Drowning Hell

Propers: The First Sunday in Lent, AD 2021 B

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.

Every culture has a flood myth: the Hindus, the Greeks, the Navajo, the Chinese, the Mayans. If you were to look at the Ancient Near East—at Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers”—the Great Flood was simply an established historical fact. We might question it, whether, where, and to what extent it may have occurred, but the world of the Bible did not. The Flood had happened. The only question then was: What did it mean?

3700 years ago, an Akkadian epic called the Atra-Hasis, recorded in various versions on clay tablets, told a Flood story very much like the one we would recognize today: divine judgment, inescapable inundation, and a handful of survivors on a boat. One sort of person might say that this earlier tale is the source of our biblical version, and that might well be true. But another sort of person might point out that multiple attestation is a sign of veracity. Many different sources speaking of a flood is pretty good evidence for some sort of flood.

But in the Atra-Hasis, the Great Flood occurs because the gods are fickle and cruel. Humanity was made to be, in effect, slave labor—and when we grew too numerous and too loud, our divine masters decided to dispose of us. In the Greek version of the story, Zeus resolved to exterminate mankind due to our hubris. In other words, we were getting uppity, a little too big for our britches. In both cases, humanity only survived because lesser deities defied the will of the supreme god of their pantheon, who clearly had it out for us.

Now, the biblical version of the Flood takes the same bones of the story—wiping out civilization, an ark to preserve life, coming to rest on a mountaintop—while flipping the interpretation on its head. In the biblical Flood, God is not fickle. He did not create human beings as slaves but as the beloved stewards of His Creation, God’s own sub-creators, the gardeners of Eden. But sin enters the world through a serpent in that garden and continues to spread like a virus until, as it says in Genesis, humanity’s “every thought was only evil all the time.”

Imagine that. You and I have wicked thoughts every day. Sometimes we succumb to them. And sometimes the better angels of our nature win out. But according to the biblical Flood account, our “every thought was only evil all the time.” We never made a good choice. We were 100% absolutely corrupt, and we were taking the rest of Creation down with us. In the biblical interpretation, the Flood is not the wrath of God but His Hail Mary pass—as it were—to save a sinking world.

And humanity is preserved not in defiance of God’s will, but explicitly in accordance with God’s will. It is God who appears to Noah, the last not-quite-hopeless human, telling him to build an Ark, to preserve life, to save man and beast alike. And the Flood comes to wash away evil, to give Creation new birth, new life, a new “in the beginning.” And God then hangs His bow in the heavens as a sign of peace, a sign that humanity will never again be washed away in a Flood.

Isn’t it funny how we treat this as a children’s story? We paint murals and hang mobiles and buy toys based on Noah’s Flood. And I get it. There’s a big boat and lots of animals and a great big beautiful rainbow. That’s great stuff for kids. But what happens when the Sunday School class finally asks: What about everyone else? What about the people of the land who weren’t on the Ark? What about the animals who couldn’t swim? That could lead to an awkward conversation or two.

I’m reminded of the action movie True Lies, in which a woman learns that her ho-hum husband of many years, played by boring old Arnold Schwarzenegger, has in fact been a secret agent all along. And she asks him, “Have you ever killed anyone?” And he replies, both honestly and earnestly, “Yeah, but they were all bad.”

Has God ever killed anyone? “Yeah, but they were all bad.” What a terrible ending that would be, if indeed that were the end of the story. But see, there’s another part to the story of Noah’s Flood that we rarely if ever talk about. And that’s a shame. Because a good ending makes or breaks the entire story. It changes how we understand whatever went before. And the ending of the Flood narrative in the Bible is for my money the very best part of it all.

Every week, Christian congregations confess the faith of the Church, using the words of the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed. And one of the lines in there confesses that Christ “descended to the dead,” He “descended into hell.” And there He conquered—trampling down death by death! We call it in theology the “Harrowing of Hell,” and it’s the reason that the underworld is in such disarray when Dante visits it in The Inferno.

In His Crucifixion and Resurrection, Jesus Christ has conquered sin and death and hell, as we read today in the First Epistle of Peter. The Prince of the Apostles writes:

He (Jesus) was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you.

Did you catch that? When Jesus died, He descended into hell and made a proclamation—that is, the Gospel proclamation, the Good News of God’s victory in Jesus Christ our Lord—to the spirits in prison, to the spirits in hell, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah. These are the same people of whom Genesis says their “every thought was only evil all the time.” 100% absolutely corrupt, pure evil—and Jesus died for them! Died to save them, died to rescue them, died to liberate them from their prison in hell.

That’s the true ending to the story of Noah’s Flood. All the people washed away, all the people from whom God needed to save what was left of His weary world, Jesus saves them. It’s not just the Ark that prefigures salvation but also the Flood itself. We too are drowned in our evil, drowned in our sin, drowned to ourselves, in our Baptism. And then we are raised up from our watery graves by Jesus Christ into His own eternal light and life and glory. 100% corrupt and Jesus saves us all!

That’s what it means to conquer sin and death and hell. It means that nothing on earth or in heaven or in the deepest pits of Hades, nothing at all in the whole of existence, could ever keep us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. If we fly up to heaven, He’s there. If we flee down to hell, He is there. And there is no amount of wickedness or sin or brokenness or death, nothing at all that we could ever say or do, that can possibly stop Him from coming for you at the last. He will dig you up with His bare hands.

Floods. Graves. Devils. Death. None of them can stand in His way. None of them has so much as a prayer of thwarting God’s will in the end. We threw everything we had at Him on that Cross, and it barely slowed Him down. You can run, you can hide, you can sin, you can die. But ultimately, He will find you. He will raise you. And He will be yours, and you His, beyond space, beyond time, beyond death, forever. And there’s not a damn thing that you can do to stop Him. Because at the end of this and all possible worlds, love conquers all.

This is the Good News of the victory of Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us rejoice—and tremble.

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