The Cross, the Grave, the Life

What happened on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday — and what it means for you.

The Christian story turns on three days. Most religions turn on teachings. Christianity turns on a weekend.

I want to walk through the three days as a story first, and then say what the church has said for two thousand years they mean.

Friday

On Friday, a Jewish rabbi who had been preaching in Galilee and Jerusalem for about three years was arrested at night in a garden, tried by the Sanhedrin on a charge of blasphemy, handed to the Roman governor on a politically reframed charge of insurrection, scourged within an inch of his life, and crucified outside the city wall along with two convicted criminals.

He hung on the cross for about six hours. He spoke seven recorded sentences in that time. He said, of the soldiers who were killing him, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. At about three in the afternoon he said it is finished, and died. A Roman centurion confirmed the death, by spear-thrust, before the body was released. A wealthy man named Joseph of Arimathea wrapped the body and put it in a fresh tomb cut into rock. A large stone was rolled over the entrance. Roman soldiers, on the order of the Jewish authorities, were posted to guard it.

That is the Friday.

Saturday

On Saturday, nothing visible happened.

The Saturday of the Christian story is the day everyone in the story thinks it is over. The disciples are scattered. The women are preparing spices to anoint the body in the morning. The authorities are congratulating themselves on a problem solved.

I think it is worth pausing on the Saturday. Most of the people who will ever live, including most Christians, live their whole lives on the Saturday — between the death of a hope and whatever comes next, with no information yet about which side of the equation is going to hold. The Christian claim is that the Saturday is not the end. But the Saturday is real.

Sunday

At dawn on Sunday, women came to the tomb, found the stone rolled away, and the body gone. Over the next forty days, the man they had buried was seen alive — in gardens, in upper rooms, on roadsides, by the sea, by groups as small as one and as large as five hundred. He ate with them. He let them touch him. He talked. He answered questions. He showed Thomas the wound in his side and told him, gently, to stop doubting and believe.

Then, in front of his disciples, he ascended out of sight, with a promise that he would return.

That is the Sunday. The rest of the New Testament — every letter, every sermon, every word of every gospel — is a community trying to come to terms with the Sunday.

What the church has said it means

The cross is not, in the Christian reading, a tragedy that God afterward redeemed. The cross is the point. It is the place where the just consequences of every human turning-away — the ones I have made, the ones you have made — were absorbed by the only person in the universe who didn’t owe them.

The standard image for this in the New Testament is substitution. He stood where I should have stood. He took what I should have taken. Paul puts it like this: God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.¹ Isaiah, writing seven centuries earlier in a passage that reads like an eyewitness report from the foot of the cross, puts it like this: he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him.²

The empty tomb on Sunday is, in the Christian reading, God’s public receipt that the transaction went through. If the cross alone had been the end, you could have read it as a noble failure — good man, killed by bad men, sad. The resurrection is the event that says: no, this was the rescue, and it worked.

What it means for you

It means that the verdict on your life is not, in the end, going to be the verdict of your worst moments. The verdict has already been issued, in the wood and the blood on Friday and the empty tomb on Sunday, and the verdict is paid for.

What it asks of you in response is not to clean up first. It asks you to come — as you are, in the precise condition you are in now, with nothing in your hands — and trust that the work has been done. The technical word is faith. The practical word is come.

I would say more, but the rest of the site is the more. If the historical question is what’s holding you, the minimal facts is the place. If the question is whether anything like this is even philosophically possible, why anything at all is the place. And if you would like to read what has happened to the people who actually took this seriously over twenty centuries — that is the longest essay in the world, and you do not have to start with me. Start with the gospel of John.