What the World Called Saturday

Jesus of Nazareth was crucified on a Friday. The Gospel accounts are specific: it was the day of Preparation, before the Sabbath, the fourteenth of Nisan by the Jewish calendar, the day the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in the temple. The timing is not incidental. John's Gospel frames the entire passion narrative around it — the Lamb of God dying at the hour the Passover lambs die, the sacrifice that the sacrificial system had been pointing toward since Egypt.

He died at approximately three in the afternoon. By Jewish reckoning, Friday evening was the beginning of Saturday — the Sabbath. The body was in the tomb by sundown. Saturday was the Sabbath. Sunday, what Christians call Easter, was the first day of the week.

Saturday is the day the New Testament says almost nothing about. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all move from the burial on Friday evening to the empty tomb on Sunday morning with the briefest of transitions. Mark 16:1 simply notes that when the Sabbath was past, the women bought spices. That is all. Saturday is passed over in the Gospel accounts with a speed that might look like nothing happened.

That speed is the most important silence in Scripture.

Nothing happened that any human reporter could observe. The stone was in place. The guards were posted. From the human side of the stone, there was nothing to report. What was happening was happening in the realm that Part Five traced through Sheol and Hades — the realm of the departed, the condition of separation from the living God that Adam entered in the garden and that every soul that had ever died had entered in one form or another since.

Into that realm, on that Saturday, the Son of God descended.

The Creed Knew

The Apostles' Creed, one of the oldest summaries of Christian belief, contains a line that most congregations recite every week without pausing over it: "he descended into hell."

That line is not a metaphor for the suffering of the cross, though it has sometimes been read that way. It is not a description of Christ experiencing the spiritual agony of separation from the Father in the garden or on the cross, though that experience was real. It is a statement about what happened between the burial on Friday and the resurrection on Sunday. He descended. He went somewhere. The creed says so.

The Greek word in the underlying tradition is Hades. He descended into Hades. Into the realm of the dead. Into Sheol. Into the condition that Adam entered on the day he ate. The creed, which predates most of the systematic theology that has been built around it, knew that Saturday was not empty.

The New Testament texts that describe this have been among the most debated in Scripture, not because they are unclear about the fact of the descent but because they are tantalizingly brief about the content of it.

"Because Christ also suffered once for sins — the just for the unjust — to bring you to God, by being put to death in the flesh but by being made alive in the spirit. In it He went and preached to the spirits in prison, after they were disobedient long ago when God patiently waited in the days of Noah as an ark was being constructed." — 1 Peter 3:18–20 (NET)

"For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead." — 1 Peter 4:6 (NET)

Ephesians 4:9 says that the ascension implies a prior descent "into the lower parts of the earth." And then Revelation 1:18 places in the mouth of the risen Christ the most direct statement:

"and the one who lives! I was dead, but look, now I am alive – forever and ever – and I hold the keys of death and of Hades!" — Revelation 1:18 (NET)

The keys. He holds the keys. Keys do not belong to visitors. Keys belong to the one who has taken the territory.