“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.”

From “Awake, O Sleeper,” an ancient Christian homily for Holy Saturday.

Holy Saturday is a solemn day in the liturgical life of the Church – a moment that we spend “in the tomb” with Christ after His Passion. It is a moment to reflect upon the truth of the tomb in our experience and the abiding hope that by entering the tomb, the Lord liberates us from its hold in this life and in the next.

It happens that this Holy Saturday falls on April 19th, the tenth anniversary of the martyrdom of 30 Ethiopian and Eritrean migrants in Libya. These Orthodox Christians were seized by operatives of the Islamic State for the crime of their Christian faith. Threatened with death if they would not abandon their faith, they were then brutally murdered by beheading in some cases and shooting in others. The murderers made a cruel spectacle of the deaths with a video threatening a similar fate to any Christian who would refuse to give in to their evil demands.

I hope that all Christians remember those 30 men, poor and vulnerable, who offered such a powerful witness to their faith in the Lord of Life. On this Holy Saturday, may we find that same deep and abiding faith.

From Archbishop Henning.