About Easter Saturday — A Lesson for a Clutch of Mere Humans by Susan G Holland (aka Fellow Traveler)

“Well, what did the Holy Spirit think about all this? How did He feel?” That is the question that stretched some minds back when I led a class of very sharp 12 year old girls in a Scriptural studies Sunday School class. It was Easter week…Palm Sunday.

• My intensely investigative girl-group of “tweens” and I had done a pretty scholarly job of parsing out the recorded events of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ, and then we delved into the sufferings of God the Father. If being “in the Spirit” is being in the presence of God, and being “in hell” is the absence of the presence of God, then when Jesus was banished into hell to pay for our sins, he was separated in the most complete way from the presence of God the Father.
• The sufferings of Christ and the Father must have been immense and devastating to the emotions of both, we thought. Just think of the pain of earthly parents and children who are separated by death! Excruciating.
• The sober little group and their teacher were trying to imagine the hugeness of that concept, when one twelve-year old girl piped up and asked, “Well, how did the Holy Spirit feel about all this?”
• This wonderful question was an amazing jump for all of us. We wondered and posited and puzzled. Together we pieced together a sort of metaphorical rubbery stretchy kind of perfect entity stretched to the limit, straining and hurting and enduring the wrenching, unsufferable breach between Father and Son. The Spirit was bound to both; part of both, and by nature the essence of both, and experiencing both kinds of agony — the sorrow of seeing all the blame piled on a totally good creature crushed with banishment by not only fellow creatures, but by his own father! It had to be a separation way more unthinkable than any of the physical pain. The pain, we thought, might have really killed God of the Trinity if it were not for the special character of the Holy Spirit to reach EVERYWHERE — while connected still to the other two persons of the Trinity.
• It must be the specialized function of the Holy Spirit to bring back a lost person from hell and reunite them with the Wholeness that is a God who can go everywhere and not die. Did the Holy Spirit go with Christ to the cross and the grave and to hell, and then by a kind of infinite tensile strength pull Christ from total separation back into the Father’s presence? And did it hurt the Holy Spirit? Did it call for ultimate perfect strength to endure? Did He do it anyway? And especially why? Why would a God Spirit choose to go to such pain to draw us humans who have received the offer of grace and forgiveness in faith, (believing that God meant it when He promised that if we are in Christ we are pardoned? )
• The class with the girls ended. We were ready for the contemplation of Holy Week. All of us were ready now.

Originally published at cowbird.com by Susan G Holland , digital graphic also by Susan Holland