holy saturday and moby-dick

sacred stories for a world gone mad

Today is Holy Saturday, the day and night in the Christian liturgical year between Crucifixion Friday and Easter Sunday. But I’ve been thinking all day about Moby-Dick.

This was the year I finally got around to reading that leviathan of a novel. Our son told me he was listening to the audiobook, and he suggested I give it a go, too, so we could talk about it. So I did, though I followed our son’s lead and didn’t technically “read” but “listened.” I started the second week of Lent, on a long drive home from New York state to North Carolina, did most of the listening while running, walking, or working in the woods, and finished under a mostly full moon this past Monday morning.

I mention beginning and finishing in Lent because, in my mind, Moby-Dick is one of the great Lenten parables. I’ll add that I think of Lent in two ways. It’s the forty other-than-Sunday days prior to Easter that the Christian world observes--a season when all the tent-stakes of your life are pulled up, and off you go into the wilderness. But it’s also something the whole world experiences, not just the Christian world—a season of uprooting, wilderness, and uncertainty into which we are all collectively thrown.

Now feels like such a time, and I suppose that’s why, on this last day of Christian-world Lent, I find myself thinking about Moby-Dick as much as anything explicitly Christian.

Moby-Dick, as you likely know, is Herman Melville’s epic novel about a wounded man whose obsession with vengeance destroys himself and a host of others. (If you’ve never read it and want to without knowing what happens, stop reading this post right now. Come back when you’re finished reading. See you in six months.) The wounded man is Ahab, captain of the whaling vessel Pequod. Years earlier, Ahab lost a leg to a great white whale named Moby Dick (for reasons no one knows for sure, Herman Melville hyphenated the title of the book but, when referencing the whale itself, uses no hyphen), and Ahab is dead set on killing this whale and avenging his loss. Backed by other people’s money, and using his great gifts as orator, Ahab persuades the rest of the crew (all but one, the first mate, Starbuck) to support this mission of vengeance. But Moby-Dick is a tragedy, and the great whale brings down the Pequod. Ahab and all the crew, save one lone survivor, the narrator, go down with it.

The narrator tells us, in the first sentence of the book, to “Call me Ishmael.” And whether that be the narrator’s birth name or one he chooses for some symbolic reason, Ishmael proves to be an exceptionally biblically literate narrator. He knows (and clearly Melville does, too) that Ishmael means “God hears” and that Ishmael was the name of the son born to Abraham by the slave Hagar, whom “God hears” and rescues from death in the wilderness. He also knows that it was through Abraham’s other son, Isaac, born later to Abraham’s wife Sarah, that the “chosen people” of Israel descended, while through Ishmael descended the not-chosen people, the Muslims.

Melville wrote Moby-Dick in 1850 and ’51, and most scholars believe that in Moby-Dick and other works, Melville was expressing opposition to the institution of slavery. I do not know whether Melville intended to suggest that it is the unchosen and downcast of the earth who will survive, while the self-destructive chosen will not, but that is how it lands in me these 175 years later.

Moby-Dick’s Ishmael survives because of an accident. In the climactic encounter with Moby Dick, the great whale rams Ahab’s harpooning boat, and Ishmael and two others fall into the sea. Those other two immediately pull themselves back into the boat and return to the Pequod with Ahab, but Ishmael cannot reach the boat in time. The wheel of fortune turns quickly, though. Moby Dick pursues Ahab to the Pequod and smashes it. Ishmael, alone in the great sea, watches the Pequod go under. Now it’s just him and miles and miles of human-less ocean, and his hours are numbered. But a coffin rises to the surface of the sea, an empty coffin which the narrator has introduced earlier in the novel and which was assembled, caulked, and coated with pitch so it would be buoyant. And upon this empty death-chamber Ishmael floats for a day and a night before he’s rescued by the ship Rachel.

The Rachel has also been introduced earlier. Its captain had two sons fall overboard, and both became separated from the ship. He begs Ahab to help him search for his children, but Ahab, hell-bent on his revenge, refuses. The Rachel, Ishmael says, is a ship weeping for her children, like Rachel in the Bible (Matthew 2: 18). So not only is it Ishmael, the unchosen one, who is the only one saved. It is Rachel, the grief-stricken one whose plea for help Ahab ignored, who becomes the vessel of Ishmael’s salvation.

I imagine it is clear to you that I am highlighting parts of Moby-Dick that strike me as parabolically relevant in this present moment, this Lent when a wounded, vengeful man is steering a ship of fools hard in the direction of destruction, when the survival of those who identify as chosen is very much an open question, and when the help rendered in the aftermath of destruction will likely come from those who know the sorrow of losing everything.

In using Moby-Dick in this way, I hope I’m not butchering Melville or offending any of you whose powers of literary interpretation far exceed my own. But even if I am, I hope you’ll tolerate one more comment.

As I said at the top of this piece, today is Holy Saturday. On Holy Saturday, we do not know yet that Jesus will be resurrected tomorrow. We know only what Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome, and the other disciples knew, that Jesus is dead and gone. Holy Saturday is when all hell has broken loose and we don’t know if or how it will ever be corralled again. It’s when we’re floating on a coffin in an empty sea, without any idea that the Rachel or any other help will ever come for us.

In the earliest ending of the gospel of Mark, Holy Saturday actually extends into Easter Sunday. The women go to the tomb, find it empty, and are told by a young man in a white robe that Jesus is risen. But they don’t see Jesus, they leave the tomb feeling afraid, and the story ends right there--a fitting end for the gospel in which Jesus’s only words from the cross are, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

The versions you’re likely to hear in church tomorrow are from Luke and John, and in these, too, if you read what’s actually written, a good bit of Holy Saturday remains. In Luke, as in Mark, the women don’t see Jesus. They talk with two men in dazzling clothes who tell them Jesus has risen, and then they leave. Later in the day, two men walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus do see Jesus, though they don’t realize it’s him until after they’ve eaten supper with him and he’s left.

In John, Mary Magdalene goes to the cemetery alone, sees the stone has been rolled away from the tomb, and leaves to tell Peter and John. These two run to the tomb, find it empty, and leave, but Mary remains. She looks in the tomb and sees something Peter and John had not: two angels. They ask her why she’s weeping, and she answers that she’s come looking for Jesus’s body and it’s not here. Far from gladdening her, in other words, the empty tomb is making her sad. Then she turns around and sees someone she thinks is a gardener. He asks the same question the angels had, “Woman, why are you weeping?” and she answers him as she had the angels. The gardener then speaks her name, “Mary,” and that’s when she perceives he’s not a gardener. He’s Jesus.

What I’m trying to get at is this: Holy Saturday is not just a day on the liturgical calendar. It’s the eternally recurring reality that all is lost. Not just feels like it’s lost. Is lost. Holy Saturday is when we reap what we’ve sewn, when we experience the fallout of the also eternally recurring experience of Crucifixion Friday, when, though we know not what we do, human madness lays to waste everything and everyone we love, God included, and Easter is beyond even our dreaming.

And when Easter happens—which it will, because Easter too is an eternally recurring reality—if it is Real Easter, it will not happen as we expect. All we may ever see of resurrection is emptiness. And if we do see the actual risen Jesus, for a while we’ll think he’s just a stranger in the road, or someone who works in gardens for a living, or a grieving father on a ship named for a grieving mother.

Even so, come soon, our Deliverer.

(The cover of the first American edition of Moby-Dick, published in November 1851)