Harrowing of Hell – Peculiar Faith

Flowers Delivered and Hell Harrowed: The Everyday Rhythms of Hope

It’s an early Saturday morning. Gentle rays of sunshine are trickling through stained glass, kaleidoscoping around the baptismal font. I lift the wooden lid from the font and liberate a small spider who had wandered in there, who knows how long ago; the stone hasn’t felt water’s blessing for some time.

I unlock the front door of the church to help Mary bring in the Easter lilies from her car; she’s perfectly named for this occasion. Mary co-directs the altar guild and there’s work to be done, even when the sanctuary will remain mostly empty of people tomorrow and we stream prayers and chants and bread and wine through pixelated images into people’s homes.

Margie and David were just here and we all looked for David’s glasses; he thought he might have left them in the sanctuary after preaching one of the Good Friday homilies yesterday afternoon. We looked in the sacristy but didn’t see them anywhere amidst all the religious hardware strewn about, the candlesticks and altar books and kneelers and linens that had been stripped away from the Altar on Thursday evening.

Tom arrives, and then Valerie, all of us in casual Saturday morning garb—I’m wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and the leather jacket I bought with my mother at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The sixth anniversary of her death was this past Wednesday, and the rectory has been filled with the smell of roses since then; Bobbie and Margie brought the roses to me that afternoon, to help me mark that mid-week moment.

It’s a wonderfully strange day, this Saturday that sits betwixt and between, this day of ordinary patterns of everyday life that carry charged particles of hope and anticipation.

Not somewhere else, but here; not in some other time, but right now God moves and stirs among us. Holy Saturday reminds me every year about this everyday character of Christian hope. The drama of Maundy Thursday and the heartache of Good Friday have unfolded with whatever poignancy they hold for each of us still and then…Saturday. There’s cleaning to be done, some fussing with flowers, returning fair linens to the Table, freeing a spider from a dry font.

Meanwhile, as early traditions would have it, Jesus is not quietly dead in his tomb nor merely resting on this day but busily harrowing Hell. Descending among the dead, he tramples Hell’s gates beneath his pierced feet—the gates are destroyed, not only so no one need ever enter through them again but also to ensure that everyone there is freed—every single one.

One of my favorite icons of this underworld drama depicts Jesus yanking Adam and Eve from their graves, both of them apparently startled and maybe even a tad reluctant, unsure of what this new life might mean.

I appreciate that reminder, too: resurrection is not resuscitation, but something utterly new and fresh and disorienting. And also this: no one is left out of this shocking newness and no one is left behind.

Not a single one.

Harrowing of Hell, Church of the Holy Savior, Istanbul

Holy Saturday: Rest, Reparations, and Hope for Earth

In some Christian traditions, Jesus spent the day between Good Friday and Easter busily harrowing Hell, toppling its gates and freeing all the dead who were dwelling there from ages past. This is the divine version of “no child left behind” but for every human, and I would now revise this to mean “no creature left behind.” The whole creation finds healing and liberation in the unfathomable mystery of Easter.

But here we still live, in that great liminal day between imperial crucifixion and the divine burst of new life. If Jesus were to harrow Hell today, he wouldn’t have to travel very far from where most of us live—next to toxic waste dumps, petroleum refineries, poisoned water supplies, landfills brimming with plastic. Earth herself needs to rest, to recover, to repair.

Is it time to ponder reparations for the planet?

I fully support reparations for the descendants of African slaves in this country, and for indigenous tribes decimated by American genocide, and for many others as well. Perhaps now is the time to add Earth to that list, to offer this planet a reprieve from the daily torture we inflict on her ecosystems and many creatures, some space and time to repair and renew.

This is of course impossible; we cannot simply stop doing what we’re doing, not even for a day let alone what is more genuinely needed—at least a whole year. Impossible at first blush, perhaps, but not after a moment’s recollection of how quickly the world’s wealthy pledged astonishing amounts of money to fix Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It’s time they stepped up again, acknowledged that their wealth came in large measure from raping the planet, and chip in some reparations.

In 2018, the world had 2,208 billionaires with a combined net worth of approximately $9.1 trillion. If we created a planetary reparations fund and demanded a simple tithe from those wealthy folks, we would have quite a tidy little sum to get us started on what is now necessary: stopping most human activity and resting; the fund could go toward ensuring certain vital services remain operating and that people are fed while the planet rests, resets, repairs.

Holy Saturday is the perfect day on which to contemplate such a harrowing idea as we dare to hope for resurrection. It is a good day, perhaps, to plumb the depths of God’s grace, to journey with Jesus to the roots of our distress and resurface with hope.

I’m grateful for theologian Elizabeth Johnson and her elegant, eloquent words for precisely that hope. May her words accompany us into the blazing light of a deep resurrection, and inspire a renewed commitment to this planet, our shared homeland:

In our day we discover that the great incomprehensible mystery of God, utterly transcendent and beyond the world, is also the dynamic power at the heart of the natural world and its evolution. Groaning with the world, delighting in its advance, keeping faith with its failures, energizing it graciously from within, the Creator Spirit is with all creatures in their finitude and death, holding them in redemptive love and drawing them into an unforeseeable future in the divine life of communion (Quest for the Living God, 198).

Late afternoon at the regional park

Beyond Bunnies: Unleashing the Wildness of God

Easter is no less commercialized than Christmas. I thought about this today and posted a pithy note on Facebook about it: “Global capitalism illustrated: moving effortlessly from the Harrowing of Hell to the Easter Bunny.” I’m not sure what I meant by that and I’m wrestling with it on this Holy Saturday evening.

I think was trying to say something about how markets rely on domestication for the sake of creating a commodity suitable for mass marketing and profit-making; an empty tomb becomes a Hallmark card. I’m not sure about the economics of all this, and I might be even less sure of the theology. Here’s what I’m wrestling with:

Among the many ways of journeying through this Holy Week, I try to pay attention to a story of resistance against the forces of religion-inflected empire, forces that brutalize whole populations; and a story of an instance of that resistance being met with heavy-handed law enforcement and mockeries of justice, agonizing physical torture, and a summary public execution; and a story of betrayal, abandonment, and risky tender care of the executed by terrorized friends.

christ_medieval_cross2

It’s a story not of tidy endings but of gut-wrenching perplexity, discounted testimony (from women), fear-drenched cohorts of erstwhile revolutionaries, and encounters with a stranger who upends the most basic boundaries on which we still rely for defining what life itself is, and what it means when it ends. At least one first-century gospel writer imagined burial cloths neatly folded in an empty tomb, as if Jesus had been napping and slapped gently awake by a watchful parent.

Perhaps. But if death is woven into the very fabric of biological evolution and the harmonies of ecosystems and the finalities of bereavement and grief, and if particular kinds of death stain its finality with outrage and despair—being shot eight times in the back by police officers in your family’s backyard while carrying a cellphone—then I imagine a rather different kind of God, wild and unleashed, the one dragging life out of the waters of untamable chaos at the dawn of time, a God tearing down the pillars of Death’s Dominion and yanking a lifeless body into a crack of all that rubble where light feebly shines.

A paltry analogy comes to mind. My Australian shepherd dog Judah loves to chase sea birds along a low-tide beach, where he inevitably gets mired in muck. I cannot merely call to him, shout out his name from the slightly more stable shore to release him from his muddy entombment. I must slosh through the muck, my feet and ankles and shin bones layered in stinky slime, and there lift his sixty-pound canine body out of the sea bed, one sloshy, painstaking step at a time. I heave. I pull. I yank. I do a big heavy-lift. I do this over vast distances.

So does God on Easter morning.

That story—its brutality and tenderness, its untamable effervescence—that story, I worry, is now offered by referring to the reliable turning of the seasons, with appreciable nods to a pear tree finally blossoming after a winter of bare twigs (which I myself have said in years past from an Easter-lily drenched pulpit), or the cuddly softness of bunnies newly born in a cozy nest as tulips begin to bud. Hallmark cards and multi-colored plastic grass and baskets of plastic eggs filled with chocolate rabbits—the familiars of my own childhood, which I have no desire to denigrate or dismiss (except for the plastic; we have to stop using plastic).

My fretting focuses not there but on mistaking the undeniable and spirit-soaring brilliance of winter morphing into spring for the tenacious God of life, the God who anoints a suffering servant to stand against the crush of imperial oppression armed only with compassion and loving intimacy, that same, wild God of irrepressible life who insists on interrupting our reasonable stories with a universe that is not only queerer than we imagine but queerer than we can imagine; the most familiar friend is the unrecognizable stranger. This is not just Spring; it is the Spring we recognize at once even though we have never before seen it, have never even dared to imagine it.

A wild God appears on our horizon, the One who will always find a domesticated shrine in the religious institutions that gravitate toward the comfortable rhythms of state power and all the benefits such power bestows on white men like me.

Perhaps I wrote that pithy Facebook post to myself—Easter as a hallowed space of comfort has yet to harrow my own collusion with the imperial forces of death.

Easter Day inaugurates a fifty-day season, every year. Thank God. This is by far more harrowing than Lent. Or it should be, or so I am supposing after a long week of wondering what the hell all these religious rites are really all about.

Hell. Back to that.

On this night, as tradition has it, Jesus harrowed Hell. I cannot imagine Hell was pleased.

May the morning’s dawn unsettle all of us with the wild, undomesticated life of God.

chora_anastasis2 — The Harrowing of Hell as Adam and Eve are Raised by Christ