Commontide
Paschal Cycle
Moveable feast
Holy Saturday is the Saturday of Holy Week, the day between Good Friday and Easter, and it moves each year with the date of Easter. It keeps the Sabbath on which Christ's body lay in the tomb, and the church's confession that in death he descended to the dead. The Gospels tell of the day only from outside the tomb: Joseph of Arimathea's burial, the sealing of the stone and the setting of the guard, the women who rested on the Sabbath. The Book of Common Prayer (2019) keeps the day as Holy Saturday, with a Liturgy of the Word and no celebration of the Eucharist; the older Anglican books called it Easter Even. The Orthodox churches keep it as Great and Holy Saturday, often on a different date because they reckon Easter by the Julian calendar. No council or prayer book instituted the day. It was kept as a fast before any surviving witness, and it closes with the night of the Easter Vigil.
All four Gospels end their accounts of the Passion with the burial. Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body and laid it in a tomb, and the women who had followed Jesus from Galilee saw where he was laid (Matthew 27:57-61, Mark 15:42-47, Luke 23:50-56, John 19:38-42). Matthew alone records an event set on the Saturday itself: the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate, and the tomb was sealed and a guard set (Matthew 27:62-66). Luke says only of the women, "On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment" (Luke 23:56, ESV). No Gospel tells the day from Christ's side. What the church confesses of it, that Christ descended to the dead, rests on the creeds and on the epistles (1 Peter 3:18-19 and 4:6; Ephesians 4:9), and the Apostles' Creed affirms the descent without describing it.
The observance is older than any account of it. The earliest witness is a letter of Irenaeus of Lyons to Victor, bishop of Rome, written about 190 and preserved by Eusebius in his Church History more than a century later. Irenaeus was pleading against the excommunication of churches whose practice differed from Rome's, and he wrote that the dispute concerned not only the day of Easter but the manner of the fast before it. Some fasted one day, others two, others more; and, in Arthur Cushman McGiffert's translation, "some, moreover, count their day as consisting of forty hours day and night." This variety, he added, had not begun in his own time but long before, in the time of the ancestors. The earliest witness already describes the fast as inherited.
By the third century the fast had a shape. The Didascalia Apostolorum, a church order from Syria, prescribes a total fast on the Friday and the Saturday and tells the faithful, in Margaret Dunlop Gibson's 1903 translation, to "assemble yourselves, and wake and pray the whole of the night", reading the Prophets, the Gospel and the Psalms until the third hour of the night after the Sabbath, when the fast ends. (Elsewhere in the chapter, the words joining Saturday to the Friday fast are a reading found only in the Syriac.) The same chapter grounds the Friday fast in a charge against the Jewish people for the crucifixion, a rationale whose echoes in later Christian practice around these days were harmful. In North Africa, Tertullian called the Pasch a day of more than usual solemnity for baptism, then insisted at once that every hour is fit for baptism and there is no difference in the grace. At Rome, the , long associated with Hippolytus, has the candidates fast on the Friday, gather with the bishop on the Saturday for exorcism and prayer, keep vigil, and be baptized at cockcrow.
The Book of Common Prayer (2019) appoints the same readings for Holy Saturday in every year: Job 14:1-17; Psalm 130 or Psalm 31:1-6; 1 Peter 4:1-8; and as the Gospel either Matthew 27:57-66 or John 19:38-42. They are read at a Liturgy of the Word, for there is no Eucharist on this day.
The readings keep to the tomb. Job's chapter on the shortness of human life is a funeral text, and the prayer book's Burial Office draws on it; read on this day, it sets the death of Christ within the common lot of every mortal. Psalm 130 is a cry out of the depths and a waiting for the Lord. The Epistle opens from Christ's suffering in the flesh, and in its sixth verse speaks of the gospel preached even to the dead, one of the few texts on which the church's confession of the descent rests. Matthew's Gospel gives the burial by Joseph of Arimathea, the two Marys sitting opposite the tomb, and the sealing of the stone and the setting of the guard; John's, the alternative, gives the same burial in his own account. Together they hold the day to what Scripture says of it: a body laid in a tomb, watched by those who loved him and guarded at the request of the chief priests and the Pharisees.
The Gospel is the one continuous element in the Anglican tradition: Matthew 27:57-66 has been read on this day since 1549. The Epistle, 1 Peter 3:17-22, held from 1549 through the American book of 1928 and was replaced by 1 Peter 4:1-8 in 1979; no explanation for the change has been traced. The lesson from Job is new in 1979 and 2019; no earlier prayer book is known to have appointed an Old Testament reading at the Communion on this day. The first book of 1549 also gave an introit, Psalm 88, which was dropped in 1552.
In the Book of Common Prayer (2019) there is no celebration of the Eucharist on Holy Saturday. Where a Liturgy of the Word is held, it begins with the Collect of the Day. The book provides two collects: the first, written by Bishop Otis Charles for the American book of 1979, and an alternative new in 2019, the only collect in the long run of the prayer books to speak of Christ's descent to the dead. The readings follow. In place of the Prayers of the People an anthem taken from the Burial Office is said, whose central line, "In the midst of life we are in death", entered English in the burial rite of 1549; the service ends with the Lord's Prayer and the Grace. The Great Vigil of Easter is a separate service, appointed for a convenient time between sunset on Holy Saturday and sunrise on Easter morning, with its own collect. It belongs to Easter.
The rite asks little of the worshipper and asks it plainly. The congregation hears the burial read, hears over Christ the words the church says over its own dead, and goes home without the Sacrament. The day is kept by not hurrying it: on the Sabbath the women in Luke's Gospel "rested according to the commandment" (Luke 23:56, ESV), and the church rests with them beside a sealed tomb. Yet the early witnesses kept this Sabbath as the threshold of the night when the baptized went down into the water, and Cyril of Jerusalem prayed that his candidates would see that night, "the darkness which shines like the day."
In the Western church the day has been marked chiefly by what is absent. The altar stands bare after Maundy Thursday, images are veiled, holy-water fonts are sometimes emptied, and no Eucharist is celebrated in the daylight hours. The bells, and in strict use the organ, are silent from the Gloria of Maundy Thursday to the Gloria of the Easter Vigil. These customs are general and well attested. Across much of Catholic Europe children are still told that the bells have flown to Rome and will come back at the Gloria, in France and Belgium bringing eggs and sweets; it is a folk explanation of the silence, told for centuries, and not an account of where the silence came from.
Medieval England gave the empty day a devotion of its own, now lapsed. From the Regularis Concordia, drawn up at Winchester about 970 to 980, a cross and often the reserved Host, wrapped in linen, were laid on Good Friday in an Easter Sepulchre, usually an arched recess in the north wall of the chancel, and raised early on Easter morning. Through the Saturday parishioners kept watch beside it in shifts by candlelight, a watch the Church Monuments Society compares to one kept over the body of a dead neighbor. Some asked to lie near it: Joan Norton of Faversham, who died in 1535, provided a tomb to serve as the sepulchre. The rite was abolished in 1548, and the stone recesses that survive, at Heckington, Hawton, Patrington and elsewhere, stand empty.
In the Byzantine churches the Matins of Great and Holy Saturday, usually sung on the Friday evening, is a funeral for Christ. The Epitaphios, an embroidered cloth icon of the dead Christ representing his winding sheet, lies on a bier decorated with flowers, by custom by the young women of the parish, and the Lamentations are sung over it; in the translation of Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, "O Life, how canst Thou die? How canst Thou dwell in a tomb?" It is carried in procession under tolling bells, the people following with lit candles. This layer is younger than the day it adorns: the oldest surviving embroidered Epitaphios dates from about 1200, the Lamentations appear in manuscripts of the thirteenth century, and the repertoire now sung was first printed in the Triodion at Venice in 1522. At Jerusalem the Holy Fire, a flame the faithful hold to appear within the tomb of Christ and pass from hand to hand through the church and the city, is first recorded by the Frankish pilgrim Bernard the Monk in 867.
Households have filled the day where the church left it open. In Poland, Ukraine and their diasporas, baskets of Easter food (bread, eggs, salt, horseradish, ham or sausage, sometimes a lamb of butter or sugar) are blessed on Holy Saturday and eaten at breakfast on Easter morning, a custom still widely kept. In the Philippines Black Saturday is kept in quiet, and at Quiapo a silent procession honors Nuestra Señora de la Soledad. In Mexico, Venezuela and Chile effigies of Judas are burned in public squares, in Mexico often in the likeness of unpopular public figures. The custom has a darker record: effigies have been given caricatured Jewish features, and in April 2019, at Pruchnik in Poland, a crowd beat and burned such an effigy, an act condemned by the World Jewish Congress.
Primary sources. The earliest witness to the paschal fast is Irenaeus's letter to Victor, preserved in Eusebius, Church History V.24, in Arthur Cushman McGiffert's translation for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 1, at Wikisource; it is the one source that shows the fast already old in the second century. Margaret Dunlop Gibson's The Didascalia Apostolorum in English (Horae Semiticae I, 1903), chapter 21, pages 98-99, is at archive.org, for the earliest full description of the two-day fast and the night vigil; readers should consult her apparatus, since one phrase joining Saturday to the fast is a Syriac-only reading. The Apostolic Constitutions are at New Advent, Book V for the week's fast and the vigil, and Book VII for the one Sabbath of the year kept as a fast. Cyril of Jerusalem's Procatechesis, in E. H. Gifford's translation, is at New Advent, preached to candidates for the Jerusalem vigil. Egeria's account of the day, in M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe's 1919 translation, chapter 38, is transcribed at users.ox.ac.uk, an eyewitness description of the observance from the 380s; the widely linked CCEL copy breaks off in Lent and does not reach this chapter. The homily on the Lord's burial (CPG 3768, Patrologia Graeca 43, columns 439-464) circulates in the English of the Roman Office of Readings in a PDF transcription, to be read with Roger Pearse's account of its authorship after Vaillant. The prayer-book texts are free online: the 1549 readings and the 1637 Scottish collects at justus.anglican.org (; ), the Church of England's , and the from the Anglican Church in North America. The 1955 decree is at , for the restoration of the vigil to the night in the reformers' own words.
The fourth-century witnesses fix the day's peculiar place in the week. The Apostolic Constitutions, usually dated to Syria about 375 to 380, forbid fasting on any Sabbath but one in the year, the Sabbath of the Lord's burial, which is to be kept with fasting rather than feasting because the Creator was then under the earth; its night is kept in watching and reading until cockcrow, when the catechumens are baptized. At Jerusalem, Cyril preached to the candidates for that same vigil and prayed that God would one day show them that night, in E. H. Gifford's translation "the darkness which shines like the day." A generation later the pilgrim Egeria, in Jerusalem about 381 to 384, recorded what she saw on this Sabbath: the usual offices kept at the third and sixth hours, the office of the ninth hour omitted, the paschal vigil prepared in the great church; and the newly baptized, clothed as they came from the font, led with the bishop first to the Anastasis for one hymn and a prayer, and then to the greater church, where the people were keeping watch.
No pope, council, synod or prayer book instituted Holy Saturday. It stands in the paschal cycle before every witness that survives, and every datable act in its history regulates its margins rather than founding it: a regional church order formalizing an existing fast, a first collect in one line of prayer books, a restored hour for its closing vigil.
In the Western church the vigil did not stay in the night. By the later Middle Ages the vigil that belonged to the night was being sung in daylight; the available sources name neither the act nor the century that moved it. The Saturday afternoon and evening, the hours ordinary people were free, were left without a liturgy, and in England lay devotion filled them with the watch at the Easter Sepulchre. The descent became the day's imaginative content, chiefly through the Gospel of Nicodemus, which Roger Pearse, following A. Vaillant, dates to 424 or 425, and which gives the fullest narrative of it. All four surviving English mystery cycles staged the Harrowing of Hell, though their pageants were not played on Holy Saturday.
The best-known text for the day comes from the East. An ancient homily on the Lord's burial and descent opens on a silence over the whole earth while the King sleeps, and has Christ go down in search of Adam, as a shepherd seeks a lost sheep, take him by the hand and raise him, saying: "Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light." It is read on Holy Saturday in the Roman Office of Readings, and it has long been ascribed to Epiphanius of Salamis, who died in 403. Pearse reports that Vaillant's critical edition of 1958 identifies its likely author as a later Epiphanius, Archbishop of Cyprus, who attended the Council in Trullo in 691; the homily is a Byzantine work of the seventh century, not the fourth.
The English Prayer Book of 1549 gave Easter Even an Epistle, 1 Peter 3:17-22, with its account of Christ preaching to the spirits in prison, and a Gospel, Matthew 27:57-66, but no collect; the books of 1552 and 1559 kept the same. The first proper collect for the day in the English, Scottish and American line is in the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637, a baptismal prayer built on Romans 6. The 1662 book has a different and shorter collect with the same Romans 6 opening; whether it reworked the Scottish text or drew independently on the same scripture is not established. Between those books, the Long Parliament's Ordinance of 8 June 1647 abolished Easter and every other festival in England and Wales, and the day's propers returned only at the Restoration. Being movable, Easter Even never appeared in the 1662 calendar of red-letter and black-letter days, which covers fixed dates only; it was not ranked low but stood outside that ranking. The Epistle from 1 Peter 3 held through the American book of 1928; the American book of 1979 replaced it with 1 Peter 4:1-8, added a lesson from Job, and gave the day a new collect, written for that book by Bishop Otis Charles; the Book of Common Prayer (2019) keeps that shape.
In the Roman Church the night was recovered in the twentieth century. Pius XII allowed the vigil to be restored to the night by experiment in 1951, and the general decree Maxima Redemptionis Nostrae Mysteria of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, dated 16 November 1955, made the restoration universal from 1956. The decree gives its own reason: the services of the triduum had been pushed back into the morning hours and were often performed by the clergy in a nearly empty church. It set the solemn Mass of the Vigil to begin at about the midnight between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. The reform was contested at once, notably by Mgr Léon Gromier at a conference in Paris in 1960. In the Roman rite today the Mass is not celebrated on Holy Saturday, and Communion is given only as Viaticum.
One reading of the day is recent. Since Hans Urs von Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale (1970), which read the descent as Christ's solidarity with the dead rather than his entry into their realm as a victor, some theologians have treated Holy Saturday as the church's name for grief and for waiting that has received no answer. It is a development of the last half-century, not the tradition's own reading, and Balthasar's account is contested within Catholic theology, in a sustained rebuttal by Alyssa Lyra Pitstick, Light in Darkness (2007).
The Eastern churches never developed a day without the Eucharist. Great and Holy Saturday is kept with Vespers joined to the Divine Liturgy of St Basil, with fifteen readings from the Old Testament and, in the course of the service, a change from the dark vestments of the Passion to bright ones. The Orthodox Church in America describes this liturgy as having been, in origin, the church's Easter baptismal liturgy, and as remaining for every Christian the yearly experience of dying and rising with the Lord.
Further reading. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992), borrowable at archive.org, is an account of the English parish rites, the Easter Sepulchre among them, and of their suppression. The Lenten Triodion, translated by Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware (Faber, 1978), gives the Byzantine services of the day in English; the Lamentations are also at OrthoChristian. Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Eerdmans, 2001), is a modern theological treatment of the day, written in the shadow of its author's own death.
Online resources. The Church Monuments Society's article "The Easter Sepulchre" (11 April 2020) describes the English sepulchres, the parish watch kept beside them, and two wills that mention them. The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia article on Holy Saturday gathers the older Western evidence, though it names no document for the vigil's move into daylight and should be read with that caution. The appointed readings are at Bible Gateway in the English Standard Version: Job 14:1-17, 1 Peter 4:1-8, Matthew 27:57-66, and John 19:38-42.
O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.