Human Work on Holy Saturday

An Essay from the Perspective of Absence

Abstract

The relation of the dead and the living is examined against the background that the contemporary Christian faith is not a process of mastering the ready-made doctrines, but a personal experience of looking for the true life of Christ. Here, the most important emphasis is put on the mourning work by the living person with repentance for the absent deceased loved one. The idea of Holy Saturday in the Paschal Mystery provides us an instructive point of view. The Easter Triduum can be radically found in the whole of time and sanctifies and moves our chronological time forward. Particularly on the second day, Holy Saturday, when the Lord descended to the dead according to the Apostles’ Creed, the Church essentially refrains from any kind of the ecclesiastical liturgy. Then the illumination of revelation on the living people decreases, as the Lord is absent, and their sinful visage becomes apparent in contrast. The self-inquiry on that day illuminates that the living people are responsible for the death of the deceased in the historical-social stage and it forms a necessary part of the mourning work here. Once the living fulfill the responsibility of being conscious of their sins, they can acceptably expect the resurrection of the dead. But the burden of such self-inspection is likely to be so heavy that in order to accomplish it we, as living ones, need to take as our model someone such as Oshida Shigeto, who was thoroughly honest to the radical evil in him.