Red-Letter Day
also known as Great Saturday, Great and Holy Saturday, Easter Eve
Holy Saturday is the day Christ's body lay in the tomb, between the crucifixion and the resurrection. In the West it is kept without the Eucharist: the altar bare, the church silent, the fast unbroken until the vigil of the night. In the East the day carries a sung funeral for Christ and a liturgy that is already turning toward Easter. It is the oldest kind of observance the Church has, and no one instituted it.
On the Friday evening, Joseph of Arimathea asked for the body, wrapped it, and laid it in a tomb he had cut for himself. The stone was rolled across. Matthew reports that the chief priests went to Pilate the next day and had the stone sealed and a guard set, in case the disciples should come for the body. Luke says that the women who had followed from Galilee saw where he was laid, prepared spices, and then rested, because it was the Sabbath. That is the whole of what the Gospels tell of this day, and none of it is told from inside the tomb.
The Church has kept the day anyway, and kept it longer than it has kept almost anything else. Our earliest witness is already looking back. Around the year 190 Irenaeus of Lyons wrote to Victor of Rome about the fast that preceded Easter: "For the controversy is not only concerning the day, but also concerning the very manner of the fast. For some think that they should fast one day, others two, yet others more; some, moreover, count their day as consisting of forty hours day and night." The churches disagreed, and Irenaeus said the disagreement was old: it had not begun in his time, but long before, in that of their ancestors. Forty hours is the span from a Friday death to a Sunday dawn. The Church was already keeping time with a body in a tomb, and could no longer remember learning to.
What it did on the day was fast, and what it did on the night was baptize. A third-century Syrian church order directs the faithful to eat nothing on the Friday and the Saturday, but to "assemble yourselves, and wake and pray the whole of the night, with prayers and supplications, and with the reading of the Prophets, with the Gospel and the Psalms," until the third hour of the night after the Sabbath. A later Syrian book gives the reason for the strangeness of a Saturday fast: this is the one Sabbath in the whole year on which fasting is commanded rather than forbidden, because the Creator was then under the earth. At Rome, candidates were baptized at cockcrow. At Jerusalem, Cyril preached to those about to be baptized and prayed that God would show them that night, "the darkness which shines like the day." A pilgrim named Egeria, who was there a generation later, wrote down what happened: the ninth-hour office omitted, the vigil prepared in the great church, the newly baptized led out from the font to the tomb itself for a single hymn and a prayer, and then on to where the people were keeping watch.
That is what the day was for a long time: an emptiness with a night at the end of it. Then the vigil drifted off the night and into daylight, and our sources name neither the act nor the century that moved it, and the day hollowed. In England the parishes filled it themselves. From the tenth century a cross, and often the reserved Host, was laid in an Easter Sepulchre, a recess in the chancel wall, and the parishioners watched beside it in shifts through the day and the night, as one historian of the monuments puts it, as they would have done over the body of a dead neighbour. Men and women left money for the sepulchres and asked in their wills to be buried beside them. In 1548 the sepulchres went, with the ashes and the palms and the candles, and were not replaced.
What the Church said about the day, when it said anything, it said in the language of sleep. A homily long read on this day, and long ascribed to the wrong man, opens: "Something strange is happening: there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep." It has Christ go down after Adam "as for a lost sheep," take him by the wrist, and say to him: "Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light." The Eastern churches sing the same thing as a lament over an embroidered image of the buried Christ: "O Life, how canst Thou die? How canst Thou dwell in a tomb?"
The prayer book gives the day no more than the day gives itself. There is no celebration of the Eucharist. There is Job on man born of woman, and the anthem out of the burial office, and the Gospel of the sealing of the stone. And there is the collect, which asks for nothing except the thing the day is: that as the crucified body of God's 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.
You will probably spend this day doing something else. The shopping is not done, the eggs are not dyed, and the day has no service to hold you. That is not a modern failure; it is close to what the day has always been, an emptiness the Church declined to fill. The one discipline it asks is that you not hurry: hold back the festivity, keep the fast, let the silence be a real silence rather than a gap between two better days. The collect appointed for this day does not ask God to end the waiting early. It asks only that we await with him the coming of the third day. What in your life have you been trying to resurrect before Saturday is over?
The written record for this day is unusually lopsided: dense on the practice, silent on the event. No Gospel narrates the day from Christ's side, and the descent to the dead is creedal and epistolary rather than narrative. What survives instead is evidence of what Christians did.
The earliest is a letter of Irenaeus of Lyons to Pope Victor, written about 190 and preserved only because Eusebius of Caesarea quoted it in his Church History around 320. It shows the pre-Easter fast varying in length from church to church, and describes that variation as already ancestral. Nothing in the surviving sources reaches behind it. The third-century Syrian Didascalia Apostolorum gives the earliest full description of the two-day total fast ending at the third hour of the night after the Sabbath, though its text carries a Syriac-only expansion at the crucial phrase, and its stated rationale for the fast is anti-Jewish. The Apostolic Constitutions, a Syrian church order of about 375 to 380, supply the exception rule (this is the one Sabbath of the year on which fasting is required), the week's diet, and the night's programme. From Jerusalem in the early 380s we have Egeria's travel diary, the best evidence in the file and the only eyewitness description, and from the same city a generation earlier Cyril's address to baptismal candidates. Rome contributes the Apostolic Tradition, associated with Hippolytus and reflecting early third-century practice, with its cockcrow baptism; North Africa contributes Tertullian, who calls Easter the most solemn day for baptism and then immediately insists that every day is the Lord's and there is no difference in the grace.
Two things follow from this evidence base, and both are worth stating plainly. First, no pope, council, synod, or prayer book instituted Holy Saturday. It is embedded in the paschal cycle before every witness we possess, and every datable act regulates its margins rather than founding it. Second, the sources do not agree on when the vigil left the night. Four separate chronologies circulate, none resting on a primary document; the honest form is that by the later Middle Ages the vigil that belonged to the night was being sung in daylight, and we cannot say who moved it or when.
The Anglican line is documented much better. The 1549 book gave Easter Even an epistle (1 Peter 3:17 to 22), a gospel (Matthew 27:57 to 66), an introit psalm dropped in 1552, and no collect at all. The first proper collect in the English, Scottish, and American line appears in the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637, and it is a baptismal prayer built on Romans 6: that as we are baptised into the death of Christ, our sins may be buried with him, and we not fear the grave. The 1662 book supplies a different and shorter composition sharing that opening, asking that "by continual mortifying our corrupt affections we may be buried with him; and that through the grave, and gate of death, we may pass to our joyful resurrection." Whether 1662 redacted 1637 or drew independently on the same scripture is not established. That collect held in the American books of 1789 and 1892, and the epistle held from 1549 all the way to 1928, before both were replaced: 1979 and 2019 appoint Job 14 as an Old Testament lesson, Psalm 130 or Psalm 31, and 1 Peter 4:1 to 8, and print two new collects, one written by Bishop Otis Charles for 1979 and one new in 2019 which is the only collect in the whole run to name the descent to the dead explicitly. No source consulted explains why the epistle changed.
In the East the Friday night office is a funeral. The Epitaphios, an embroidered cloth icon of the buried Christ, is carried in procession under funeral bells while the people follow with lit candles and the Lamentations are sung at a flowered bier, decorated by tradition by the parish's young women. Passing beneath the cloth, or carrying home its flowers, is held to be a blessing. In the West the day is marked by absences: the altar stripped, the images veiled, the bells and organ silent from Maundy Thursday until the Gloria of the vigil. Children in France, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Hungary are still told that the bells have flown to Rome and will come back; this is a folk explanation of the silence, told for centuries, and not an account of where the custom came from.
Household observance fills the day where the church leaves it open. In Poland, Ukraine, and their diasporas, baskets of Easter food are blessed on Holy Saturday: bread, eggs, salt, horseradish, sausage, sometimes a lamb of butter, eaten at Sunday breakfast. In German-speaking Europe and its emigrant communities, bonfires are lit on the Saturday evening. In the Philippines, Black Saturday is kept in domestic quiet, with a silent procession at Quiapo in Manila. In Mexico, Venezuela and Chile, effigies of Judas are burned in public squares, in Mexico with a strong satirical edge; the same custom has repeatedly been turned against Jews, as at Pruchnik in Poland in 2019, where an effigy with sidelocks and a placard was beaten and burned, drawing condemnation from the World Jewish Congress.
The earliest evidence for the paschal fast is Irenaeus of Lyons, quoted at Eusebius, Church History V.24.12 to 13, in the translation of Arthur Cushman McGiffert for the second series of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, available at Wikisource. The Didascalia Apostolorum, chapter 21, is quoted from Margaret Dunlop Gibson's translation, The Didascalia Apostolorum in English (Horae Semiticae I, 1903), pages 98 to 99, archive.org; the phrase "and Saturday" is a Syriac-only addition in Gibson's apparatus. The Apostolic Constitutions VII.23 and V.18 to 19 are at New Advent and New Advent. Egeria's Itinerarium, chapter 38, is quoted from the translation of M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe (1919) as transcribed at Oxford; the widely-linked CCEL copy breaks off mid-Lent and never reaches this chapter. Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis 15, is in E. H. Gifford's translation, New Advent. Tertullian, On Baptism 19, is at New Advent, and the Apostolic Tradition, chapters 20 to 21, in Burton Scott Easton's translation at Project Gutenberg.
The homily beginning "Something strange is happening" is CPG 3768, Homilia in divini corporis sepulturam, printed at Patrologia Graeca 43, columns 439 to 464, quoted here in the modern English used in the Roman Office of Readings (PDF transcription). It is traditionally ascribed to Epiphanius of Salamis, who died in 403; following A. Vaillant's 1958 critical edition, Roger Pearse identifies the likely author as a later Epiphanius, Archbishop of Cyprus, present at the council in Trullo in 691 (roger-pearse.com). The Lamentation verse "O Life, how canst Thou die?" is from the First Stasis of the Enkomia at the Orthros of Great and Holy Saturday, in the translation of Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, The Lenten Triodion (Faber, 1978), as printed at OrthoChristian.
For the prayer books: the 1549, 1552 and 1559 readings, the 1637 Scottish collect, and the 1789 and 1892 American propers are at justus.anglican.org and its companion pages; the 1662 collect, epistle and gospel were read from the Church of England's own 1662 text; the current propers, rubric, collects and anthem are in the ACNA 2019 Holy Saturday leaflet, which carries no book pagination. The 1647 Ordinance is transcribed in the Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum at British History Online. The 1955 decree Maxima Redemptionis Nostrae Mysteria is at Catholic Culture; the traditionalist objections to it, including Gromier's 1960 conference, are set out in Stefano Carusi's study, translated at Rorate Caeli. The Easter Sepulchre and the phrase about watching over a dead neighbour come from the Church Monuments Society's article of 11 April 2020; the standing account of the English parish rite and its suppression is Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992). The Epitaphios datings and the Holy Fire's attestation history are drawn from Wikipedia) and Wikipedia, both tertiary; the Pruchnik incident was reported in the Times of Israel, 21 April 2019.
Between those books the day was abolished outright. The Long Parliament's Ordinance of 8 June 1647 removed Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide and all other festival days from observance in England and Wales, substituting a secular half-holiday each month; the propers returned at the Restoration. A structural point often got wrong: Easter Even carries neither a red-letter nor a black-letter designation in 1662, not because it was ranked low but because that table covers fixed dates only, and a movable day never entered it.
The one great modern act is Roman. Pius XII permitted the restored night vigil by experiment in 1951 and made it universal by the general decree Maxima Redemptionis Nostrae Mysteria of 16 November 1955, effective the following year. The decree names its own problem candidly: the services of the triduum "are often performed by the clergy with the body of the church nearly deserted." Its rule was that the solemn Mass of the Vigil begin "at about the midnight which falls between Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday." The reform was contested at once, notably by Mgr Léon Gromier at a Paris conference in 1960, who objected to the reworking of the font blessing and the litany.
The East has no comparable break, because it never had the same loss. It never developed a day without a liturgy: the Eucharist is offered, at Vespers joined to the Liturgy of St Basil, with fifteen Old Testament readings and a change from dark vestments to bright partway through. Its most distinctive elements are, by contrast with the fast, late. The oldest surviving embroidered Epitaphios dates from about 1200, the earliest manuscripts of the Lamentations sung over it from the thirteenth century, and the repertoire now in use was first printed in the Triodion at Venice in 1522. At Jerusalem, the Holy Fire enters the written record with the Frankish pilgrim Bernard the Monk in 867, and is independently described in the tenth and eleventh centuries by the Muslim writers Ibn al-Qass and al-Biruni.
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.
Job 14:1–17Psalm 130 or Psalm 31:1–6v1 Peter 4:1–8Matthew 27:57–66 or John 19:38–42