Breaking Hell

Propers: The Great Vigil of Easter, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

On the seventh day, God rested.

We call today the Great Sabbath, or Black Saturday. It is a time of eerie quiet, the calm before the storm. Jesus has died and lies wrapped in linens in His tomb—as the world holds its breath to see if the grave has final say even over God.

But this quiet is deceptive. It masks the overturning and remaking of Creation itself. Like a seed buried within the earth, Jesus is sprouting new life in the darkness, reaching down into the depths of the world, ready to burst forth in abundance. Scripture tells us, in the words of St Peter, that while our Lord’s body lay resting in the tomb, His perfect soul descended to the dead, down into hades, down into hell. There He proclaimed liberation to the dead even from the time of Noah—a time, according to Genesis, when the wickedness of humankind was so great that our every inclination was only evil all the time. And yet Christ came for them!

We call this “the Harrowing of Hell,” Christ’s conquest of the underworld, foretold by the prophet Habakkuk, who described it thusly:

In fury You trod the earth,
    in anger You trampled nations.
You came forth to save Your people,
    to save Your anointed.
You crushed the head of the wicked house,
    laying it bare from foundation to roof.

Such is the ruination Jesus brings upon sin, death, and hell.

While the earth is silent, while the tomb is sealed, while Christ descends unseen, all of hell is in an uproar, broken open, overthrown. The demons scatter like wasps from a shattered hive, as Christ Victorious, firstborn of the dead, plunges down with His own two hands to raise the despairing dead from their graves. The powers of sin, death, and hell are broken upon the wood of the Cross, the very axis upon which the entire world is now turned upside-down.

In the Bible, in the Old Testament, human beings do not go to Heaven—not to the highest Heaven, not into the very presence of God. We simply don’t belong there. That is a realm reserved only for the mightiest of angels, whose minds stretch vaster than our entire universe. Occasionally you hear of an exception to the rule: Enoch, for example, or Moses or Elijah. They were said to be taken up from the earth to dwell in the presence of God. But the rest of us, the mass of us, would end up in Sheol, the Pit, the land of the dead. God stays up; we go down. That was the way of it.

But Jesus Christ changes all this. He flips cosmology itself on its head. Now it is God who descends to the dead, who delves into the depths of hades. And He does so to kick the hornets’ nest, to crush the serpent’s head. By becoming Man, He has ransomed mankind for His own, and now the King has come to claim His rightful subjects, to drag us from the dragon’s claws. But this isn’t a battle, folks. This isn’t a struggle. The struggle took place on the Cross, and has been won for all time in Christ. After that, hell hasn’t got a prayer.

Jesus Christ is perfect Life: death has no hold over Him. Jesus Christ is perfect Light: the shadows evaporate before His flame. He has conquered the grave simply by entering it, by taking it all upon Himself. And so now we are freed! Freed from sin and death and hell! Freed from the anguish and despair of a broken world! And not just us, but all generations that have gone before, and all that shall come after! Hell has been harrowed, broken, gutted open. Its gates can never be shut. And for that matter, neither can Heaven’s.

Now that Christ has conquered, the souls of the blessed dwell in unapproachable light. Heaven has been opened to man by the one Man who can of right unbar that gate. The great wound that crippled Creation has been undone, and the world’s turned upside-down! For God had died and death is dead and Christ has conquered all!

This is the inheritance of our Baptism: Christ’s own death already died for us, and Christ’s own eternal life already begun. For in the dark of night, when all seemed lost, the ground shook, the seal split, and the tomb was burst asunder! And it is not just one Man who Rises on this most sacred, holy night, but all of us, every man, woman, and child, we all rise—through Him, with Him, in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, our God now and forever!

On this night, all hell is conquered. On this night, the dead now rise. On this night, the world is remade, and the heavens are turned, and from this point on we no longer slide inexorably toward destruction—but now we rise and we rise and we rise toward that day when Christ will dry every tear and heal every wound and raise every mother’s son from the loamy earth of the grave, when God at last shall be all in all!

Tonight we rise! And all the world rises with us in Christ.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.