Scripture: 1 Peter 2:18-20a, 4:6
For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit,19in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison,20who in former times did not obey... For this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead, so that, though they had been judged in the flesh as everyone is judged, they might live in the spirit as God does.
Believe it or not the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, a day when not much on earth seems to have happened, was believed by the early church to be a most significant day. Adam Hamilton, author of this year's Lenten Study 24 Hours That Changed the World, explains it this way:
What was the spirit of Jesus doing on this second day? Did he rest on the sabbath as his body lay in the tomb; or did he, as affirmed in one version of the Apostle’s Creed, descend “into hell”? This doctrine, known in medieval English as the “harrowing of hell,” held that at his death Jesus descended to the place of the dead-what the Old Testament calls “Sheol”-then set free the righteous dead so they might ascend to heaven and preached the gospel to all who had never heard it. The scriptural origin of this idea may be found in 1 Peter 3:18b-20; 4:6... Scholars debate the meaning of these verses, but they may point us toward what Jesus Was doing on that Saturday. He may have done in the realm of the dead what he sought to do in his earthly ministry: “to seek out and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10). This doctrine and these verses would point to the depth of the passion Jesus Christ has for reaching people who have been alienated from God.
This idea of Christ seeking out and saving the dead is a very old tradition. It can be found in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter which dates from about 200 A.D. In it the risen Christ leads a cross shaped procession of the dead from the tomb. In the Odes of Solomon, poems which date from the end of the first century, the dead cry out to Christ for pity and Christ says:
Then I heard their voice,
and placed their faith in my heart.
And I placed my name upon their head,
because they are free and they are mine.
Notice that in these traditions we are not just talking about Christ saving the righteous dead, as Hamilton suggests. We are talking about Christ saving all the dead who seek forgiveness and new life from God.
In our part of the country it is fashionable to condemn those who have "died in their sins" to eternal torment in a fiery hell. You can certainly find scripture verses which can be interpreted this way. But I believe this is to miss the point of the message of Christ who tells us:
Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.36Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. - Luke 6:35-36
In other words, Jesus tells us to love our enemies because God loves his. If, as Paul says at the end of Romans 8, "Neither life nor death nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord," then it follows that even in hell one cannot hide from the pursuing love of God, that God continues to seek and save the lost even after death.
This is not a new idea. Listen to the words of Psalm 139 (KJV) from the "Old" Testament.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit?
or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning,
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
10 Even there shall thy hand lead me,
and thy right hand shall hold me.
If there is hope even for those who choices have made hell of the lives of others and their own lives fit only for hell, how much more so is there hope for you and I, who still can devote ourselves to sharing with others in this life the love Jesus came to show to all humanity.
