The Waiting Trinity of Holy Saturday: A Hermeneutical-Artistic Proposal

Holy Saturday is the liturgical “day between days” where the church remembers Jesus Christ's passion and anticipates his glorious resurrection from the dead in hopeful waiting. This underexamined day in Protestant theological imagination is a day of tension showing that the resurrected One of Easter Sunday is the crucified One of Good Friday who journeyed through the fullness of death on Holy Saturday. Despite the pioneering work of Alan E. Lewis and Hans Urs von Balthasar, the symbol of Holy Saturday is poignant with still unexplored constructive possibilities for the church's proclamation of the Gospel of justifying and (re-) creative hope today, both within and beyond Holy Week. Therefore, this article explores how Holy Saturday testifies to the “waiting Trinity” as rooted in and expanding on Karl Barth's theology of the cross from Church Dogmatics 2.2 and symbolized in the Throne of Grace sculpture at the Kirche Sankt Maria zur Weise (“Wiesen Kirche”) in Soest, Germany, proposing a hermeneutic of the waiting Trinity as the basis for a new trinitarian, cruciform theology of the hope for a world beset with chaos and catastrophes.