What did Jesus do between His Death and Resurrection?
In recent years at Sacred Heart we have returned to the practice of using the Apostles’ Creed during Sunday Masses in Lent and Easter. This version of the Creed was named after the Apostles, not because tradition says that they composed it, but because it was developed during 800 years of continued apostolic succession to the form we now recognize.
One phrase always causes me to think twice: ‘He descended into Hell’. What did Christ get up to after his death and being laid in the tomb? If, as this Creed affirms, he descended into Hell, what was his purpose there? Why don’t we see this descent represented in the Nicene Creed or any of the Sunday scriptures? Why don’t we hear more about this seismic event?
During my 20 years as Director of Music at the Cathedral of St Marie in Sheffield UK, in addition to the normal celebrations of Triduum, we used to add Sung Morning Prayer and Office of Readings on Good Friday and Holy Saturday and into these liturgies we would insert some additional preparatory rites for the Elect. It was on the morning of Holy Saturday that I got to hear, for the first time, that great reading from ‘the ancient homily for Holy Saturday. I am pleased to learn from Fr. Steve that this same reading is given to the Elect from Sacred Heart at the final stage of their preparation for Initiation at the Easter Vigil.
Hell, in the original understanding was the place of death. Everyone went there when life ceased. It was neither a place of judgment nor torment; that came from what Dante (1265–1321) imagined in his ‘Inferno’ and from countless ‘fire and brimstone’ homilies in subsequent generations!
Before Christ, no one ascended to heaven but, in this reading, Christ, who is ‘the life of the dead’, extends a hand to Adam to lift him from Hell, and along with him, all those who had died subsequently were also lifted from the underworld to follow Christ to share his glory and the greater life.
In the book Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday Alan E Lewis goes deep into all of this and at one point introduces Christ’s encounter in the place of death with the prophet Isaiah who comments: ‘Now I understand what I meant when I wrote the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light’.
If any of this has got you thinking, allow that ‘light-bulb’ moment to get brighter!
– Philip Jakob,
Director of Music
To read the Holy Saturday Homily that Phil references, click here.
