In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
As an Anglican, I absolutely love the Book of Common Prayer. I love the profundity and tradition of the prayers, the liturgical calendar, and even that section in the back called the “Historical Documents” that links us to generations past. Towards the back, you might know there is what is called “An Outline of the Faith,” sometimes called the Catechism. And the Catechism defines prayer as a response to God, by thought and deed, with or without words. The Catechism then notes that the primary types of prayer are adoration, praise, thanksgiving, penitence, oblation, intercession, and petition, and then proceeds to define each of those types of prayer.
And as much as I hate to say this, I think there’s a mistake in the Prayer Book. Not that any of the definitions of prayer are wrong, but one is very clearly lacking. The Prayer Book does not list “lament” as a type of prayer. The most common classification in the book of Psalms is that of lament – a prayerful cry or plea towards God. Lament cannot be reduced into the category of petition or intercession where we are simply asking for God to help in a certain situation. Lament goes deeper than that. A prayer of lament is about expressing a sense of doubt, pain, grief, despair, hopelessness, Godforsakenness.
We see the prayers of lament in Psalms such as the 13th: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever? How long will you hide your face from me?”; or the 31st “For my life is wasted with grief, and my years with sighing; my strength fails me because of affliction, and my bones are consumed. I am forgotten like a dead man, out of mind; I am as useless as a broken pot.” A lament is a prayer of brutal honesty with, or, even, against God. Such Psalms of prayerful lament show us that God does not need to be flattered and can be confronted directly and boldly. These laments are offered because there is a faithful assumption that God hears such laments, can receive them compassionately, and will be moved to respond to the cry.
We have been trained to suppress these sorts of thoughts, to keep them to ourselves, and certainly to not hurl such accusations or complaints against God. The Psalter though shows us that the Jewish people understand the importance of prayers of lament. Jesus, as a faithful Jew, knew this as well. As he gave up his dying breath on the Cross yesterday, in both Matthew and Mark he quotes a lament from Psalm 22 – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Holy Saturday is the day on which we sit in lament. The horrors and screams of agony and betrayal on Good Friday have fallen silent and not yet have we arrived at the shouts of surprise and victory of Easter. Instead, we sit in lament remembering that Jesus descended to the dead between his Crucifixion and Resurrection. For well over a thousand years, the Church has proclaimed this as a part of its Apostles’ Creed; that a part of the salvation offered to Creation includes Christ’s descent into and vanquishing of hell. In the older language of the Church, this was called the “harrowing of hell,” which is such a powerful description of this saving event.
A “harrow” is a farming tool made up of teeth that is dragged over plowed land to break up clumps and remove weeds; and when used as a verb, “harrow” means to cause distress. This is what Christ does for us – he goes to that place of depravity, darkness, death and he brings distress to it. He brings God’s grace to the realm of Godforsakenness.
The fact of the matter is that crucifixion is the most vile, repugnant, and dehumanizing act that can be done to another human being. The pain caused in crucifixion is excruciating. The wickedness of crucifixion is that it is not like being hanged, burned, beheaded, or drawn and quartered, which are all at least mercifully quick ways of publically executed. But crucifixion would last for hours. Most of the time when you see a Crucifix, Jesus is wearing a loincloth, but that is for our sensitivity and is not based on historical fact. Jesus and all those who suffered the cross of Rome did so with the disgrace of being completely naked. And this torturous death was seen as a public spectacle. This sentence of death was not carried out in secret or by a rogue terrorist organization, but by the government itself and was sanctioned by the religious institution of the day. And because the death was licit, it was treated as a spectacle and many would show up to ridicule and insult those on the cross. It was a completely degrading way of dying. And that was exactly the point – the message sent by hanging someone on a cross was “This is not a person, but an animal, and so we will treat them as such.”
And it is because of this experience that we know that Christ suffered the worst of humanity. He was rejected by his people, abandoned by his disciples, and executed by his government. God in Christ knows what Auschwitz was like, what Vietnam was like, what it was like to be in the crumbling Twin Towers, what is like to have a family member commit suicide. In the Crucifixion, Jesus brought into very being of God the reality of senseless suffering, of abandonment, of despair, of rejection. So when we proclaim that Christ descended into hell, we know it is true by simply looking at the Cross, where we saw hell on earth.
Jesus allows our fallen nature, Sin and Death to drag him all the way down into the lowest place we can imagine. The 4th-century Archbishop of Constantinople, Gregory of Nazianzus, wrote, “That which he has not assumed, he has not healed.” But by being Crucified and going into that place of Godforsakenness, Jesus has assumed the very worst, bringing healing even to hell. Now, what hell is, how you get there, or who is there does not really matter for Holy Saturday. That confusion is why the vast majority of churches completely skip over this day.
In reading commentaries in preparation for this sermon, I was surprised how many scholars wrote some version of “I can’t believe I got stuck writing the commentary for a day on which no one is actually going to be preaching.” Because we are uncomfortable or unsure of our doctrine of hell, far too many Christians also put aside our doctrine of Christ’s descent into hell. It’s no different when we put aside prayers of lament – we don’t know what to do when we are plunged into such depths, so we avoid them altogether.
What matters for today is not our theology of hell, other than the fact that Christ harrowed it. By the harrowing of hell, we mean that Christ went to that place of utter rejection of and from God. Christ went to that place of depression and despair, where the light of hope and joy could not shine and he harrows it – he turned it upside down with the plow of his love. In proclaiming the message of forgiveness and reconciliation into the places of utter rejection and despair, Jesus provides a way out of hell – both the place of utter separation from God and the places in our own lives where we feel as if hope is fool’s folly.
It takes a prayer of lament though for us to see this. Only from the pit of despair can we know that Christ as been to the bottom with us. And though the Prayer Book makes an error of omission in not listing “lament” as a type of prayer, it does realize that we cannot mark Holy Saturday without lament. We are told that after the Gospel and homily, we are to read together the anthem from the Burial Office – “In the midst of life we are in death.”
Lament allow us to be honest with ourselves and with God. Lament unites us to Jesus in his cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Lament plunges us into the realities of Sin and Death and shows that the love of God awaits us on the other side. Lament is the bridge that we travel from Good Friday to Easter morning. Thanks be to God that Jesus Christ is, himself, that bridge.
