Holy Saturday

Between Cross & Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday
By Alan E. Lewis
Eeerdmans, 2003
(490 pages, $25.00, paperback)

reviewed by Peter Joslyn

To begin reading Alan Lewis's final work, imposing as it is in scope and length, may prove too intimidating for the casual reader. In addition, despite the author's candidly expressed desire to make his work accessible for laymen, the density of some passages may still leave the less-than-scholars among us re-reading the same paragraph multiple times. Lewis's prose, occasionally, lacks a certain robust clarity. Nevertheless, this literary artichoke proves itself in the peeling.

Lewis proposes a novel reexamination of the gospel narrative, choosing the day after Christ's crucifixion and burial as his point of observation. In the course of defending this disconcerting, uncomfortable, and indecisive moment as a fruitful one for Christology, the author insists that we must “hold in tension what the cross says on its own, what the resurrection says on its own, and what each of them says when interpreted in the light of each other.” In this “multivocal” understanding of the basic Christian story there is, according to Lewis, a potentially ripe doctrinal harvest.

“The closer we have edged to the thinkable thought of ‘the death of God,'” Lewis argues, “the clearer has become the mystery, already disclosed in the narrative of cross and grave, that God lives, expands, and triumphs through that withdrawal and defeat which is self-surrender unto death.” It is only in seriously pausing at the occupied tomb of Christ that we are able to appreciate the magnitude of his passion; it is only from this appreciation that the awful joy of the following resurrection comes.

That this meditative pause is potent Lewis argues most convincingly within the eighth of his ten chapters, which is devoted to the re-characterization of world history according to his Holy Saturday paradigm. The early Church, Lewis argues, was imbued with the understanding that “if Pontius Pilate's easy prey was indeed to conquer the Babylonian tyranny of the Roman Caesars, that prospect was no instant analgesic but a sobering demand for courage, patience, and endurance, through a painful interim of fellowship with Christ's sufferings and concrete identification with him in his own persecution and extermination. Thus eager, expectant Christian hope for the apocalypse, when death would be swallowed up by life, simultaneously demanded a lifestyle marked by vulnerability, fiery ordeal, resistance and faithful witness unto death.”

In short, Lewis's novel Christology implies an eschatology, which places the Church itself within a grand, historical Holy Saturday, between the Christ-event and the Apocalypse. It is this interim period, wherein evil seems triumphant and the wisdom of God appears foolishness, that prompts Lewis (and his readers) to pause and consider “God in the grave.”

Peter A. Joslyn recently graduated from Wabash College . He currently teaches at New Covenant Schools in Lynchburg , VA.