Hell is that buried coffin with souls trapped within. Souls held captive in hell’s bowels have no chance of escape until now. When Christ was brought down from the Cross on Good Friday and His Body ritually prepared to be entombed, we might think that He was laid in the sepulchre where lying there passively He awaits for the third day, His Resurrection. However, the Apostles’ Creed states that “He descended into the hell”. Tradition calls it the Harrowing of Hell and it refers to Christ descending into Hades to free souls trapped there from the beginning of time.
The idea that Christ entered into Hell makes a hell of a sense. Anyone born before the Resurrection of Christ does not stand any chance of going to heaven at all. They may have been righteous. People like Abraham, Sarah, Aaron, Miriam, Moses, Elijah, all the Patriarchs and Prophets of old and even Joseph the father of Jesus. They still need the grace of God which comes only through His Son, our Redeemer. This grace of redemption gives meaning to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Christ saved His mother at the moment of her conception precisely because every soul needs justification, either through Christ’s harrowing of hell OR Christ’s redemption won through His resurrection from the dead.
Just visualise Joseph, the father of Jesus, a man of honour, on Holy Saturday meeting His Christ as He descends step by step into hell to draw souls and allows them to be taken up into heaven. All righteous souls were not damned to hell but neither were they redeemed until Christ’s Resurrection.
During the hours after His death on the Cross, Jesus was not relaxing but was relentlessly busy with the mission of salvation. Take a look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Christ descent into hell was not an insignificant moment because the “Gospel was preached even to the dead” (1 Peter 4:6). In Hell, Christ “brings the Gospel message of salvation to complete fulfilment. This is the last phase of Jesus’ messianic mission, a phase which is condensed in time but vast in its real significance: the spread of Christ’s redemptive work to all men of all times and all places, for all who are saved have been made sharers in the redemption” (CCC 634).
Tonight/today, the tomb stands empty. It is a sign of the Resurrection. Christ's bodily resurrection completes His victory over sin and perpetual death. The empty tomb stands as a symbol of our faith in the Resurrection. Faith begins with the senses but it does not end there. This faith in the Resurrection calls us to grow more and more comfortable with the reality of dying, of actual death but always in the light of rising to new life.
It is a life long journey and who better to represent us than Peter. He did not start as Peter the martyr. He started as one eager and later became a bit of a show off and when faced with difficulties, failed the Lord catastrophically by denying Him. Now all Peter sees is the empty tomb and he believes. This coward will soon gain the conviction to even die for the Lord. In Peter we have hope that our weakness may through the grace of Christ’s Resurrection be converted into conviction that courageously holds onto Christ until the end.
The truth of the Resurrection is found in the Harrowing of Hell and it teaches us that Christ died and rose from the dead that we might have a firm faith to know deeply that death cannot hold on to us forever. Our old and unredeemed history ends with the Cross. Our new and redeemed history begins with the Resurrection. Alleluia, let us rejoice for Jesus Christ is Risen.
