Jesus Goes to Hell

Hades

Propers: Good Friday, A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

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

What is this hell, into which Christ must now descend?

The popular image, so prevalent in the Middle Ages, is that hell is a vast torture chamber, a place of eternal torment, eternal suffering, which exists because divine justice demands punishment for our sins.

But if we believe in Christ, we are told, if we put our faith in Him and in His atoning sacrifice on the Cross, taking our punishment in our place, then we will be delivered from divine justice by divine mercy, and thus enjoy the unmerited eternal bliss of heaven. For if hell is separation from God, then heaven is the unfettered beatific vision of His presence: direct knowledge and communion and everlasting life with the God who is Goodness and Beauty and Truth and Love.

And this is problematic because it posits a schism within God: as though part of God demands justice, while another part demands mercy, and who can know which God will seize us at the last—the merciful, or the just? And who could possibly help us if the latter? Should the devil and all the assembled forces of hell threaten us, we need have no fear, for Christ is for us, God-With-Us. Yet if it is the punishment of God that threatens—who could possibly deliver? A monstrous God is infinitely more terrifying than any devil could ever be.

We have trouble squaring that circle. God is just, we say; God must be just. Yet God is merciful as well; God must be merciful. And never the twain shall meet.

But this whole notion of heaven and hell is blown asunder by God’s actions on this night, by His death on the Cross, at our hands and for our sake, and by His descent into hell to harrow it, to batter down the gates of death, and to rise triumphant with all the ransomed souls of the dead resplendent in His train. The popular view of heaven and hell cannot hold up to the reality of Good Friday. If hell is separation from God, how then can it still be hell while God is there in Christ?

Moreover, if hell is just—if justice is satisfied by endless torment and suffering—then God must be unjust in saving us from our own just punishment. Conversely, if heaven is unmerited mercy, then God is unmerciful in allowing hell to exist. And this half-and-half nonsense is ridiculous. Because if God is not all-just, and God is not all-merciful, then, simply put, He is not God.

Punishment can never satisfy justice. They are entirely separate realities. If a man murders my father, and I in turn murder that man, this does not bring my father back. It does not lessen the injustice of his loss even one iota. Punishment may satisfy human prejudice, human vengeance, human rage, but never justice; much less divine justice. Torturing a sinner does not rectify his sin.

Only repentance can do that. Only a sinner realizing his sins, confessing them, turning from them, seeking to set things right—only this can satisfy justice, human or divine. For the truth is that perfect justice and perfect mercy are really the same thing. They are both of them perfect truth.

And so there is no schism within God, because His justice and His mercy and one and the same: He is not sometimes just, sometimes merciful. God is always true. And whether we experience that truth as punitive or purgative is rather up to us.

What if heaven and hell, ultimately, are the same address? What if the judgment at the end of the age is nothing other than seeing God clearly, seeing Goodness and Beauty and Truth and Love as they really are, and thus seeing ourselves as we really are? Can we deal with that? Can we face our sins in order to be cured?

In this understanding, hell as it exists now is the place for those who can’t; who cannot handle the truth; who shrink in fear from the effort it would take to confront our wrongs, to repent of them, to turn from them, to rise and change and be reborn. Because that hurts. It hurts to burn our old false idols. It hurts to turn and be reborn.

And so it is easier to hide in hell, because hell requires of us nothing. There is nothing to do there, nothing demanded of us—only to moan and cry and suffer forever, we think. The damned know the sorrow of repentance yet shy from the action it necessarily entails. Love hurts, after all. How much easier it is to suffer alone.

But God will not allow it. He will not abandon His children to the pits of our own sin. Down He comes, down from the Cross, down through the Tomb, down into the throat and the belly and the very heart of hell. And there He tears open a path, a fatal gash through death itself, and heaven bursts in upon the damned, and there the crucified Christ proclaims liberty to all the wretched dead imprisoned from the time of Noah, from the time of Adam.

Here in hell, here in death, Christ proclaims that there is no refuge, no escape, from the compelling Love of God, save in that Love itself—that He is in hell too, and that if they make their bed in hell they shall not escape Him. He shall pursue them, pursue every lost and wayward child, and grapple with them, wrestle them. And He shall not let them go until they bless Him.

Christ will drag us kicking and screaming out from these hells of our own devising and into the Light of God, because His infinite mercy, His infinite justice, His infinite Love demand this of Him, demand this of us. And the fire of that Love will drive us out of hell, consuming within us the horrors of sin, purifying all that is good and true and beautiful, showing us what we truly are and are truly meant to be.

And He will not relent. And He will not stop. And He will not rest, ever, until every lost and wayward child has been won for the Kingdom, has turned and seen and repented and risen.

So I tell you, from the shadow of this Cross, that if you love God, if you truly desire the Good and the True and the Beautiful, if you accept the wrongs you have done and repent of your injustice, rejoice! For Christ has died for you! He has harrowed hell for you! He has loved you all the way to hell and back. And He will never stop loving you, never stop forgiving you, never stop calling you back home, until you are His and His alone.

But woe to you who flee from God. Woe to you who cringe before the Good and the Beautiful and the True. Woe to you if you deny your wrongs and embrace injustice. For Christ has also died for you. He has harrowed hell for you. He has loved you all the way to hell and back. And He will never stop loving you, never stop forgiving you, never stop calling you back home, until you are His and His alone.

You cannot escape Him in heaven. You cannot escape Him in hell. You cannot escape the Love of God, who has died this night to save the world.

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


Credit to whom credit is due: This homily is pure George MacDonald.