This is the Blessed Saturday

(Reflections before the Holy Shroud). Moses secretly foreshadowed the great day, saying: and God bless the seventh day. This is the blessed Sabbath, this is the day of rest, in which the Only Begotten Son of God rested from all his works, having sabbathed the Sabbath by looking at death in the flesh... (The stichera of the great Sabbath on the Lord I cried - Glory). The Lord is in the tomb, and we are at this tomb. Once more God rested from His work and tasted the Sabbath rest. Heaven and earth stood in trepidation at the Lord's tomb. In this solemnity of silence, the intelligibility of silence, the lightness of sadness, our poor soul contemplates, cries, and prays. People once killed God who came to earth, but to this day they are constantly killing Him. In the face of this tomb there is no place for powerless self-defense, for its light penetrates the entire innermost soul, and we see in this light our weakness, anger, and fall. We humans drive thorns into His Brow, one and all, by deed or inaction. Or are we better than those who abandoned Him then, denied Him, doubted Him, tortured and crucified Him? We were not destined to have this test, outwardly we passed it, but this did not make us free from criminal complicity: in the person of those who rejected God, blind and bitter, the human race committed deicide, in captivity to the prince of this world. The Lord is a lover of mankind. He came to save His creation, to call to life the fallen and dying grain in the ground. God came to us, such as we are, to deicides, murderers and suicides, and tasted death on the cross for our sake. Can man kill God? are not legions of angels ready to defend Him? Will not every creature be consumed by His wrath? But He remained defenseless before the murderers and did not resist death. The Father sent and the Son went to accept death. The mind is torn by contradiction and exhausted by mystery. The Lord is a lover of mankind. In His image He created man for His glory; He loved his pristine incorruption above all creatures. But how is love possible for fallen man, in whom the gaping insignificance of the creature is exposed? How can you love me? And yet the Son of God came to fallen man, to me and for my sake, and He died for me and with me, in order to save me, like every person. The measure of God's love and condescension is inconceivable for us, for God imprisoned everyone in disobedience in order to have mercy on everyone (Rom. 11:32), and for everyone and for everyone the Lord will rest in the tomb. This tomb is a revelation of God’s love for man, it is a gift of its insatiable sacrifice: to give everything for love, so that nothing remains ungiven. No one has greater love than this, but whoever lays down his life for his friends (John 15:13). And behold, the Creator, having assumed human nature, lays down His life for His creation. The Lord created the world in six days and rested on the seventh day from His works; this is the first Sabbath of God’s rest. The Lord gave originality to the world in man, who through his freedom can fall away from Him; the Lord inclined His omnipotence to this freedom. The world of God rebelled against God and remained outside of Him. In order to save the world, to return it to Himself, God Himself descended into the world and became human, God Himself became a creation, uniting with it. God accepted the suffering of human life. He was exhausted by the weakness of human flesh (Matthew 26:42), He suffered from human sin and demonic malice (Matthew 17:17), He experienced the human sorrow of mortal nature (Matthew 26:38, John 11:33.35). Besides sin, He knew everything human. God did not leave man in death; He passed through its gates with him. God died as a man for the sake of man, and this is presented to us “in the fleshly tomb.” The greedy nothingness from which man was created, exposed by sin, opened its mouth and brought death into creation. Human nature became mortal, but God did not resist this mortality for Himself. Hell received God himself upon the bait of mortal nature. Nothing, total darkness, after the creation of the world once again appeared before God, and He illuminated this darkness with the light of His resurrection. The circle of creation has closed. The work of God is completed with the salvation of the world - not in the omnipotence of His power, but in the omnipotence of sacrificial love. A new Sabbath rest has arrived: the Lord, who rested from the works of creation, also rested from the works of salvation. This coffin, the imaginary victory of death, is a victory over death. There is no darkness of death, for in it lies the light of resurrection, the bright peace of divine Sabbath. The gates of hell are open, the path has been passed and sanctified, for He is with us in death, and in it we are not abandoned to Love. The death of God... It is the highest gift and the ultimate sacrifice from the God of love to the God of truth. God, as the Creator, is responsible to Himself for His creation. Creating the world, He eternally offers for it the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8). God loved the world so much that He did not spare His Son for it (John 3:16). God made peace first with His omnipotent Word, and then with the death of the Word on the cross. The Father sends the Beloved Son to her, and He freely comes to do the will of the Father, anointed with the Holy Spirit. The mind becomes numb before the sacrifice of God’s love, which creates peace and crucifies itself for it. Divine love, eternally sacrificial in itself, pours out its sacrifice to the world; all creation, above and below, is horrified by this unbearable sight. And in this self-repentance of God, an immutable answer is given to the question about all human sorrow and suffering: God’s sacrifice for the world is greater than any human sorrow, and it is the sacrifice of saving love. May the sorrow for the world subside at this tomb, may the murmur of the human heart be silent! But how can God, the eternal and most blessed, suffer and die humanly? This is why He became a man, joined His creation, in order to make his life His life, to help him not from the outside, but from within, in himself, and, first of all, to take upon Himself all created weakness, all human suffering. He became our brother in order to make us, like Him, sons of God. He accepted our suffering, mortal body in order to glorify it with Himself. Along with the fullness of humanity, He accepted the sin of this humanity in His devotion to God. The One Sinless One did not know the poison of sin, but He knew all its power through His human nature, one with His brethren. He knew the full weight of suffering from the sin of others through the immensity of His compassionate love. In His Person He united everyone, in His nature He contained everything that came into existence through Him (John 1:3). God can neither reconcile with sin nor forgive it, leaving it without His wrath. But God Himself, who became man, offers God as a sacrifice of propitiation and atonement all of His human nature: His most holy soul, which tasted spiritual death from the weight of sins, and His most pure body, which tasted death on the cross. He accepts compassion with man and suffering for man. In the night of Gethsemane, which crowned His life on earth, by the power of compassionate love He experienced the grief of all human sin in the present, past and future, in all its disgusting and painful nature. He took into Himself all the remorse of human conscience and the deadness of sin, and from the depths of it He prayed to the Father with a strong cry, with tears (Heb. 5:7). It was the weeping, groaning and praying conscience of all mankind, responsible for every sin that weighs on it. No one can lift this weight except the One Sinless Man and God. But lifting it upon Himself, He weakened sin for the sinners themselves, He shielded man from the angry Face of God, reconciling him with God, propitiating God. Every human sin is mourned in the darkness of the Gethsemane night and plunges into it. But sin, flowing from all sides into His sinless soul and tormenting it with its opposition to God, rose up with all its power against Himself, who had taken up residence in the kingdom of sin. His blind servants were furious with Christ in order to completely destroy Him from the face of the earth. There is an internal necessity in this confrontation; the Lord prepared His disciples for it, anticipating to them that He must be delivered into the hands of sinners and be killed by them. Victory over militant evil is not possible without its confrontation. And the Lord tasted the full cup of suffering: the cowardly betrayal of friends and the fierce hatred of enemies, the coarse ferocity of warriors and the refined mockery of leaders, the cold cruelty of the law and the frenzied bitterness of the people were dissolved in it, and above all this was the final bottomless sadness of loneliness in a duel with the evil of the whole world and its prince: My God, My God, where have you forsaken Me? (Matthew 27:46). But all the most terrible torments of soul and body could not yet be fulfilled without the last, and at the same time the first, enemy of human nature—death—attacking Him. It did not exist as a necessity for His sinlessness, but He freely accepted it in order to offer His life as the highest and final sacrifice to God. No one takes (My life) from Me, but I myself give it (John 10:18)... He gives it as evidence of the boundlessness of God’s sacrificial love, as a victory over death. The body and blood, in which our life is, is our complete and exclusive property. To give them up, to break His Body and shed His Blood, means to give Himself up. In death on the cross is the fullness of the power of God's incarnation. Skin for skin, but for his life a man will give everything he has (Job 2:4), Satan says about Job, and here God gives His Body and Blood for human nature. God dies, tramples death with death... God's love has exhausted all its sacrifices. Completed (John 19:30): in creation there is salvation, in condemnation there is redemption, in rejection there is reconciliation, in death there is resurrection. God has rested from His works and calls man to Himself into divine rest, so that he may move towards the path of salvation and not harden his heart. For the Sabbath has been abandoned to the people of God. He who entered into His rest, also rested from his works, as God did from His (Heb. 4:9-10).