But that it is women, in the Gospel accounts, who have the first inklings of what actually happened, might suggest that the risen Christ wasn’t exactly striding with a superhero’s gait. Of course Easter is full of victory and triumph imagery, chains breaking and bars shattering. My own reservations about all this is that the risen Jesus might en d up resembling Mel Gibson’s Braveheart portrayal of William Wallace more than the one from Galilee. Is there is a second chance, a twenty-second chance, seven-hundred and second chance? We’re skirting on the ragged edge of orthodoxy here-although if indeed this is universalism, it is clearly Christian universalism, not a human or general universalism. It is somewhat parallel to the idea attributed to Karl Barth that God’s “yes” to us in Christ, can outwait and outlast any of our human “no’s” to God. Recent interest in the harrowing of hell has moved toward a quasi-universalism, where Christ releases not only those who never heard, but also those who originally rejected him. On one level, it tries to answer the question, “What about those who lived before Christ? What about those who never heard of Christ? What about those who never had the opportunity to trust in Christ?” It is an image that is more instructive than factual, trying to convey the lengths that God will go to save his people.īut it is an inspiring image. Apparently Augustine called the harrowing of hell more allegory than history. None of this is exactly a lynchpin in my own faith. And the bizarre claims, found in Matthew’s gospel, of bodies of dead saints rising and roaming the streets of Jerusalem after Jesus’s death, might suggest something similar. “When it says, ‘He ascended,’ what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth?” Ephesians 4:9. “Jesus also went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey” 1 Peter 3:19. Some puzzling scriptural allusions could indirectly support such a notion. According to this tradition, Jesus went to the place of the dead to break its dominion, to bind the strongman. Often it is ass ociated with the Saturday between his death and resurrection Sometimes it is called the “harrowing of hell”-to harrow is to disturb, to ransack and wreck. “Hell” here is more a description of Jesus’s experience on the cross, almost a psychological account of the crucifixion.īut some Christian traditions have made much of Jesus’s descent to the dead. The Heidelberg Catechism, for example, answers “Why does the creed add, ‘He descended to hell’?” with “To assure me in times of personal crisis and temptation that Christ my Lord, by suffering unspeakable anguish, pain, and terror of soul, especially on the cross, but also earlier, delivered me from hellish anguish and torment.” (Q&A 44). In our Reformed tradition, we have never made much of Christ’s descent. Instead, the intention is to convey “sheol”-the place of the dead-rather than hell, the place of the demonic and damned. Some of you may recall that we used to say “he descended into hell.” Are we trying to clean up the creed? Make it more family-friendly, rated PG rather than R? Not really. Nearly every Sunday we recite “he descended to the dead” in the Apostles’ Creed. I’ve been told that in some of the art you can be certain that they are Adam and Eve because they have no navels. Adam and Eve are typically at the front of the procession, in what might be considered the greatest prison break of all time. Behind the conquering Lord is a mob of people. Often there are a few little demons squished beneath the heavy gates. Jesus usually strides over the blown-to-smithereens gates. It was in some wonderfully pe culiar medieval art. It wasn’t in any classroom or theological tome that I first encountered such a vision of the risen Christ. In these first days of Eastertide, I like to envision Jesus, robust and victorious, standing triumphantly over the splintered gates of hell, calling out, “All ye, all ye, all come free!” Playing hide-and-seek as a kid, when the game was over, we would yell out “Olly, olly, oxen free.” Only recently did I learn the ancient origin of our nonsensical refrain was “All ye, all ye, all come free.”
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