I am thankful to Eric Severson
who has agreed to let me use his article
Listening on the Day of Silence: Khora and Holy Saturday
as a guest post for today.
This article was first published on April 7, 2009
by "The Other Journal".
It is a little bit lengthy and academic
but speaks to so many important things
about Holy Saturday
that we often miss.
If you have time to read just one post about Holy Saturday,
this is the one.
And I'm not just saying that because it is here on my blog.
I said the same thing last year, too! L.
*****
When Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented
and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and
the elders. He said, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.” But
they said, “What is that to us? See to it yourself.” Throwing down the
pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged
himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, “It
is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood
money.” After conferring together, they used them to buy the potter’s
field as a place to bury foreigners. For this reason that field has
been called the Field of Blood to this day. Then was fulfilled what had
been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah, “And they took the thirty
pieces of silver, the price of the one on whom a price had been set, on
whom some of the people of Israel had set a price, and they gave them
for the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me.”
—Matthew 27:3-101
This
new beginning of our discussion of the universe requires a fuller
division than the former; for then we made two classes, now a third must
be revealed. The two sufficed for the former discussion: one, which we
assumed, was a pattern intelligible and always the same; and the
second was only the imitation of the pattern, generated and visible.
There is also a third kind which we did not distinguish at the time,
conceiving that the two would be enough. But now the argument seems to
require that we should set forth in words another kind, which is
difficult of explanation and dimly seen. What nature are we to
attribute to this new kind of being? We reply, that it is the
receptacle, and in a manner the nurse, of all generation. I have spoken
the truth; but I must express myself in clearer language, and this
will be an arduous task for many reasons [. . . .] Wherefore, the
mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any way
sensible things [. . .] is an invisible and formless being which
receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the
intelligible, and is most incomprehensible.
—Plato, The Timaeus2
It
is a lonely scene, really. Knowing that he has just participated in
the immanent crucifixion of Jesus, Judas stumbles his way back to the
place of his most egregious transgression. Only the gospel of Matthew
bothers to report evidence of a major reversal in Judas’s mentality
between the Gethsemane betrayal and his suicide-by-hanging. We learn in
Matthew 27 that Judas has something of a change of heart when he hears
that Jesus will soon die because of the betrayal. Although his original
motives are unrecoverable, Matthew carefully notes that Judas
“repented”
3
and retraced his steps, silver in hand, to the religious leaders who
were behind the conspiracy against Jesus. Judas appeals to these men by
offering the sweet sound of a specific and heartfelt confession. “I
have sinned,” he claims. But the priests offer him no avenue of
absolution. Judas is turned away with these stunning words of priestly
failure: “What is that to us? See to it yourself.”
4
It
is not the death of Jesus that immediately precipitates Judas’
suicide; it is these words. Then, in one shocking verse, Matthew quickly
and summarily describes Judas’s reaction to these words, “Throwing
down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and
hanged himself” (Matt. 27:5). Why does Matthew pause to tell us this
part of the story? For the most part, the evangelists make very little
of the time that passes between the cross and the resurrection. Most of
the events they recount are fairly trivial—Matthew discusses the
provisions for Jesus’s body and some Roman concerns about the sealing
of the tomb; Mark and Luke mention that Mary Magdalene and Jesus’s
mother accompany the body of Jesus all the way to the grave (Mark
15:47; Luke 23:55); and the gospel of John says nothing. These hushed
moments, the uneventful events of Holy Saturday, are understandably
overlooked in contemporary retellings of Jesus’ passion. There is
little to be said, after all, when the Word of life lies silent and
interred. There is little to be seen when the Light of the world is
extinguished. These Holy Saturday moments are bleak indeed. So perhaps
the Judas suicide story, full of despair and hopelessness, is an
appropriate Holy Saturday event, whether or not the sun had set on Good
Friday. Some theologians have begun to ask questions about how we
might be theologically faithful to this neglected day in the Christian
calendar, and this essay is my attempt to craft a response. My study of
this dark day is driven by a suspicion that the experiences of Holy
Saturday resonate with everyday experiences of aimlessness, loss,
trauma, and confusion.
This is not the first suggestion that we ought to pay attention to the Saturday hiatus in the Christian passion story.
5
The novelty of this essay is my exploration of the intersection of
this unusual philosophical term with Christianity’s Holy Saturday and my
assertion that Holy Saturday is better understood by way of
khora. I suggest that Holy Saturday provides rich symbols for engaging the theological and existential paralysis of
khora, revealing a very Christian time of divine healing and eschatological hope.
It
would be disingenuous, however, to suggest that I study Holy Saturday
for its own sake or even out of scholarly or spiritual curiosity. It is
rather the experience of the disciples, of the women who lingered at
Jesus’s tomb, and particularly, of Judas that compels this study. But
even beyond understanding what it was like to loiter beside the corpse
of Jesus or to feel the raw culpability of Judas, I suggest that the
Holy Saturday experience is an ongoing characteristic of creaturely
existence. In this essay, I propose a theology of Holy Saturday
experience in which the healing and redemptive Triune movement does not
reverse but consecrates and sanctifies this day.
Holy Saturday
The
gaping silence between Good Friday and Easter Sunday cannot be
explained as a welcome pause or an artistic hiatus. Children find joyful
anticipation on Christmas Eve of the morning to come; we relish the
anticipation of seeing a loved one after a long separation. Music and
cinema, even paintings and architecture, all toy with anticipation, the
art of the hiatus, but Holy Saturday does not serve this function in
the Christian story. Holy Saturday is blunt and bleak and
uncomfortable. Mirroring the near silence of the gospels, very few
Christian communities gather for worship on Holy Saturday.
6 Instead, Christians tend to rush past Holy Saturday to Easter Sunday.
7 Uncomfortable with the darkness of Saturday and eager for a happy ending, we hurry to the end of the passion narrative. This
transgression (literally
“movement across”) robs Christianity of one of its most vital moments,
nullifying one of its richest and most intriguing symbols. Holy
Saturday, by nature silent, allows itself to be pushed around and shoved
aside—no strong story or event lurches out of the narrative to give us
pause. The
pause is the very point. A story without pause is
poorly told. But moving quickly past Holy Saturday does much more than
blanch an exciting narrative, it does much more than tarnish the
artistry of God’s narration: to gloss over Saturday is to profoundly
misread the story.
Judas’s experience, and later, the failure of
the priests and the disciples, provide a poetic refrain for this
discussion of Holy Saturday. Consideration of Judas’s demise should
make us ponder how Christian theology applies to people for whom
meaning has dissolved and the hope of healing is beyond articulation or
foreseeable possibility. Indeed, few terms in language address the
empty silence of Holy Saturday. Itself a time where symbols and hopes
perish, Saturday is difficult to talk about without jumping quickly to
an Easter justification for the hurtful darkness of the Saturday
experience.
Christianity is, and always has been, at search for
adequate symbols for the engagement of raw human existence. Victims of
abuse and trauma have testified to the inadequacy of Christian
symbolism in engaging with the depth of their hurt and despair.
8
It is perhaps the noblest of theological endeavors to search out the
stories and symbols of Christianity that help us to authentically engage
with our perplexing, disturbing world. So by slowing down the frames
of the story, by feeling and hearing the weight of Saturday’s quiet
sorrow, perhaps the Easter narrative, the central Christian narrative,
will seem more authentic, more reflective of our despair.
I offer
Holy Saturday as a valuable Christian symbol for engaging a world of
brokenness, but Holy Saturday will function unlike normal symbols. We
are accustomed to symbols that have identifiable and nameable
referents. Holy Saturday remains symbolic, but the symbolism of
Saturday is noteworthy for its lack of any structured referent. It
symbolizes the unsayable and marks the breakdown of theology and
philosophy, even language itself.
Hakeldema
After
dwelling on Saturday, our obsessions with loud speech and rapid action
become embarrassingly obvious. The symbols of Saturday run in the
reverse direction of the forceful movements of speech and action.
Saturday’s hiatus drives our search for articulation
below ground.
We must go looking for a word or concept to describe this time when
the great Logos is silent, the great Light has gone out, the great Hope
has perished. Even as the other three gospels move rather breathlessly
forward, Matthew pauses to narrate a moment where meaning has
literally gone underground. Enter
Hakeldema.
9
Judas,
in a denial that mirrors Peter’s, is not convinced at the Last Supper
that he is the foretold betrayer. He does not believe that the horrible
and damning passage quoted by Jesus can really apply to him and his
Passover scheme; “Surely not I, Rabbi?”
10
The motivations and emotions behind Judas’s betrayal escape even the
most careful readings of these texts, but he is clearly presented as an
ambivalent character. Judas denies being the prophesied betrayer, dips
his hand into the bowl with Jesus, kisses Jesus at the moment of
betrayal, is profoundly anguished when Jesus is condemned, repents
anxiously, and ultimately commits suicide.
11
A
fascinating and perplexing element of the Judas narrative is the
“field of blood” that is purchased with the money Judas gained from
betraying Jesus. Judas dumps his money on the temple floor in disgust
and leaves to immediately go commit suicide. The priests and elders are
unsure what should be done with this money—it was once theirs, but now
it has been tainted. It is marked by sin, ill-gotten and ill-fated.
Sensitive to the Deuteronomical code that forbids donations of money
gained through sinful means,
12
the priests are stuck with a pile of money that cannot be added to the
temple coffers. For the priests to accept this money would connect the
sacred with the sinful. Thus, this money had to be used for profane, or
at least mundane, purposes. Their inventive solution is clever indeed:
they use the blood money to purchase a blood-field,
Hakeldema, a practical and religiously correct purchase for a profane place if ever there was one.
13
The priests designate the field as a place of faceless burials and
nameless graves, a cemetery for foreigners. Judas’s money purchases a
graveyard not worthy for even the lowliest of Israelites.
There is
a respect and concern over places of burial that reaches far into the
mists of the earliest Hebrew religious experience. Long before
subjective afterlife is a consideration, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are
profoundly concerned about where they will be buried. With ceremony it
is reported that in dying and being buried “Abraham was gathered to his
people” (Gen. 25:8). The same phrase is repeated upon Isaac’s death;
his passage out of life and into sacred burial is a movement into “his
people” (Gen. 35:29). Jacob died insisting that his remains be carried
out of Egypt; he did not wish for his body to reside in a foreign land,
no matter how friendly and inviting the Egyptians might seem. “I am
about to be gathered to my people,” said Jacob, sensing his immanent
death, “Bury me with my ancestors—in the cave [. . .] that Abraham
bought [. . . .] There Abraham and his wife Sarah were buried; there
Isaac and his wife Rebekah were buried; and there I buried Leah” (Gen.
49:29-33). David “slept with his ancestors,” as did his son Solomon (1
Kings 2:10, 11:43). To die and be buried in exile, or even worse, to lie
unburied on the ground, is a great terror to the ancient Israelite.
One fails to understand the power of Ezekiel’s “valley of the dry
bones” passage without understanding the horror of bones lying in the
empty and heartless fields of Babylon, far from their proper resting
place (Ezek. 37). To decompose unattended in a field somewhere? This is
terrible indeed. It is a denial of rest, a cursed eternity of
wandering and loneliness, a permanent banishment.
So it is not an
exaggeration to suggest that a graveyard for foreigners would be the
most banal and profane of locations. Even Jewish criminals deserved
better than to be buried in Judas’s nightmarish Hakeldema. The name
“field of blood” evokes images of lasting bloodstains on this land. But
this place is bloody in a different manner than an old battlefield,
where violent death takes its place in a broader spectrum of meaning,
where soldiers die nobly (at least sometimes), where casualties of war
die in defense of (or offense on) land and family. But when a foreigner
dies, the death happens far from family and historical burial grounds.
No one remains to carry corpses to sacred tombs or provide proper
funerals. Judas’s legacy is a sad, empty, meaningless, and profane
graveyard.
Hakeldema is the wasteland of broken and forgotten
meaning; it is an alien, bloody, monstrous place devoid of comfort and
familiarity. This word epitomizes solitude and separation from the
community. What better marker for Holy Saturday’s despair? Integral to
understanding spatial Hakeldema is the temporal element to this place.
Corpses are not only in a place but also a
time of
interminable suspension and everlasting restlessness. This is a lonely
land where even in death foreigners are eternally damned to be weary,
lonesome wanderers. We dare not long contemplate the loneliness of this
field, or of our own graves-to-come, regardless of the proximity of
ancestral tombs. To consider Hakeldema is to face the fact that death
awaits us and that nothing tangible transcends the liminality of the
final breath. Are we not all aliens and strangers at life’s boundary
lines?
In Hakeldema we have a spatial name for the temporal Holy
Saturday, which arises not as a place one might visit and leave but as a
time of indeterminate length, a despair that belies no escape and
offers no consolation. So I take up Hakeldema as the sad end to which
untended anguish leads, the dark and permanent place of suicidal
anxiety. It is at the border of this wasteland that we are pressed to
speak, even knowing that speech will not suffice. It is at this point
of speech-defying lament that the Platonic concept of
khora becomes remarkably helpful.
Khora
The dialogues of Plato are legendarily enigmatic, especially in the way
he moves characters in and around his dialogues, speaking like a
ventriloquist through one voice or another, seldom committing his
signature to any of them.
14 Picking up the
Timaeus,
one cannot be entirely sure who is doing the speaking—Timaeus
dominates the dialogue, but does he speak for Plato? Perhaps Timaeus
reveals a questioning or an unraveling of the monolithic Platonic
metaphysical systems that some interpreters have developed out of
Plato’s more famous discussions.
15 We are left to wonder. However, if nothing else, a few brief but complex passages within the
Timaeus offer
an unmistakable subversion of Plato’s typical appeal to transcendence
as a means of securing meaning amid the tumult of ephemeral creaturely
existence.
The introduction of the term
khora occurs as the conversation in the
Timaeus turns
to the familiar Platonic question of origins. Timaeus has come to
dominate the dialogue, delivering an extended monologue that struggles
to make sense of the possibility of there being a world.
16 In attempting to describe the milieu or venue upon which creation comes to be, Timaeus invokes the term
khora, a rather commonplace Greek term meaning something like the English word
receptacle.
However, it quickly becomes apparent that khora resembles a clay
receptacle in name only; as Timaeus attempts to describe how khora makes
the world possible, his words spin off into language that Richard
Kearney calls “hermeneutic poetics.”
17
We are neither able to speak well nor remain silent. We must speak,
and yet nothing of our speech is everlasting. The boldest of our words
glow, perhaps brilliantly, for a brief time before fading from
relevance. Our words revert to mere sounds. Into this desperate void,
constructive philosophy and theology are furtive; in sparks and spurts
they move forward, only to be frustrated by the temporality and
relativity of language itself. This poetic philosophy is different from
Plato’s more concrete metaphysical musings in both tone and manner, but
it addresses some of the same fundamental questions. As Timaeus
engages in imaginative philosophical discourse, he creates a litany of
metaphors, each clearly trying to name something that evades
articulation. Khora is nurse, impressionable wax, perfume base, the
mother of all things.
Standard Platonic metaphysics allows the corporeal realm to be influenced by the realm of the forms or ideas (
eidos) so that all people and events occurring within the physical world are more or less anchored in the eternal forms.
18
Physical manifestations are but fragmentary and limited reflections of
these forms, which lie above the world in transcendent splendor. The
question that lies unanswered and that perhaps troubles the mature Plato
who pens the
Timaeus is of
forum—what receives the
impression of these pure forms? What allows for the existence of the
incomplete and transient world of sensory experience? Elsewhere, in the
Republic particularly, the emphasis is clearly on the deployment of Plato’s landmark conception of the transcendent eidos.
19 Now, in the
Timaeus, which scholars consistently place much later than the
Republic,
20
Plato’s poetic hand begins to betray a fundamental philosophical
inadequacy in the grand and transcendent metaphysical system that
dominates elsewhere. This sense can be ascertained by the
self-reflective language of Timaeus. Form and impression, the binary
system by which Plato set up his cosmology, “sufficed for the former
discussion” but now appear insufficient. Timaeus suggests that “the
argument seems to require that we should set forth in words another
kind, which is difficult of explanation and dimly seen.”
21 It is no stretch to conclude that the volatility of khora destabilizes Plato’s overall system.
22
Plato has addressed sticks and stones as exemplars of higher and
better forms, but he has found no helpful correlative term for the
matrix upon which sticks drift and stones make their impression. An
accessible language to describe the milieu within which Plato’s
metaphysical game may unfold is missing.
Derrida takes interest in
khora because he sees it as a subtle indication that philosophy is, in
the words of Caputo, “in real trouble here.”
23
As the mature Plato stands back from the very useful and dynamic
system he has spent a career constructing, he perhaps pauses and wonders
at the stage on which this drama unfolds. It is a fleeting reflection,
no doubt, and is only expressed through the mouthpiece of Timaeus.
Still, insufficient attention has been given to the manner in which
khora subverts and calls into question the very enterprise that passes
for Platonic metaphysics.
Caputo notes that by introducing the
concept of khora, Plato has affirmed, or perhaps conceded, an
embarrassing quandary in which philosophy finds itself. According to
Caputo, khora “mocks the prestigious, fatherly, originary, truth-making
power” of Plato’s transcendent forms.
24
But why focus on this mockery of meaning and truth-making? What good
might come of making so much noise out of a few passages in one obscure
Platonic dialogue? A number of contemporary thinkers have found a great
deal of benefit in this extrapolation of Timaeus’ comments. Khora has
become a “surname” for Derridean deconstruction, a profound
psychoanalytic concept in the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray,
and an opening for ethical and eschatological theology in the work of
Richard Kearney.
25
A growing number of philosophers and theologians are finding in this
concept a means of addressing “the pre-original abyss each of us
encounters in fear and trembling when faced with the bottomless void of
our existence.”
26
Khora erodes and effaces the most precious and concrete of meanings;
it defaces our favorite words and concepts; it disgusts and threatens
and alienates us, for it calls into question all that is steady and
comfortable. But at that liminal boundary, where symbols shatter like
glass, we can finally find a way to speak of the unspeakable, evasive as
it may be. And that word, which calls into question words themselves,
is
khora.
Have I digressed from discussion of Holy
Saturday and Judas’s Hakeldema? I believe not. Khora is the time/place
where concrete meanings and foundations dissolve; it is when we
discover the terror of the stranger within ourselves, when we face the
clammy realization that the light we believed was at the end of the
tunnel is a mirage. So I take up khora as the time/place of lonely
despair within human hearts, the cold realization that our knowledge is
unreliable, particularly our knowledge of ourselves.
We may
never know Judas’s motives, but Matthew takes care to describe Judas’s
great reversal from snide betrayal to heartfelt remorse. The feeling
that washes over Judas at the moment of that reversal is the
paradigmatic Holy Saturday moment. It is a moment in which even words
become meaningless, a moment of khora-despair. Saturday is terrifying,
but like the deep and chaotic waters of Genesis 1, this abyss is also
“pregnant” with possibility.
27
So it is in these moments of Judas’s khora that the road forks. One
road leads to the endless khora-despair of Hakeldema; the other road
leads to the khora-womb of the community, to the faces of fellow
travelers who have seized onto an eschatological hope unfettered by the
limits of human possibility. Judas’s fate is in the hands of the
Sabbath-keeping community.
Not long after the time of Plato, an
Israelite preacher whose name is lost to us struggled with the terror
of realizing the absolutely fleeting nature of all existent things.
Calling it
hebel, meaning “vanity” or “vapor,” this man, the
author of Ecclesiastes, struggled to come to terms with the futility of
all meaning. The author of Ecclesiastes wrote that wisdom and folly
arrive together at
sheol (the grave). He suggested that our
attempts to create meaning and forge permanence in a world that dances
just above the abyss of death are vain. So the destabilization of
khora is no stranger to Hebraic thought. But for Christians, has Jesus
reversed the despair of Ecclesiastes? Or has the passion of Christ made
such an experience holy?
The Church on the Seventh Day
People have never known quite what to do with their Sabbaths. The six
days of activity that precede each day of rest set a pattern that is
difficult to break. The obsession of some first-century Jews with
Sabbath regulations is evident in the multiple charges brought against
Jesus for Sabbath-day infractions.
28 To heal, infer Jesus’s hypertechnical opponents, is an
active vocation,
unsuitable to Sabbath regulations. Making and mending together belong
to days one through six—healing is just too active, too transformative,
too world-altering to occur on a day that is meant to be characterized
by quiet reflection, thoughtful liturgy, and rest.
In shifting
liturgy and rest from the seventh to the eighth day of creation,
Christians unknowingly removed a critical element of Sabbath
celebration. Lost in translation is a small but significant aspect of
Sabbatical commemoration: divine inactivity. The eighth day is really a
revitalization of the first day of creation, bearing more resemblance
to “let there be light” than “let there be rest.”
29
And integral to the Jewish Sabbath is inactivity. For strict or
ascetic Jews, such as the Essenes, even lighting fires and beginning
journeys was prohibited.
30 But Easter Sunday is exactly the opposite; it is an ignited fire and a journey begun.
31
This makes resurrection a very appropriate Sunday (first/eighth day)
event. If Jesus had been raised on Saturday it would have been an
example of God violating the fourth commandment. The Christian passion
story honors the Jewish Sabbath, reversing the Pharisaic concern that
Jesus is a violator of this sacred day.
But how does the
resurrection make Holy Saturday holy? How is this Sabbath sanctified by
resurrection Sunday? We cannot understand the eighth day of creation
without first exploring how the Christian story incorporates and
blesses seventh-day silence and inactivity. And because the ethical
questions of Sabbath observance move beyond matters of personal purity
to more pervasive communal concerns, Sabbath is richly social. The
“day of rest” is celebrated in ecclesial fashion, in households,
synagogues, and sanctuaries. Honoring the Sabbath is about actively
creating time for the people of the community to face one another.
At
this point, I offer a general charge against Christianity for its
failure to honor the fourth commandment, for our failure to remember the
Sabbath and keep it
holy. We have, I fear, turned our back on
the khora in which so many humans dwell. The rush-to-Sunday is a rush
to action, a rush to tangible hope, a rush to foreseeable victories and
palpable redemption. But the resurrected Jesus offers no such reversal
of Saturday’s uncertainty. The resurrected Jesus moves mysteriously
among the disciples, moving through walls, disappearing from tables and
rising into the sky. The resurrected Christ is no resuscitated corpse;
he is both less and more than this. Jesus is raised into the
eschatological future, beckoning the Christian community into a future
that evades our attempts to discern and anticipate. Jesus is resurrected
into a divine future (
eschaton), a future outside of human
possibility. Inasmuch as Holy Saturday represents the death of tangible
and predictable hopes, it remains today in full force. In fact, this
death is
sanctified by Easter Sunday. It is right and good that
the false messianic hopes of the disciples remain dead and defeated.
There is a lesson that the church must learn, a lesson evident at the
Emmaus table, in the upper room, at the ascension, and elsewhere. The
resurrected Jesus has now danced beyond the grasp of the disciples,
moved below and above the realm of human expectation and possibility.
Easter Sunday should cast the church into the eschatological future,
insisting that the people of God live toward such a future, as
unreasonable and irrational as such hope may be.
When we allow
Easter to nullify Saturday we miss the blessed finality with which our
Friday dreams must be shattered in order for our future to be truly
divine. Easter is no Hegelian synthesis of the incarnation and the
crucifixion. As a church of the eighth day, we are to be a people who
have been rightly robbed of our desire to see suffering, sorrow, abuse,
and death have tangible payoffs. What we learn from khora and Holy
Saturday is not overturned on Sunday but given sacred confirmation and
eschatological transformation. It is, in fact, a profanation of
Saturday to ignore its significance or to allow its
khoratic character
to be overlooked and ignored. This Saturday, like every Jewish
Sabbath, is anything but profane. It is blessed, sanctified, to be
kept holy.
Sabbath Violations: “What is that to us?”
Judas
is failed in at least two ways following his change of heart: first,
by the priests from whom he seeks absolution, and second, by the
community of disciples that fails to situate themselves between Judas’s
khora-despair and his Hakeldema. In both cases, Judas is left alone to
deal with his despair. The starkest denial of community comes at the
hands of the priests. They may, in fact, have delivered a message to
Judas that was of deeper cause for despair than even his ghastly
betrayal of Jesus. Judas comes refunding the blood money he had received
for betraying Jesus, and his request for absolution is not entirely
unreasonable—he does not come to the priests asking that they find a way
to reverse his sin and turn Jesus loose. By appearing again at the
temple, Judas is confronting the terror of his private khora, and for
help in this confrontation, he turns to the priests. Their response to
Judas is nothing short of a death sentence. Seeking forgiveness and
confessing his sin to these religious leaders, Judas hears in reply:
“What is that to us? See to it yourself” (Matt. 27:4).
If Judas is
to find forgiveness and absolution, he is told to find it within the
context of his own life, amid the rubble of his private khora. He must
move on alone, with no face of love to call him out of a fixation on
his despicable failure. Judas came to the priests to save his life,
perhaps as a final attempt to rescue a future, however bleak. But Judas
is turned away by the coldest and most heartless words of Matthew’s
gospel. Do you seek a future for your broken, guilty life? “See to it
yourself.” Are you dwelling in that dark and silent place where there
is truly no hope in sight? “What is that to us?” Has there been a more
egregious Sabbath violation than this? Judas is lost in khora and his
religious guides turn his sorrow back upon itself, perhaps redoubling
his loneliness and desperation. We need not even stretch this text to
see the inextricable connection between the response of the priests and
Judas’ suicide. The blood of Judas stains the hands of the priests who
refused to honor the sanctity of the Sabbatical community. To honor
the Sabbath and keep it holy is to refuse to profane Sabbath pain.
Using Judas’s money to purchase the graveyard for foreigners accurately
illustrates their profanation of Judas’ sacred khora; they turn an
opportunity for Saturday healing into Hakeldema. Consistent with the
Pharisaic concern against Saturday healing, they refuse to raise even a
finger of hospitality to Judas’ sincere request for absolution.
We
might be tempted to read a Sartrian or Heideggarian existential crisis
into Judas’s despair. But this individualistic (and anachronistic)
reading cheapens and overlooks what is really at stake as Judas moves
between the temple and the noose. Judas’s walk to Hakeldema is indeed a
walk (perhaps a run) of existential despair. Suicide is a lonely and
solitary act, and despite our inability to access Judas’s private pain
and personal crisis, we should not look past the experience of this
individual. But what is also noteworthy about this Sabbath walk is that
the fractured community of disciples fails to take account of their
missing brother. One can speculate that they are perhaps angry with
Judas, fuming at his betrayal, and now consider him to be a dangerous
alien, a monstrosity, an outsider. Peter and the other scattered
disciples (except perhaps the faithful women who follow Jesus all the
way to the tomb) appear to be absorbed in their own disappointments and
failures. They are too self-absorbed to stand between Judas and his
noose. Some of them may have clung together after Jesus died, but did
any of them give a second thought about Judas? Is his sin beyond the
reach of the disciple’s forgiveness?
The fragmentation of the
community on Sabbath represents another violation of the fourth
commandment. The disciples ignore their repentant and sorrowful
brother. Like the priest and elders, Judas’s friends fail him
miserably. His suicide happens because no one has offered him a future;
there is no communal Sabbath respite for his lonely and solitary
despair. The pathways to forgiveness and life have been sealed off; he
has been told to seek his own redemption and the chasm of khora opens
up beneath him. Without the priests, without his friends, Judas chooses
suicide. No face of Christ stood between Judas’s khora and his
Hakeldema. No sacred Sabbatical bread or wine was extended to a man
starving for lack of a future. The Eucharist is the meal of the
eschaton, the womb of khora, the presence of the broken Christ in the
midst of a broken world, but to Judas the table was closed.
If we
overlook Holy Saturday, with all of its despair, we choose to ignore
the deepest level of God’s Triune movement in the world. Gregory of
Nazianzus famously argued that what Christ has “not assumed, he has not
healed.”
32
A failure to dwell within the khora of human existence is a general
failure of the church not unlike the failures of the priest and the
disciples. Must those who seek hope in Christ first “see to it”
themselves? Must the community wait until the despairing and lonely
faces of Judas humbly turn to the church for hope? The inactivity of the
Sabbath ought never to be confused with passivity. The church is
inactive on Sabbath for the purpose of looking into one another’s faces.
Sabbatical rest is about finding unreasonable hope as a community
marked by God. When our Judases are missing, we should be scrambling to
find them. The church of the crucified and resurrected Christ belongs
on the border of Hakeldema, offering the grace of the khora-womb to
those lost in khora-despair.
Sabbath Healing
Within the body of Hebrew Scripture and Jewish Midrash, much attention
is given to Sabbath observance, and the seeds of this thought are found
in a few short lines on the tablets of the Ten Commandments (Exod.
20:8-11). Here, in its most abbreviated form, the Sabbath directive
pauses to consider an unlikely recipient of Sabbath rest: foreigners.
After requiring rest for children, slaves, and livestock, the
commandment reaches an even more astounding nadir: even aliens are to be
given rest on this day. Aliens were at this point in Israel’s history
by definition foreign to the worship of Yahweh. Yet the sanctity of
Saturday apparently knows no exemption. All Sabbath rest is holy. There
can be no Hakeldema where bodies and souls must dwell in endless
unrest. Israel is to provide a hospitable khora for Saturday rest, even
to those who are hostile to the worship of Yahweh. Children, slaves,
livestock, and foreigners are at the mercy of the community; they are
only given rest when a space/time is created for such
shalom (peace).
The failure to provide space for Sabbath shalom is a fundamental
failure to abide by the fourth commandment. There can be no places of
banishment outside of the reach of this holy day; Hakeldema is Sabbath
violation. The church should be a sanctified khora for the world; this
is how the people of Christ must honor the fourth commandment. This
irrational and other-centered love is the marker of Christian Holy
Sabbath observance.
Not incidentally, when describing Hakeldema,
Matthew points back to the story of Jeremiah’s rather irrational
purchase of a potter’s field. Facing the impending doom of invasion,
Jeremiah foolishly buys property that is likely to soon be stripped
from him. Recorded in Jeremiah 32 is the most elaborately described
financial transaction in the Bible, a resounding statement of hope even
within the context of Jeremiah’s pessimistic message. This “potter’s
field” is the opposite of Hakeldema; it is a “field of hope”
established against all reasonable expectation of deliverance.
Jeremiah’s “field at Anathoth” is the locus of eschatological hope, a
promise of redemption despite the impending Babylonian conquest.
Jeremiah purchases this field like a child making a sandcastle in front
of the rising tide. It is beautiful and senseless, hopeful in a manner
that cannot be quantified in human terms.
Holy Saturday reverses
the loneliness of Hakeldema; it fills the khoratic chasm. This abyss is
occupied not by permanent meaning or anticipated victories but by
faces, by cruciform concern for the other, by love. Humans must learn
to gaze without blinking at the terror of khora. Instead of turning
away into lonely despair, we must turn to one another, finding Christ
in the Eucharistic facing of Christian liturgy and community. Khora is
brutally neutral; it is a hiatus of both despair and healing. Khora is
both the nurturing womb and the heartless hand of time that fades and
erases the most indelible of marks. By dwelling unflinchingly in the
stark reality of khora, the church can hollow and hallow a time for the
healing of the world. Neutral khora becomes holy in the hands of the
resurrected Christ, most tangibly in the hands of Christians who break
bread and together offer a divine future to a despairing world.
Critical to the life of Christian Sabbath is the
turn toward the future,
an element absent in Plato’s khora and Judas’s Hakeldema, though it is
hinted at in Jeremiah’s bold purchase of the “field at Anathoth” (Jer.
32:7-8). The Eucharistic community celebrates a meal that casts its
gaze beyond the hopelessness and meaninglessness of the
now and
into a future that is by its divine character evasive. Suicide,
Judas’s or otherwise, is the death of futurity; it is the abysmal end
to hope. Christian faces, faces seized by the eschatological hope of
the resurrected Christ, offer a particularly pressing gift to a lonely
and suicidal world. Christian hope offers a future to the despondent,
without patronizingly manufacturing that hope out of human expectation. I
fear that too often we close off the channels of grace and healing by
attempting to determine
how Saturday’s despair will turn into
Sunday’s rejoicing. In this sense, too, Sabbath is violated. How will
the church respond to the crisis of those living in brokenness, victims
of trauma, those lost in the nightmare of existential anxiety? To step
around these people, literally and theologically, is to transform the
ambivalence of khora into the doom of Hakeldema. We are ethically bound
to honor Holy Saturday and keep holy, to refuse the temptation to
ignore khora’s abyss, and to see how God turns fields of blood into
fields of hope.
Notes
1. Bruce Metzger and Roland Murphy, eds.,
The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991). Unless otherwise noted, all biblical references are from the NRSV translation.
2. Plato,
The Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 48e-53c.
3. The Greek here uses the word ????????????, literally “having regretted (it).”
4. This narrative is found in Matthew 27:3-10.
5.
In recent decades, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Alan Lewis, Shelley Rambo,
and others have begun to recognize that Christianity has suffered from
ignoring this shadowy day. Neither is my technical exploration of
khora particularly
unique. Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, John Caputo, Richard Kearney,
and others have already noted the puzzling way that meaning and form
dissolve in this conceptual frontier. In fact, the manner in which
concept of khora is developed here is intentionally and grateful
patterned after the work of Richard Kearney, both through personal
interactions and Kearney’s remarkable chapter on khora in Richard
Kearney,
Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Ideas of Otherness (London, UK: Routledge, 2002).
6. A noteworthy and fascinating exception should be noted: in a profound theological move, the
Book of Common Prayer
prohibits the celebration of Eucharist on Holy Saturday. There are also
some rich uses of Holy Saturday in Eastern Orthodox Christianity,
which will be explored in a more expanded version of this paper. See
Charles Mortimer Guilbert, custodian,
The Book of Common Prayer: According to the use of the Episcopalian Church (New York, NY: Church Publishing Incorporated, 1979), 283.
7. Many theologians have recognized this. See Alan Lewis,
Between Cross and Resurrection (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001); Shelly Rambo,
Divine Love and Human Trauma: Reading the Middle Day (Unpublished doctoral dissertation for Emory University, 2004); Hans Urs von Balthasar,
Heart of the World (Edinburgh, UK: Ignatius Press, 1980).
8. Rambo,
Divine Love and Human Trauma, 1-15.
9. The Lukan and Matthean authors both use the same word for the field in question,
Hakeldema, and this name apparently stuck to the piece of land, as Matthew claims that it is still called
Hakeldema
“to this day” (Matt. 27:8). But the Lukan and Matthean authors offer
differing accounts of how the field was purchased and the manner of
Judas’s suicide. In Mark, Luke, and John, Judas just disappears from the
narrative. Matthew befriends the character of Judas, at least
somewhat—having served his explicit purpose of delivering Jesus into the
hands of the chief priests and elders, Judas becomes expendable. The
Lukan voice makes mention of Judas’s demise in Acts 1, but the mention
is clearly parenthetical, as most English translations indicate with
literal parentheses around the comment. Luke makes no pretense to
understand or describe Judas’s postbetrayal experience.
10. Matthew 26:24. Jesus quotes Psalm 41:9.
11.
Certainly this is more ambiguous and nuanced than Luke’s attribution
of Judas’s betrayal to possession by Satan in Luke 22:3.
12. Deuteronomy 23:18; here the ill-gotten gains are from prostitution.
13. Donald Hagner,
Word Biblical Commentary: Matthew 14-28 (Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1995), 813.
14. John Sallis,
Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus
(Bloomington, ID: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1. Here Sallis
refers to the complicated Platonic practice “of ventriloquy.” The point
is that it is possible (perhaps likely) that Plato does not intend the
comments of Timaeus to reflect his own voice.
15. Plato,
Timaeus, 48e-49a.
16. Kearney,
Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 193.
17. Khora is only addressable through a kind of “hermeneutics of imagination” (see Kearney,
Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, 194), a poetry of faithfulness, a foolish speech uttered out of the dumbfounding human conundrum in which we find ourselves.
18. Sallis,
Chorology, 12-17.
19. Jacques Derrida,
On the Name (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 120.
20.
Ibid. This is despite allusions in the beginning of Timaeus that
suggest that this dialogue begins the day after Republic ends.
21. Plato,
Timaeus, 48e; 49a.
22. John Caputo,
Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York, NY: Fordham, 1997), 99.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Derrida,
On the Name, 89-130; Julia Kristeva,
Revolutions in Poetic Language (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1984); Luce Irigaray,
Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Kearney,
Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 191-211. See also Caputo’s
Deconstruction in a Nutshell and
The Prayers and Tears of Jacque Derrida (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997).
26. Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, 204.
27. Ibid.
28.
In Luke 5:27-32, Jesus and his disciples are twice accused of Sabbath
transgressions, though it is unlikely that these events would have been
seen as offensive to the vast majority of first-century Jews.
29. Genesis 1:2; the second quotation is a paraphrase of Leviticus 25 and other Sabbatical commandments.
30. Waston E. Mills, ed., “Sabbath” and “Essense,” in
Mercer Dictionary of the Bible (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1990).
31.
This is quite literally the case in the liturgy of the ignited Paschal
candle, common in Christian Holy Saturday vigils and particular Easter
Sunday liturgies.
32. Gregory of Nazianzus,
On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002).
