This Is the Blessed Sabbath

“This day was mystically prefigured by the great Moses, who said: God blessed the seventh day. For this is the blessed Sabbath, the day of repose on which the Only Begotten Son of God rested from all His works. By the dispensation according to death, the Son of God kept the Sabbath in the flesh…” ~Sticheron of Holy Saturday

 

The Lord is in the grave, and we stand at the grave. Once again God is resting from His works and enjoying the rest of the sabbath. Trembling, heaven and earth have bent down to the Lord’s grave. In this solemn quietude, in this audible silence, in this radiant sorrow, our poor soul too contemplates, weeps, prays. People had once murdered the God who came down to earth, and to this day they are ceaselessly murdering Him. In the face of this grave, there is no place for impotent self-defense, for the light of this grave penetrates all the hidden places of the soul and in this light we see our infirmity, wickedness, fallenness. We, people, are thrusting the thorns into His brow, each and every one of us, by action or by inaction. Or are we better than those who, at that time, had deserted Him, renounced Him, doubted Him, tormented and crucified Him? Externally, we escaped this trial; but this did not make us free of criminal participation in it: in the persons of those who had renounced God, in the persons of these blind and embittered ones, the murder of God was accomplished by the entire human race, in its subjugation to the prince of this world.

 

The Lord is a lover of human beings. He came to save His creation, to call to life the seed that had fallen into the earth and was dying. To us, such as we are, to murderers of God, murderers of man, self-murderers, God came and experienced the death on the cross for our sakes. Does man have the power to murder God? Are not the legions of angels ready to defend Him? Will His wrath not turn any creature into ash? But He remained defenseless before the murderers and did not resist death. The Father sent and the Son went – to receive death. The mind is torn apart by contradiction and grows weak before the mystery.

 

The Lord is a lover of human beings. In His image He created man for His glory; He loved man above all creatures for his primordial incorruptibility. But how is love for fallen man possible, for man in whom the yawning nothingness of the creature had been revealed? How can I be loved? Nevertheless, it is to fallen man, to me and for my sake, that the Son of God came; and He died for me and with me, in order to save me, together with all other human beings. We are incapable of withstanding, of receiving, the measure of God’s love and condescension, “for God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that He might have mercy upon all” (Rom. 11:32); and the Lord reposes in the grave for all human beings and for the sake of all human beings. This grave is the revelation of God’s love for man; it is the gift of the insatiable sacrificiality of this love: to give all for love, so that nothing remains ungiven. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn. 15:13). And here the Creator, having assumed the human nature, lays down His life for His creature. 

 

The Lord created the world in six days and rested on the seventh day from His works. This is God’s first sabbath. The Lord bestowed autonomous being upon the world in man, who by his freedom can fall away from Him. The Lord adapted His omnipotence to this human freedom. God’s world rebelled against God and remained outside of Him. In order to save the world and to return it to Himself, God Himself descended into the world and became a man; God Himself became a creature, by uniting Himself with creation. God took upon Himself the suffering of human life. He suffered from the infirmity of human flesh (Matt. 26:42). He suffered from human sin and demonic malice (Matt. 17:17). He experienced the human sorrow of the mortal nature (Matt. 26:38; Jn. 11:33, 35). Except for sin, He came to know all that was human. God did not abandon man in death; together with man He passed through its gates. God died a man for the sake of man; and He is now present before us “bodily in the grave” [i.e., the Plaschanitsa icon]. The greedy nothing out of which man is created, that nothing opened wide, because of sin, its yawning abyss and brought death into creation. Man’s nature became mortal, and God accepted this mortality for Himself. Hell caught God Himself on the hook of the mortal nature. After the creation of the world, nothingness, the outer darkness, once again presented itself before God; and He illuminated this darkness with the light of His resurrection. The circle of creation was closed. God’s work was completed with the salvation of the world – not in the omnipotence of His power but in the omnipotence of His sacrificial love. The time for a new sabbath arrived: the Lord, who previously had rested from His works of creation, now rested also from the works of salvation. This grave, the apparent victory of death, is the victory over death. There is no darkness of death, for in the latter is concealed the light of the resurrection, the radiant peace of the divine sabbath. The gates of hell are open; the path has been followed to the end and sanctified, for He is with us in death as well, and in death as well we are not abandoned by Love.

 

The death of God … This is the greatest gift and the supreme sacrifice from the God of love to the God of justice. In the capacity of the Creator, God takes responsibility for His creation. In creating the world, God from all eternity sacrifices for it “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). “God so loved the world, that He gave [for it] His only begotten Son” (Jn. 3:16). God formed the world first by His omnipotent Word, and then by the Word’s death on the cross. The Father sends His Beloved Son to the death on the cross, and the Son goes voluntarily to do the Father’s will, anointed by the Holy Spirit. Our minds are dumbfounded and astonished by this sacrifice-offering of God’s love, creating the world and crucifying itself for the world. The Divine Love, pre-eternally sacrificial in itself, pours out its sacrificiality over the entire world; and all creatures, those above as well as those below, are filled with horror at this unbearable sight. And this Divine self-crucifixion gives an incontrovertible answer to the question of all human sorrow and suffering: God’s sacrifice for the world is greater than any human sorrow; and this sacrifice is the sacrifice of salvific love. And so, before this grave, let sorrow for the world grow silent! Let the grumblings of the human heart cease!

 

But how can God, who is eternal and all-blessed, suffer and die humanly? God became man and has come to participate in His creation precisely in order to make man’s life His own life, in order to help man not outwardly but inwardly, in him himself, and first of all to take upon Himself all creaturely infirmity, all human suffering. He became our brother in order to make us, like Him, sons of God. He assumed our suffering, mortal body in order to glorify it with Himself. Together with the fullness of humanity, He also took upon Himself the sin of this humanity in His abandonment by God. The only one without sin did not know the poison of sin, but He experienced the entire power of sin through His human essence, which He had in common with His brothers. He came to know the full weight of suffering from the sin of others by the immensity of His compassionate love. In His Person he united all men; in His nature He embraced all things made by Him (Jn. 1:3). God cannot reconcile Himself with sin; nor can He forgive sin, sparing it His wrath. But the God who became man offers God His own human essence in a sacrifice of propitiation and redemption: He offers His most holy soul, which tasted spiritual death from the weight of sins, as well as His most pure body, which experienced death on the cross. He accepts co-suffering with man and suffering for man.

 

In the Gethsemane night, which crowned His life on earth, by virtue of compassionate love He experienced the sorrow from all human sin in the present, past, and future, in all its repulsiveness and painfulness. He received into Himself all the torments of the human conscience and all the deadliness of sin; and out of the depths of this conscience he prayed to the Father “with strong crying and tears” (Heb. 5:7). That was the weeping, groaning, and praying conscience of all humanity, taking responsibility for every sin weighing upon it. No man has the strength to lift this weight. This strength is possessed only by the one who is without sin, by the one who is God. And by lifting it upon Himself, He made sin impotent for sinners themselves; He served as the shield which shielded man from the wrathful Face of God, reconciling man with God, propitiating God.

 

Every human sin is wept over in the darkness of the Gethsemane night and is submerged in the latter. But the sin that poured from all sides into His sinless soul and that tormented His soul with its opposition to God, this sin also rose in revolt with all its power against Him Himself, who had made His abode in the kingdom of sin. The blind servants of sin directed their fury at Christ, with the purpose of removing Him from the face of the earth. This antagonism has an inner necessity; the Lord prepared His disciples for it, warning them that He would be given into the hands of sinners and be killed by them. The victory over militant evil is not realizable without the opposition of the latter. And the Lord tasted the full cup of sufferings: in this cup was a mixture of the cowardly betrayal of His friends and the bitter hatred of His enemies, the crude ferocity of the soldiers and the refined mockery of the leaders, the cold cruelty of the law and the frenzied hatred of the people. And above all this there was the final bottomless sorrow of solitude in the duel with the evil of the entire world and with its prince: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).

 

But the most horrible torments of soul and body did not reach their full measure until He was attacked by the final, as well as the first, enemy of humanity – death. Because of His sinlessness, death was not a necessity for Him; instead, He received it voluntarily, offering His life as the supreme and final sacrifice to God. “No man taketh it [my life] away from me, but I lay it down of myself” (Jn. 10:18). He lays it down in testimony to the limitlessness of God’s sacrificial love, in order to conquer death. The body and blood which constitute our life are our full and exclusive property. To give them up – to break His Body and to shed His Blood – is to give Himself in sacrifice. In the death on the cross lies the fullness of the power of the Incarnation. “Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life” (Job 2:4), says Satan about Job; and here God gives up for humanity His Body and Blood. God dies, “trampling down death by death…” (Paschal Troparion).

 

God’s love has exhausted all of its sacrifices. “It is finished” (Jn. 19:30): creation has received salvation; condemnation has been conquered by redemption; rejection has been overcome by reconciliation; death has been overcome by resurrection. God is resting from His works, and He is calling man to Himself into His divine rest, in order that man move forward on the path of salvation and in order that his heart not be hardened. “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from His” (Heb. 4:9-10).

 

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