Holy Saturday is one of the most enigmatic days in the whole church calendar. It lies in a sort of wilderness space between Lent, which while ongoing surely has its climax on Good Friday, and Easter, which hasn’t begun yet. What are we meant to do today? Is there anything for us to celebrate?

The only thing Scripture tells us about the disciples on the day between Jesus’ death and resurrection is that they observed the Sabbath rest (Luke 23:56). We can only imagine what that Sabbath day must have felt like. The disciples must have been caught in a whirlpool of doubt and confusion. Surely Jesus’ death proved he was not the Messiah after all? Could it be that the Pharisees had been right about Jesus all along? But what of all the signs they had seen? What did the last three years of their lives mean? How could they go back to Galilee after everything they’d been through? How did God want them to spend the rest of their lives? The male disciples would have wrestled with the guilt of having abandoned Jesus in his hour of need. The women would have spent the evening, once the Sabbath was over, collecting their spices and anticipating the experience of embalming Jesus’ corpse, the traumatic ordeal of rubbing ointment into his lacerated body, reliving the events they had watched from a distance the day before. And in all this, they attempted to keep the Sabbath, to worship and celebrate Israel’s deliverance from slavery, to participate as best they could in the festival that was continuing all around them.

And what was Jesus doing on Holy Saturday? Here Scripture speaks only rarely and enigmatically. 1 Peter 3:18-20 is a difficult text that I don’t feel confident taking a position on at the moment. Ephesians 4:9, the other classic text, is similarly disputed.

Holy Saturday does, however, get a line in the Apostles’ Creed. ‘He descended into Hell’. Even that line is the most controversial of the creed, with several prominent evangelical theologians arguing that we should remove it.

The 39 Articles, however, reaffirm in Article III that we should confess that Christ descended into Hell. So I have a confessional commitment to uphold that article of the creed and feel a need to be able to articulate what I understand it to mean. So here goes.

One common explanation, which was John Calvin’s preferred position, is that on the cross Jesus suffered the torments of Hell for us. So the Heidelberg Catechism, which in general I love so much that I keep a copy on my bedside table, says:

Q. Why is there added: He descended into hell?
A. In my greatest sorrows and temptations I may be assured and comforted that my Lord Jesus Christ, by His unspeakable anguish, pain, terror, and agony, which He endured throughout all His sufferings but especially on the cross, has delivered me from the anguish and torment of hell.

Heidelberg Catechism, q44

To be clear, I believe everything in the answer given here. I think it’s true and precious. I just don’t think that’s what the creed means. Aside from being (so far as I can tell) wholly novel in the 16th century, it feels contrived. If the article refers to Jesus’ suffering on the cross, why put it after the article on his burial?

A far simpler, if rather more prosaic, answer is given by the ACNA catechism To Be a Christian, which also has bedside table privileges.

Q. What does the Creed mean by saying that Jesus descended to the dead?
A. That Jesus descended to the dead means that he truly died and entered the place of the departed.

To be a Christian: Q68

To be a Christian is working here with the modern translation of the Creed, which says ‘he descended to the dead’. As is commonly noted, the word translated ‘Hell’ in older versions of the Creed strictly means the underworld, the realm of the dead more generically, rather than the post mortem place of torment we associate that word with today. I’m given to understand that ‘Hell’ had a similar breadth of meaning in the past. So what the Creed is saying is that Jesus died and his soul went where dead people go.

Why would that be worth having an article of the Creed devoted to? And why would it be important enough that the 39 Articles insist we retain it? Well, aside from the fact that it’s probably best not to chuck things which were matters of patristic consensus unless there’s a really good reason, there are three reasons why I think it’s worth keeping.

Firstly, by giving an account of what happened to Jesus’ soul, however minimal, we are confessing that Jesus had a human soul. Denial of this – a heresy technically called Apollinarianism – is one of those ideas which pops up quite frequently among Christians. The Creed and Holy Saturday forces us to remember that Jesus was a complete human being. There is no part of being human Jesus has not entered into. All our human experiences and emotions are familiar to him. Including death.

Which is the second reason this is important. Jesus’ descent to the dead means that Jesus has experienced every aspect of human death. His body has experienced human death at its worst and his soul has likewise experienced death and the state of being dead. This is a precious truth. Since being ordained last summer, I’ve attended a couple of deathbeds. There are many comforting Gospel truths I can share at times like that if people ask me. But if truth be told, there’s so much I don’t know about the specifics of what happens when you die. God has only revealed so much, and while Scripture contains enough to know that it is far better to depart and be with Christ, it is still a frightening prospect to actually experience death and to anticipate being dead. It is a huge comfort to know that nothing awaits us which Jesus hasn’t been through himself and triumphed over for us.

Finally, the descent to the dead reminds us that ‘going to heaven when you die’ is not the end of the story. At theological college I had the privilege of hearing N. T. Wright speak about this in many occasions. Too often, Christians have thought about heaven as though the goal of salvation was to live a disembodied life in a very pleasant parallel universe. By framing Jesus’ post-mortem state as a descent to the underworld (rather than, say, an exaltation to paradise), the Creed underlines that death and the state of being dead are part of Christ’s humiliation, aspects of the human condition that Jesus came to save us from. The descent cries out for a resurrection. It teaches us that ‘going to heaven when you die’, if that is the end of the matter, should be as unsatisfying as a Holy Saturday with no Easter to follow.

Holy Saturday is a bit of a lull in the Calendar’s round of celebration. But even that lull, and the tensions it reveals, have a valuable place in helping us celebrate Christ’s death and resurrection rightly.