Saturday, April 3
The Harrowing of Hell
Holy Saturday is the day between the substitutionary death of Jesus on the cross and His glorious resurrection. On Holy Saturday we celebrate the Harrowing of Hell--the mystery of Christ’s descent into Hades to lead the captives in a great parade of triumph (Ephesians 4:8-10). This is therefore a day of watchful expectation, in which mourning is being transformed into joy. He who brought all things into being in creation, now makes all things new in re-creation. Christ has broken the power of death and therefore has given us life eternal.
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4 comments:
I would really like to know how Biblical Christians can continue to state that Jesus died on Good Friday, Holy Saturday was the day between and Sunday was the day of Resurrection, when the Bible makes it clear that Jesus was THREE NIGHTS and THREE DAYS in the heart of the earth.
“For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the huge fish, so the Son of man shall be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” Matthew 12:40, MKJV.
Do we wish to make God a liar because of the vain traditions of man?
According the the Jewish method of calendar reckoning, the "three days and three nights" was in fact fulfilled--and the traditional accounting of Good Friday to Easter Sunday is altogether Biblical. See the helpful reference works of Edersheim, Keil and Delitch, and/or Kittle. This is a great reminder that we need to be very careful about what we dismissively label as "vain." It often turns out that is is not so much tradition's "democracy of the dead" that has gone off the rails but our own "modernist, ethnocentric, mechanistic, and reductionistic rationalism."
So, Friday night plus Saturday night equals three nights. I guess I failed math.
What you failed was to see that it is not math. The Hebrews always reckoned any part of a 24-hour cycle as a full day and night: yom. Remember, they were not Moderns like us, driven by the mathematical and mechanical structures of reductionistic rationalism.
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