Holy Saturday - Don't Hide From Death
Mortality is a tough subject to dwell on. So much so, we moderns work hard to avoid it altogether. But not we Christians. We are invited by the Faith to look death square in the face and rejoice!
We are a death-denying culture. In the US, the Funeral business is a $20 billion industry employing over 13,000 people nationwide! And, in 2016, we crossed that line where over half of the Americans who passed away chose cremation over a burial. If we don’t choose cremation, we apply techniques to the body to make it look less like a corpse.
We even say silly things like “Doesn’t he look good” or “They did a great job on him.” Amazing how we try to hide from uncomfortable truths.
While all of this may seem to be honoring, and to be sure, it is to many, there is an element in our treatment of our loved ones who pass as an attempt to escape dealing with our mortality.
We hide from the terrifying truth of our mortal life. And that fear of death drives so many of our passions to rule us rather than us mastering them.
Suppose you want to read an excellent book about a traditional Orthodox way of honoring and interring the faithful departed. In that case, I highly recommend “A Christian Ending” by J. Mark and Elizabeth Barna.
Look at our lesson today in Romans 6:3-11:
Brethren, all who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death. We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His. We know that our old self was crucified with Him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him. For we know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over Him. The death He died He died to sin, once for all, but the life He lives He lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
While the Orthodox Church attempts to get us to step back and see all of the Lord’s earthly ministry as His saving work, it would simply be wrong not to see the central reality of suffering and even physical death as a message we cannot ignore or minimize.
Jesus was born to die and live again. And so were you!
St. Paul’s magnificent epistle to the Romans spells out this wisdom through the Divine Mystery of Baptism as an icon of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, SO THAT you will appreciate just what the Church is saying to you at your baptism. Notice three inescapable Truths in Christian Baptism:
First, You have to Die to Live. This plays out in so many ways, even in our everyday lives. I have to die to the choices that destroy me so that I can live by the choices that engender life within me. I have to die to live. Of course, dying entails suffering. It is simply delusional to pretend that this Christian Way is going to have me avoiding suffering, no matter what the modern prophets of “feel good” religion as mere therapy may promise. Dying means being willing to pass through temporary suffering to get to eternal joy!
Next, You were meant for Freedom. Christian baptism embarks the newly baptized on a life of purposeful and pursued freedom from the brokenness and slavery of sin and death. This new way of living on the other side of Baptism is meant to foster freedom from sin (“missing the mark”) and freedom from the dead-end notion that sin is just “breaking the rules.”
Finally, You were meant to be LIKE Christ. We baptize SO THAT we will become like Jesus Christ. Period. Full Stop. End of discussion. The purpose of the Mystery of Baptism is to emulate Jesus in His death AND resurrection! AND all the wisdom of the Faith preserved for you through the centuries is meant to equip you to live out the purpose of your baptism.
Today, as we celebrate Holy Saturday and the dawn of Pascha, it’s time we Orthodox Christians abandon the death-denying culture of delusion of our modern age. It’s time we Orthodox Christians live out the promise of our theology and enter daily into the eternal blessings of our Baptism as Christians. It’s time we are Normal Orthodox Christians!
P.S. He Who enclosed the deeps is now seen dead, and the immortal One is laid in a tomb enclosed in a shroud with myrrh. Women, too, come to anoint Him, weeping bitterly and lamenting: “This Sabbath is blessed above all others, for Christ, having fallen asleep, will rise on the third day.” Kontakion of Holy Saturday
Fr. Barnabas Powell is the parish priest at Sts. Raphael, Nicholas, and Irene Greek Orthodox Church in Cumming, GA. He is also the founder of Faith Encouraged Ministries and produces the Faith Encouraged Daily Devotional on Substack. Watch the Faith Encouraged YouTube Channel here - https://www.youtube.com/@FaithEncouraged
Thanks for this, Father.
What you’ve written echoes something I’ve long wrestled with in Desert and Fire: the scandal of the Incarnation is not only that God became flesh, but that He did not flee from it. He entered not just the high places of human dignity but the broken marrow of it all—the sweat, the soil, the weeping, and yes, the corpse.
We are terrified of the body because we are terrified of God hidden in matter. So we sterilize death, tuck it behind cosmetic illusion, or cremate it into abstraction—hoping perhaps to avoid that final indignity which once baptized us into glory. But the Gospel, if it means anything, insists that God is not merely above matter but within it, transfiguring the dust from the inside out. We do not need to ascend—we must descend, with Him, into the clay.
The incarnation does not permit the comfort of escaping upward. It draws us deeper into the real, into what is—flesh, rot, sorrow, dirt—and dares us to find God there. Not in an idea of resurrection, but in the limp and perfumed weight of the crucified Christ, wrapped in linen, held in the hands of grieving women.
To be baptized into His death is to say yes to that descent. It is to look upon the corpse and whisper, “Even here, especially here, God is.” The Orthodox liturgy, in its refusal to flinch, preserves a truth that our modernity has entombed: that the body is not the enemy of the soul, but its cradle, its chalice, and—one day—its glory.
Dear Father Barnabas, THANK YOU for this beautiful meditation on Holy Saturday!