly the most eroding of all the forces of modern life that are eating away at our wellbeing as individuals and as a society.  It says that what matters most is what can be traded, bought and sold as commodities.  It proclaims that the endless quest to acquire more and still more should be endorsed.  It encourages greed, and in particular, envy, possibly the most deadly sin of the seven.  It says that we are in love with money and the power it gives us.

As regular readers of this blog know, my wife and I spend time regularly in France.  There, Sunday trading is tightly regulated.  In a country that is officially far more secularised than the UK, whose mantra is laïcisme, this is not because of the influence of religious faith.  It’s more to do with the strong bonds of family life and the unions’ resolve to uphold it.  So Sunday is a marvellously peaceful day with its own pace of life.  Families make the most of it.  Sport and leisure flourish.  It’s true that people do not go to church in huge numbers.  It’s also true that in some towns, some smaller shops are open for business.  But not the big supermarkets and megastores.  So the traffic is lighter and the atmosphere less febrile.  The continental Sunday, once much maligned in protestant England, has a wholesomeness about it that we have now almost lost here. 

I have to say that I am gloomy about the future.  By a curious act of group-think, the coalition has got itself believing that unregulated Sunday trading will encourage greater consumer spend and therefore help get the economy out of the pit in which it has been stuck for so long.  I doubt this very much.  At best, it will attenuate the public’s shopping habits across twelve hours rather than six.  But the evidence of this economic crisis is that the public is not as naïve as the government appears to think. We are not inclined to part with more money than we can afford simply because more shopping hours are available to us. Internet shopping is available 24 hours a day, but it is not encouraging consumers to spend in ways that stimulate demand and therefore create capacity and productivity. 

My concern is as much with the symbolic effect of this likely change, and for what it says about our collective understanding of what our life together in our contemporary society should be like.  There is something worryingly cynical about a government that smuggles in this unwanted change under the banner of the Olympics when the original rhetoric promised otherwise.  So I hope that Christians will resist it, not for spurious sabbatarian reasons, but because we care about human life and its flourishing.  And because we follow a way that points the human heart to where treasure truly lies.