‘He descended into hell’

Belief in bodily resurrection has always been at the centre of the Christian Church. St Paul went as far as to say that if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and your faith is vain (1 Cor 15.17). Nowhere was the resurrection argued for more strongly than in North Africa. St Augustine of Hippo defended the Resurrection. He argued, in the tradition of St Paul, that because Christ has risen, there is the resurrection of the dead.

Jesus the Risen Saviour, surrounded by his disciples as he pulls Adam and Eve from the depths of hell to salvation, in a mosaic at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut.

He argued that the death and resurrection of Jesus was for the salvation of man: “To achieve each resurrection of ours, the saviour paid with his single life, and he pre-enacted and presented his one and only one by way of sacrament and by way of model”.

But first, what does Christ descending to hell means?

The Greek word Hades—translated as “hell” in the Apostles’ Creed—is the underworld of Greek mythology, not necessarily the place of permanent punishment of those utterly lost forever. It corresponds with the sheol of Old Testament Jewish teachings. It is distinct from the “lake of fire”, mentioned only in Revelation, which is what we tend to understand as “hell”, the place of eternal punishment for the unrepentant.

What emerges clearly from the Bible is that all those who died before Christ slept in their graves, awaiting a resurrection to the new earth, under God’s heavenly Kingdom. Christ, according to St Peter, went there to make sure that all, even those separated from God through their unbelief, would hear the Good News and be granted opportunity to convert.

For instance, when Job was suffering he prayed to die: “Who will grant me this, that thou mayst protect me in (the grave)… and appoint me a time when thou wilt remember me?” (Job 14:13). In John 8:56, Jesus said: “Abraham rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it and was glad.”

So the resurrection of Christ opened up the floodgates of heaven. St Paul insists that the resurrection of those who believe the Good News is an act of partaking in the mystery of God becoming man.

He makes it clear that our dependence on Christ is not just in the spiritual realm alone, but physically too. Christ also had insisted on this: “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (Jn 6:53). Many were scandalised.

In fact, Christ used even a stronger term, trógó, which is Greek for the verb “to gnaw—”unless you gnaw the flesh…”

Many today also, including some fellow Christians, are scandalised by the Catholic insistence on the Real Presence in the consecrated host. To them, John 6:53 should be understood only in the symbolic sense, as a figure of speech.

But the Catholics believe the Eucharist is the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is really and substantially contained in it.

We believe eating the flesh of Christ in the Eucharist is the condition for our resurrection.

When Jesus reveals himself to the eleven (still called The Twelve) on Easter evening, “he upbraided them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen”.

Stranger still was the power the resurrected body of Christ possessed; no longer limited by physical objects, space or time. In physical laws this means the elements of Christ’s resurrected body travelled faster even than the speed of light. Hence St Paul calls him “the man of heaven”.

There are those who say the Resurrection narrative was produced by the apostles’ naïve faith (or credulity). On the contrary, the Gospel makes it a point of emphasising just how dumbfounded and disbelieving they were. It makes it clear that their faith in the Resurrection was born “under the action of divine grace, from their direct experience of the reality of the risen Jesus”.

Christ’s resurrection is a subject of faith because it is a transcendent intervention of God in creation and history. In Christ’s resurrection, God, who entered human history, overtakes it to draw it to the Omega-point to share in the divine life.

This gives a new meaning to Christ’s saying that “when I’m lifted up, I will draw all things to myself”.