As we continue working through the Creed, we see the Church continuing to work towards trying to understand what it is that Christ did to save us.

he suffered death and was buried, (passus et sepúltus est,)

If you think about it, the fact that Jesus died is astounding. The Son of God, who was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and became man, who was named Jesus, died. What does this even mean? How can God die? Because that’s what we’re saying happened. Not only does this challenge what we understand death to be, but it also forces us to confront the depths of love God has for us.

Death is not a natural thing for humans, Genesis teaches us, but a consequence of sin. In death, our body and our soul are ripped apart. It is the final stage of our purification for the next life. The fact that we continue to exist after the sundering of ourselves that is death is a miracle. We are not souls that drive around bodies as if they were robots. Our bodies are integral to who we are and how we exist. They are what distinguishes us from other humans.

Christ did not need to die. He did not sin. He was not born with original sin. He had no need of purification. And yet, he still offered himself up to death. His death had many effects, thought. First, it freed humanity from the yoke of the earlier covenants with God. A covenant can only be broken when one of the parties dies. (This is why, for example, we say that marriage is most properly a covenant.) Humanity could not free itself from sin and always struggled to turn to God. When Jesus came into the world, he took all sin onto himself, St. Paul teaches, and bore it to the Cross. St. Paul teaches about this over and over in his letters, “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin.” (2 Corinthians 5:21; cf. Galatians 3:13, Romans 3:24-26) St. Peter also speaks of this, saying, “He himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross, so that, free from sin, we might live for righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” (1 Peter 2:24)

After his death, he was buried. Rituals, traditions, and corporal works of mercy do not go out the window when times are challenging. To bury the dead is a corporal work of mercy, and we must bury the deceased. In burying the dead, we pay respect to the fact that these remains used to be a human person. In cremations, an aspect of this respect is to keep all of the remains of the person together: nothing should be scattered or given to family or friends. We bury the person’s remains in their entirety. Beyond the fact that this is a work of mercy for the deceased person, it is also a work of mercy for those who mourn him or her. When the remains are laid to rest in a grave, in a mausoleum, or in a columbarium, family and friends can visit that place and pay their respects or offer prayers.

Christ’s burial, though, is of special importance, because of what happens next. If he hadn’t been taken from the cross and laid in the tomb, if soldiers had not been assigned to guard the tomb, then the Resurrection account would not have been trustworthy. If our Lord’s body had been left on the Cross, exposed to the elements, then anything could have happened to his body. Because he was given the mercy of a burial, we know that nobody stole his remains in order to fabricate the Resurrection account.

Christian, ultimately, expresses hope in the Resurrection. Christ called each of us to follow him through this life and into the next. One day, at the end of the age (in the sæcula sæculorum), when the material universe comes to an end and time ceases, we will receive our bodies back again, just as Christ did. We talk more about this later in the Creed, but one of the Church’s most important teachings is that we will one day rise from our graves, receive our bodies–now glorified as Christ’s was after the Resurrection–back again, and live in peace and in the presences of God in the new heavens and on the new earth.

Fr. Matt