Preached on Holy Saturday, April 4, 2026, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington, by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.
Job 14:1-14
Psalm 31:1-14, 15-16
1 Peter 4:1-8
John 19:38-42
Long ago I was the organist at a funeral for a small child, a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. It was a dreadful day. I do not recall what the preacher said. I remember the parents, ashen and mute, in the front row. I remember the child’s wrecked grandpa. I remember the open casket, and what looked like a terrible, forlorn, yet serene little doll inside it.
I spoke to the child’s grandfather. He had proudly doted on his grandson, a delight in his sunset years. I don’t remember what I said to him. I probably just said, “I’m so sorry.” But I clearly remember him saying to me, “We’re empty. We’re just empty.”
Millions of children have perished since that day. Millions of families have been shattered, devastated, emptied. There are the terrible accidents of life: a mysterious affliction stops the heart of a toddler; an airplane collides with a fire truck; a tumor slowly grows, undetected; someone steps out into the street at the exact wrong time. Theologians call these unintentional tragedies “ontic evils.”
Then there are intentional, immoral acts of destruction and death: the atrocity of genocide, the careless bombing of schools and hospitals, the sick pride taken by our own government officials in their casual obliteration of human life, as if everything is just a video game. Theologians call these intentional horrors “moral evils.”
It is good, and wise, that we Christians set aside two nights and a day to contemplate the presence of our Savior experiencing and contending with both ontic and moral evil. Jesus of Nazareth, as a human being, experiences ontic evil just like you and me: the ordinary predicaments of vulnerability and mortality, the accidents of circumstance common to all people. He was born into a particular time and place; he hungered and thirsted; he worked and studied; he shared dinners with friends; naturally, he wept at the grave of a friend; he then died. How ordinary, how everyday, how… ontic.
But Jesus also fell victim to moral evil. He was born into a refugee family fleeing persecution; his lower-class parents could only afford common turtledoves for his presentation in the Temple; he was finally executed by the empire in a public ritual of abject humiliation.
And today we recall his descent among the dead, the emptying of life from his body, the emptying of our Savior from the universe, the effects of ontic and moral evil at their worst. Today we contemplate the worst they both can do.
Our tabernacle where we keep the reserve sacrament is empty. It’s just a little box with its door hanging open, but it reminds me of that poor grandpa mourning the terrible, senseless death of a child. We need at least two nights and a day to stand empty before God, to stand in solidarity with those who have been emptied out, to contemplate emptiness, to be empty.
Yet even now, the Crucified One is moving, working, harrowing, hallowing. But maybe you share with the theologian Hans Urs von Balthazar the belief that on Holy Saturday, Christ merely participates fully in human death; that today, Christ is dead, and that is enough for today. This can offer an odd kind of satisfaction for us: if we live in a world of heartbroken grandparents, maybe we need today to be the day on which God joins us under the shadow of death, full stop.
But other Christians read the first letter of Peter and see in those verses the Good News that on Holy Saturday — not just a 24-hour earthly day, but an eternal spiritual reality — on this Day, Jesus is not just emptied out and dead, but he also proclaims the Gospel “even to the dead,” to everyone in Hell. (And “Hell” is any human place or condition or experience in which God is absent. This includes those places where we push God out and lock our prison doors from the inside.)
I am persuaded by this view. Even in death, the Living One rises. Even in despair, the Living One preaches hope. Even in emptiness, aching emptiness, wretched nothingness, even in that most desperate place, the Living One draws alongside us, locked in our grievous prisons.
All of this reminds me that on that most wretched day at that awful funeral for a child, there were dozens of people in the building. Behind the devastated family stood their community, and everyone sang their deepest hopes and prayers for that family. Everyone wept bitterly with them. Everyone held them close. This is what those who follow the Crucified and Risen One do. In the face of ontic evil, there is nothing we can say to the bereaved, but we can be with them.
And in resolute defiance of moral evil, we embrace one another in mighty fellowship, and we embrace all who cry out in lament. We preach hope to them and to one another, even if everything around us is laid waste; even if our hopes and dreams have been reduced almost to ashes.
Even today, on this ashen and empty day, even now, we can just hear, off in the distance, the first glad strains of God’s song of Resurrection.