LOL at everyone asking why I retumbled that table-flipping mblr earlier.

Truly he goes to seek out our first parent like a lost sheep; he wishes to visit those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. He goes to free the prisoner Adam and his fellow-prisoner Eve from their pains, he who is God, and Adam's son.

The Lord goes in to them holding his victorious weapon, his cross. When Adam, the first created man, sees him, he strikes his breast in terror and calls out to all: 'My Lord be with you all.' And Christ in reply says to Adam: ‘And with your spirit.’ And grasping his hand he raises him up, saying: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.

‘I am your God, who for your sake became your son, who for you and your descendants now speak and command with authority those in prison: Come forth, and those in darkness: Have light, and those who sleep: Rise.

‘I command you: Awake, sleeper, I have not made you to be held a prisoner in the underworld. Arise from the dead; I am the life of the dead. Arise, O man, work of my hands, arise, you who were fashioned in my image. Rise, let us go hence; for you in me and I in you, together we are one undivided person.

‘For you, I your God became your son; for you, I the Master took on your form; that of slave; for you, I who am above the heavens came on earth and under the earth; for you, man, I became as a man without help, free among the dead; for you, who left a garden, I was handed over to Jews from a garden and crucified in a garden.

‘Look at the spittle on my face, which I received because of you, in order to restore you to that first divine inbreathing at creation. See the blows on my cheeks, which I accepted in order to refashion your distorted form to my own image.

'See the scourging of my back, which I accepted in order to disperse the load of your sins which was laid upon your back. See my hands nailed to the tree for a good purpose, for you, who stretched out your hand to the tree for an evil one.

`I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side, for you, who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side healed the pain of your side; my sleep will release you from your sleep in Hades; my sword has checked the sword which was turned against you.

‘But arise, let us go hence. The enemy brought you out of the land of paradise; I will reinstate you, no longer in paradise, but on the throne of heaven. I denied you the tree of life, which was a figure, but now I myself am united to you, I who am life. I posted the cherubim to guard you as they would slaves; now I make the cherubim worship you as they would God.

"The cherubim throne has been prepared, the bearers are ready and waiting, the bridal chamber is in order, the food is provided, the everlasting houses and rooms are in readiness; the treasures of good things have been opened; the kingdom of heaven has been prepared before the ages.

The Lord's descent into hell - A reading from an ancient homily for Holy Saturday.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

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The Harrowing of Hell and the Golden Dome

What Holy Saturday reveals about a nation that can fund war but not mercy

Derek Penwell

Apr 04, 2026

Jesus descended into hell to retrieve the forgotten ones, while we’re building a Golden Dome to make sure we don’t have to look at them.

There’s an old tradition the church doesn’t talk about much anymore. It shows up in the Apostles’ Creed if you’re paying attention: “[Jesus] descended into hell.” Most congregations blow right past it. But the ancient church was paying attention.

They called it the “Harrowing of Hell,” which sounds like one of those anti-Halloween haunted houses for evangelical youth groups. But on the Saturday between the crucifixion and the resurrection, while the stone sat sealed and the soldiers stood watch, Jesus went down to the place where the forgotten had been warehoused.

He went to the dead who had no one coming for them.

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The Eastern Orthodox still depict that image. You can find icons of Holy Saturday where Christ stands on the shattered gates of death, reaching down with both hands, pulling the lost up out of the pit. It’s one of the most striking images in the whole tradition, because the positioning is so specific. Jesus isn’t standing at the top of a staircase waiting for people to hike their way up, but at the bottom, making sure no one gets left behind.

In other words, he went to where the forgotten ones were.

[Updated to address the supersessionist problems with the Harrowing tradition, thanks to a reader who rightly flagged it: Now, the traditional theology behind this story is a mess, and I should say so. The classical version says Christ descended to retrieve the righteous dead who lived before him, people who couldn’t have known Jesus and were therefore stuck in Sheol. That’s a supersessionist framework, and it is, as one friend pointed out, terrible theology. It reduces every pre-Christian life to a waiting room.

Having said that, I don’t think the image depends on that logic. What the icon captures, what the Eastern church kept painting for centuries, is a posture: God goes to the place where the abandoned are. God doesn’t wait at the top for people to find their way up. God descends. That’s the part I want to focus on.]

Today’s Holy Saturday, so I’ve been thinking about that image this morning as I drink my coffee.

Yesterday, the White House released its proposed budget for fiscal year 2027. The headlines were predictable: $1.5 trillion for defense, the largest military budget in modern American history, a 44% increase over last year. The president has been signaling this for weeks, but seeing the numbers on the page still feels like a gut punch.

What didn’t make the headlines, at least not the big ones, is where the money comes from. A 10% cut to non-defense spending. $73 billion stripped from federal programs. LIHEAP (Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program), which helps poor families keep the heat on in winter, eliminated. Community Services Block Grants, which fund job counseling and housing assistance for people in poverty, gone. Cuts to health research and K-12 education. Fair housing programs, slashed. Community development block grants that fund affordable housing and sewer systems in struggling communities, targeted again.

The budget document itself uses the word “woke” 34 times in 92 pages to describe the programs it wants to eliminate.

And if you really want to rub salt in the wounds of the struggling, there’s “the quote.” At a private White House event this week, the president said: “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care. It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal level.”

“We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care.”

What the actual hell?

I’ve read that sentence a dozen times now, and it keeps banging around the inside of my skull. Because it’s more than just a policy statement; it’s a theological confession about what matters and what doesn’t. It’s a document of priorities as clear as any creed.

Here’s what I think the Harrowing of Hell has to say about all that.

Christian tradition tells us that on Holy Saturday, Christ descended to the dead. Not to the powerful dead, or to the ones history remembered, but to the ones who’d been discarded. The ones no empire had any use for.

And the whole point of the story is that Jesus went looking for them on purpose. He went to the bottom because that’s where the people were who everyone else had written off. These are the kind of people who don’t go to high school reunions, mostly because nobody would remember them anyway.

But look at this budget. Look at who gets left behind when we decide that $1.5 trillion for weapons is essential but heating assistance for the poor is optional. Look who disappears when job training programs and housing grants get labeled “wasteful” and DOGE’d so we can fund a missile defense shield called the Golden Dome (hereinafter, GD, which feels somehow inspirationally appropriate.)

The GD. I can’t get over that name. (I went to grade school in Mishawaka, Indiana, about a mile and a half from the real Golden Dome on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. I, therefore, recognize no other pretender to the title.)

Anyway, this new missile defense system is supposed to be a gleaming, impenetrable canopy of awesomeness overhead, protecting us from threats up top, while the people at the bottom lose the programs that kept them alive. If you wanted to design the precise opposite of the Harrowing of Hell, you’d build a Golden Dome and tell the people underneath it that day care is somebody else’s problem. They should just be glad they get to (potentially) stand under the awe-inspiring golden flex.

It’s not an actual anything yet, but by God, it could be. Think how safe we’d feel then! Of course, some undisclosed number of us will have to be sacrificed to achieve such splendor. But you know, what’s that whole thing about omelets and egg-breaking?

I want to be careful here. National security is a real thing. The world is genuinely dangerous, and these aren’t simple questions. What’s more, I don’t have an alternative budget in my back pocket. So, I’m not unveiling (unleashing?) my own 17-point plan.

But what I am saying isn’t new: a budget is a moral document. It tells you what a society values by showing you what it’s willing to pay for and who it’s willing to let slip therough the cracks. And, frankly, when you line this one up next to the Harrowing of Hell, the contrast is hard to miss.

The tradition says Christ descended. This budget says we’re on the ascent. Our best traditions say the forgotten are worth going after, but this budget says we can’t afford them.

The tradition says the gates of the place where people are abandoned get shattered. Whereas this budget says we’re constructing a new celestial gated community, complete with its own golden guard shack, and it’ll protect us from everything except the suffering of those within its wall of “protection.”

⸻

Holy Saturday is the weirdest day on the Christian calendar because nothing appears to happen. Of course, Friday had the drama of the cross. And Sunday’s going to have the shock of the empty tomb.

But Saturday?

Saturday is just the silence of a sealed rock and the dull, bureaucratic certainty that death has won. The empire files its paperwork in triplicate. The soldiers clock in for guard duty. Everything proceeds according to plan.

But a budget proposal is paperwork, too. It’s the empire’s plan for what comes next, printed, bound, and submitted to Congress, where lawmakers will negotiate and horse-trade and probably ignore half of it. The whole thing’s pretty mundane. But within the mundanity, it tells you everything the empire thinks is worth protecting … and what’s not.

It’s Holy Saturday. And somewhere beneath the GD they want to build, beneath the $1.5 trillion worth of ships, warheads, and missile systems, there are people who just lost the programs that helped them heat their homes, train for jobs, find affordable housing, and get their kids into day care. They aren’t in the headlines because they aren’t in the budget. But then again, they never are, are they? They’ve been written out.

The old tradition says that it’s to these forgotten ones that Jesus went on the day between the crucifixion and the resurrection.

I don’t know what Sunday looks like for us yet. I don’t think we’re supposed to, not on Saturday.

But I know this: the Harrowing of Hell is a story about a God who refuses to leave the forgotten ones to remain forgotten. A God who descends, who breaks gates, and reaches down.

And I’m guessing that a budget that says “We can’t take care of day care” is a document written by people who’ve never heard of such a God.

The Harrowing of Hell from Horae ad usum Parisiensem ou Petites heures de Jean de Berry (c. 1385-1390)

It’s Holy Saturday, when Jesus, lately done with a literally excruciating episode, makes the time to free all the folks who’d been sent to H-E-double-hockey-sticks ever since Adam and Eve had enjoyed their naughty nosh.

Thou didst descend into the depths of earth, O Christ, and didst shatter the eternal bars which held the dead captive; and like Jonah from the sea-monster, after three days Thou did rise from the grave.

...

O my Saviour, as a living and unsacrificed offering, as God of Thine own free will Thou didst offer Thyself to the Father, and by being resurrected from the grave, Thou didst resurrect the entire race of Adam.

From the Paschal Canon