Easter morning has come and Jesus has “burst the bars of death and triumphed o’er the grave” There’s been a great deal of singing and trumpeting and formal processions (in churches that practice procession). Easter Dinner has been eaten in homes all over and now… what?
The first “what” is to take a look back at the broken bars of death and appreciate for a moment exactly what just happened. On Good Friday Jesus snuck into hell by virtue of being a dead human carrying sin (in this case the sins of the world). I can imagine (and this is just imagining) the bored functionary on shift “Dead? check. Human? check. Move along to the next open window for processing” as Jesus was waved through the gates of death into the final and darkest valley mentioned in Psalm 23.
And then, he gets loose because he is the Living Christ and nothing in hell could hold him. I imagine that it was quite a rampage he went on inside the gates of hell, breaking chains and smashing cell doors. I imagine that demonic Security tried to contain him and eventually even the devil got involved but everyone of them got their faces wrecked and butts punted. The prisoners were freed, the chains that bound them were broken, the key to hell itself was taken and broken and thrown aside, and then the very gates of hell were torn from their hinges and a CLOSED sign was posted at the entrance.
In 1 Peter there is a record that “he went and preached to the spirits in prison” and this is that preaching. We tend of course to think of preaching as a purely verbal activity, someone talks and people listen. This is a more… kinetic form of preaching, direct divine instruction in the truth that “hell is permanently closed.”
Certainly a lot of the imagery here is imagined rather than strictly biblical. We know that Jesus died, descended into hell, and on the third day, rose again from the grave. We know that something in the death-and-resurrection moment destroyed the power of sin, death, and the devil to terrorize and control our lives. We even have a hint that Jesus went and preached freedom to those in bondage in hell. Beyond that? Imagination and poetry are our guides.
Personally, I like the image of Jesus finally and righteously ‘kicking demon butt’ and smashing the chains that hold us to the dead shame of the past. The broken gates of hell are an image of freedom and future because “the strife is o’er, the battle done; now is the victor’s triumph won!”
The grave is not just a hotel that Jesus checked in for a few nights of binging movies and eating takeout or a place where he twiddled his thumbs waiting out the timer. It’s a place that terrifies and . I’ve had the chance to sit by more than a few as they go through the labor of dying and even a ‘peaceful’ death is hard. The person labors and fights for breath, sometimes there’s flailing and other times there’s weeping. For the most part these have been people of faith and still, it is an agony.
For these reasons I do rather like the image of what theologians call “the Harrowing of Hell.” I have held the hands of beloved people as they slowly lost the battle with death. I have commended the dying into the loving hands of Christ and proclaimed resurrection hope over new turned graves. So there’s more than a bit of satisfaction at the image of Jesus smashing up the whole of hell and leaving nothing behind but wreckage, a defeated devil, and all the sin of the world in a huge pile that can stay and rot until the ending of all worlds.
As the Deer 