LOVE AND THE HARROWING OF HELL
If you notice our worship bulletin’s headings thus far in April, they all describe the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th Sunday of Easter. Easter is not just one particular Sunday. It is a whole season of the church year that begins on Easter Day and concludes 50 days later with Pentecost. During these Sundays of Easter, our scriptures invite us to reflect on gospel stories of Jesus’ resurrection appearances as well as the ongoing meaning of resurrection and new life in our own lives.
Easter came early this year. So as April has unfolded I have watched the earth slowly coming to life as thesun’s warmth patiently overcomes chilly winds and cold soil to draw new life out of the frozen earth. I’veseen my spring ephemerals – jack-in-the-pulpit, bleeding hearts, King Solomon’s seal and others –cautiously send up their fragile shoots from beneath last fall’s desiccated leaves. These leaves, althoughdead and brown, nonetheless provided a blanket of insulation for roots slumbering beneath them. Even last year’s dead leaves are an essential contributor to his year’s tiny, green shoots.
But let’s go further and deeper than reflecting on how “now the green blade riseth from the buried grain… Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen: Love is come again like wheat that springeth green,” as John Macleod Crum’s hymn that we sang earlier in April proclaims.
Our personal faith as well as the church’s faith is Christian insofar as it is an Easter faith. Even faith dies and rises again. Over our lifetimes, our faith – if it is a living faith – dies and is reborn many times. We let go of earlier, maybe childhood understandings of what we believe so that a new, perhaps deeper, more profound faith can be born within us. For many of us, this experience can be painful. Sometimes this dying and rising happens within the context of life crises: a major illness, a divorce, a deep disappointment in which we see our dreams or hopes crushed, the death of a loved one.
Resurrection does not end on the morning after Easter. Like the ongoing creation, scripture speaks of an ongoing Resurrection. Jesus did not just rise once two thousand years ago. He is continually rising again and again in our lives. In his book, The Afternoon of Christianity, Czech theologian Tomas Halik writes that “to believe, to become a Christian, is to open one’s heart and realize that Jesus is now rising from the dead.” Our lives are a continual experience of painful crucifixions and unexpected resurrections. Always in life, dead leaves are falling to earth and our hearts are broken. Always in life, change happens. Life inevitably deals us unexpected blows. And, always in life, new shoots of something equally unexpected begin to stir below the dry, brown leaves of our disappointment, pain, or grief. Slowly, often agonizingly slowly, another phase in our life journey emerges quietly and unhoped for.
This is why I am drawn during the Easter season to an Orthodox icon that I keep near my desk. Eastern Orthodox icons for Easter typically portray an event known as the “harrowing of hell.” These icons of the harrowing of hell emphasize what happened on the Saturday between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.
They portray Christ as standing over the broken gates of hell, which is presented as a dark pit at the bottom of the icon. Hell’s gates have been broken and Satan is in chains. Nearby is Christ pulling two figures up out of hell. They are Adam and Eve, imprisoned in the underworld along with all humanity. In my icon, Christ’s strong hand has grasped Adam and Eve who have been imprisoned in darkness and what has become for them a living death. Jesus’ hands have reached out to lift them back into light and life. The word “harrowing” comes from the Old English “hergian,” which literally means “to seize or to plunder.” Christ is seizing back from Satan all those whom he has plundered from life’s light and promise and imprisoned in darkness. He is freeing not just Adam and Eve but all those imprisoned and enslaved in whatever literal or figurative darkness they find themselves.
Is any of this biblical? Well. Yes. Scriptures like Mt 12:40; Acts 2:24, 31; Rom 10:7; Eph 4:9; and possibly 1 Pt 3:18-19, 4:6 allude to Christ’s descent into hell where he preaches or redeems those imprisoned there. The Apostles’ Creed draws upon these passages when it affirms that Jesus “descended into hell,” or as contemporary versions say, “descended to the dead.” For much of my childhood and early adulthood, I remember that my particular denomination removed this phrase from the Creed and relegated it to a small footnote at the bottom of the page. Contemporary versions have restored this affirmation back into the Apostles’ Creed so we say now, “I believe in Jesus Christ who … was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell; on the third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty…”
At certain times in my life, this affirmation in the Apostles’ Creed has been of great comfort to me. Amid devastating medical diagnoses and personal losses, I’ve found myself feeling imprisoned in dark places. In those moments, I needed to be reminded that Christ has already descended to the depths of anything and everything that we as humans can know or feel. He goes fully into the depths of human agony even beyond the suffering and abandonment of the cross. When we find ourselves in some kind of dark night of the soul, the “harrowing of hell” reminds us that in wherever constricted or painful place we find ourselves, Christ has gone there before us and is waiting to walk with us and to lead us back to the light. As Rowan Williams says in his The Indwelling of Light, “The icon [of the harrowing of hell] declares that wherever that lost moment is or was [for each of us], Christ has been there, to implant the possibility, never destroyed, of another turning, another future…”
No one sitting in whatever difficult circumstances that have befallen them or who feels mired in whatever awful experience life has dealt them is beyond the presence of God in Christ who fills even hell with the good news of release and new life. As the final verse of John Macleod Crum’s Easter hymn concludes,
“When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,
Jesus’ touch can call us back to life again,
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.”
Easter Blessings,
Pastor Thomas