Holy Saturday, when properly viewed, provides a theology that can speak to trauma. It presents a God who himself endures trauma and needs a witness (Spirit) to keep him tethered to life.
There are a handful of books which, for me, proved quite dangerous in the end; books which seemed tame at first blush, but which, looking back, have changed my life.
One such book which I recently completed is Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining, by Shelly Rambo. Hers is but one contribution to the growing field known as “Trauma Theology,” but the gravity of Rambo’s contribution cannot be overstated.
Trauma is ubiquitous among human beings. I would argue, even, that it is ingredient to what it means to be human. However, only in recent years has trauma received due attention in prominent academic disciplines.
Trauma is now a principal subject in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and others. Beyond the sciences, it has entered the humanities as well. Literary critics, historians, and theologians even, are examining trauma through the lens of their discipline(s).
“Trauma is a fact of life,” Bessel van der Kolk writes. “Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence.” In The Body Keeps the Score, van der Kolk shows how “trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising one’s capacity for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.”
While there appear to be slight “gaps” among van der Kolk’s figures, looking back at the bloodiest century in world history (20th), the attacks on the World Trade Center (2001), the catastrophic Hurricane Katrina (2005), the relentless surge of mass shootings in America (Columbine, 1999; Sandy Hook, 2012; Uvalde, 2022), the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022), and recent instances of race injustice and civic brutality– it’s fair to say that “trauma,” of some sort, has touched every person alive today.
Here, enters Holy Week.
How, you might ask, does Holy Week relate to wars, natural disasters, and gun violence? Holy Week is a week filled with trauma.
On Friday, April 8th, AD 30 (ca.), Jesus of Nazareth, long-expected Messiah (for some), Son of God incarnate (for others), desperately sought political liberator (for many)– died. Jesus of Nazareth truly died. Nailed naked to an instrument of torture for all to see, Jesus (and his followers) faced trauma.
“The nature of life following an event of overwhelming violence is fundamentally changed,” writes Shelly Rambo. Trauma can be defined, then, as: “suffering that remains.”
The overriding question of Rambo’s book, and the question which ought to haunt all Christians, is: Can theology speak to trauma? Can theology, in other words, witness to a “suffering that remains”?
Christian theology, especially this time of year, often “fails to attend to the ongoing realities of a death that does not go away” (= trauma). Churches may observe Good Friday, sometimes through sober Tenebrae services, and the like; but, knowing the end of the story, we often rush body-and-soul to Sunday, Resurrection day.
But what about… Saturday? Have we forgotten about Saturday?
Holy Saturday (or Easter Vigil) has been observed by Christians since the first few centuries AD. Such observance, however, especially among Protestants, has largely, I think, been lost.
On Holy Saturday, the Son of God is dead. His disciples are numb with despondency and despair. Holy Saturday is a day of trauma par excellence, a day of tragic suffering which remains.
Some traditions imagine Holy Saturday through “Christ’s harrowing of hell.” As they see it, the Son of God dies, then descends to “hell,” where he preaches victory to imprisoned souls, loosening their shackles in holy fervor. According to this narrative, Saturday is a day not of trauma, but of triumph.
This tradition woefully misses the mark.
Trauma survivors would never think to view Holy Saturday as such. To them it’s a day consonant with their post-traumatic state of existence. It’s a day on which Jesus and his disciples sink deep into the depths of trauma, without guaranteed hope for anything else.
In her book, Rambo talks about the “Middle Spirit,” a form the Holy Spirit takes on Holy Saturday. Augustine of Hippo once described the Holy Spirit as the “bond of love between Father and Son.” Rambo largely re-appropriates this image.
On Holy Saturday, the Son seems utterly forsaken by his Father. Having sunk into “hell,” he remains in a state (it seems) of total separation from God the Father. Over this “second chaos,” as it were, the Spirit broods or hovers (cf., Gen. 1), stretching itself as thin as thread between abandoned Son and bereaved Father.
The Spirit, in this reading, doesn’t triumph; it doesn’t conquer; it doesn’t vanquish; it lingers. It stretches itself (figuratively) as a sort of thread connecting the realm of death (“hell”; the Son) with the realm of life (“heaven”; the Father). The Spirit, recast by Rambo, is that which remains in the face of death.
Jesus, as we know, is raised by the Father on the day that would become (for us) Easter Sunday. However, the hope of Easter Sunday comes necessarily through the hell of Holy Saturday. If Friday is a day of death, and Sunday a day of life, Saturday is a day when both are held together.
The Spirit Jesus exhales upon his death on Good Friday is a Spirit of witness, a Spirit of the Middle. It’s a Spirit Jesus-followers would all receive, a Spirit tenuously suspended between death and life.
Holy Saturday, when properly viewed, provides a theology that can speak to trauma. It presents a God who himself endures death and needs the Spirit to keep him tethered to life.
The new life which Sunday brings then, is not a return to pre-Friday life. It is existence as it has never been known before, in which death and life are held together.
The central image of the Christian faith is the traumatization of the Son of God. The suffering Jesus experienced on the cross and thereafter, does not simply go away on Easter Sunday.
Jesus bears in body and soul the trauma of death, separation; yet he blends it through this Middle Spirit, with the hope of life, the hope of connection. The “life” of a Jesus-follower, then, is a life full of suffering, full of death. But through this Middle Spirit, such “death” commingles with “life.”
This Holy Weekend, I challenge you to re-think what happened on Holy Saturday. I urge you to witness the trauma of God, to feel his divine fragility (for you), and to look for his open wounds gushing forth with the juice of life, again on Easter Sunday.
Jonah Bissell
Pastor