Icon in Chora Church, Istanbul, Christ Harrowing Hell
“O God, in Christ you have searched the depths we cannot fathom, and touched the dread we cannot bear to name: grant us the grace of patient stillness and the courage to sit with uncertainty, that we may wait in hope for your promised dawn of redemption; through Jesus Christ our Savior, by whose name even the gates of Hell cannot stand. Amen.”
This day is one of my favorites on the Christian calendar, the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. After a very full and busy liturgical week with intense religious fervor and a few logistical meltdowns, eveytyhing suddenly becomes still and quiet.
To be sure, items remain on the “to do” list, whether its polishing brass, rehearsing music, or finishing an Easter sermon (!) but the pace has slowed…except for Jesus.
Yes, this is obviously, in one respect, a day when the crucified Jesus is in the tomb, but there are certain strands of Christian traditions that suggest something a bit more active and even dramatic: Jesus harrows Hell on this day. Descending not only into death, in other words, but into the depths of Hell itself, Jesus launches a rescue mission by demolishing the gates of Hades and liberating everyone who is there.
Everyone, no exceptions.
The classic icons of this dramatic scene include (as illustrated above) the wonderful moment of yanking a startled Adam and Eve from their tombs and dragging them into new life.
I like to expand that vision even further to include the wider world of other-than-human creatures and places. On this day when God leaves no one behind, all animals, and plants, and rivers, and trees, and everything that is declared “good” and “very good” in the biblical book of Genesis is taken up into the new life of Easter.
Everything.
I know this universal vision of divine life make some people nervous and uncomfortable. But how could it be otherwise? How could Creator God, revealed in Beloved Jesus, ever bear to leave anyone or any thing out of the promise of new life?
Artist Doug Blanchard included a marvelous image in his “Passion of the Christ–a Gay Vision” series for this very day, this day of breaking down the prison walls of Hell for a breathtaking vision of Easter. I feel privileged and deeply honored to have this painting on my wall in the rectory; pairing it with the traditional icon above creates a synergy of spiritual insight, a rush of grateful hopefulness on this singular, remarkable day when God leaves no one and no thing behind.
May we live into that divine promise as a people of unshakable joy.
After the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the House of Windsor has seemed to me less like a “royal family” and more like a group of related British celebrities. When I think “king” I don’t usually think “Charles.”
“Kingship” always taps my childhood fascination with Arthurian legend, and my ongoing love for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I used to daydream of living as one of Arthur’s knights at his round table, or following Aragorn to this throne in the restored kingdom of Gondor. Those parts of me love the Feast of Christ the King.
The last Sunday after Pentecost—the very last Sunday of the liturgical year—is often celebrated with the image of Christ as “king,” an image for Jesus that has deep roots in Christian traditions even if the liturgical feast itself is mostly modern.
The lectionary continues its apocalyptic tenor for this feast and with some startling biblical texts, like the one from the Hebrew prophet Daniel (7:9-14), which includes a vision of the One who will come with the “clouds of heaven,” and who is given dominion and glory and kingship. Those heavenly clouds appear again in a vision from the Revelation to John (1:4-8), a vision of One whose coming every eye will see, and who is the ruler of all the kings of earth.
These are certainly the kinds of texts we might expect for a celebration of royal power. But something a bit deeper seems to be lingering beneath these splashy images of kingship. There’s an ancient desire percolating in all of this, a deep-rooted ache that stretches across both time and culture—the yearning to see wrongs made right, to restore wholeness in a world of fragments: the lost, found; the forgotten, remembered; the wounded, healed.
The Prayer Book collect for yesterday’s feast named that desire. In a world divided and enslaved by sin, that prayer affirms God’s will to restore all things.
That notion of “divine restoration” reminds me one of my favorite Greek words: apokatastasis. I actually devoted an entire qualifying exam in my doctoral program to that one word, and to the ongoing role it has played in Christian traditions—and that word has had quite a colorful career indeed.
The word itself appears only once in the Bible, in the Acts of the Apostles (3:21). Peter is preaching in Jerusalem about the resurrection of Jesus, the crucified but risen Lord who will come again, he says, at the time of “universal restoration.” That’s usually how apokatastasis is translated, and it captured the imagination of Origen, a second-century Greek theologian.
Origen argued that God will one day bring all beings back to their source, where they will be restored to union with God—not only all people but even the Devil and all his fallen angels! That is the day when God will be “all in all,” as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians.
That’s a startling declaration: God will not cease loving God’s creation, not ever, and God shall not fail in uniting all things in a gloriously divine communion of love—every single being, no exceptions.
Apokatastasis is in that sense not only startling but also apocalyptic—which is to say, a deeply revelatory word. The Feast of Christ the “King” reveals the underlying meaning of the whole liturgical year, that grand arc from Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, through Lent, Easter, and Pentecost—all of it reveals the unwavering purpose of God to restore, renew, and heal with love.
As I do every week, I spent some time searching online for visual images that might capture these complex desires and hopes. After entering the words “restore all things” in the Google search engine, images began popping up of the painstaking process involved when museums try to restore old paintings.
I actually find such work both fascinating and beautiful, but those images made me realize just how precarious the notion of restoration really is, maybe even spiritually dangerous: Was there ever a time when all peoples were unified? Can any of us name a distinct moment in the past when everyone flourished? Are we really pining for a perfect world that we somehow lost long ago and now we want to recover and restore it?
No—that’s going backward; we need to travel forward. The disciples asked the risen Jesus about this very thing in the first chapter of Acts (1:6): Is now the time you will restore the kingdom to Israel?
No—resurrection does not return to how things were but moves forward to God’s own vision of how they should be.
As I sorted through the online search result (without much to inspire me), I decided to use one of my favorite icons, one that depicts Jesus harrowing Hell between Good Friday and Easter morning. Part of what I love about that image is the effort Jesus seems to be making to yank Adam and Eve out of their tombs on that day. The past matters in this dramatic moment, and nothing and no one is left behind. But the momentum here is definitely forward, not backward.
The Harrowing of Hell (apse in the Chora Church, Istanbul)
Adam and Eve signal that momentum for us in their apparent reluctance, as if they are thoroughly disoriented by the whole prospect of an Easter Jesus. This is not a moment of restoration, of returning to a known past—Jesus is not putting them back in the Garden of Eden; he’s raising them to new life.
That’s the paradox of all theological symbols—they are rooted in the known to help us imagine and anticipate the unknown.
The familiar, well-known symbol of Christ as “King” must point beyond what we now know of kingship and toward something new. And that’s why it’s so important that the lectionary included a poignant moment for yesterday’s feast from John’s account of the Gospel (18:33-37).
This moment in John is not one of splashy glory or heavenly pyrotechnics. To the contrary, Jesus is standing before the Roman Governor Pilate, a vignette that disrupts our usual assumptions about royal power.
“King of Glory: By Water and by Blood,” Carol Grace Bomer
The contrast between these two figures could not be more stark—Pilate robed in imperial power; Jesus with no power at all over his own fate and on trial for his life.
Pilate wants to know if Jesus is a king.
“My Kingdom is not from this world,” Jesus replies.
While some have taken this response to mean that Jesus is concerned only with some far-off heavenly realm that has nothing to do with Earth, that’s not the substance of John’s Gospel at all. “For God so loved the world,” John famously wrote, not to condemn it but to save it.
Moreover, the encounter with Pilate is but the culmination of a whole series of encounters in John, moments of contrasting the power of “this world” to destroy Earth and the power of God to heal and renew Earth.
“My Kingdom is not from this world,” Jesus says, “if it were, my followers would fight.”
Heavenly power on earth will never be established with weapons and violence but only with the truth. This is why I was born, Jesus says, this is why I have come, to “testify to the truth.”
In a world of coercive deceptions and brutal violence, the truth of the Gospel is just this: only and nothing else but love will save us.
Love is not weak.
Love is not merely sentiment or a cozy feeling.
Love is not a last-ditch, stop-gap measure by liberal snowflakes when otherwise real-world practical strategies fail.
Love is brave, risking all for what matters most, willing to lose everything to gain what cannot be lost.
Love is fierce and strong—stronger than even death.
Love incarnate stood before Pilate.
And so we Christians celebrate that embodied moment of “known royalty” for a realm still unimaginable. Most of us do so at the Eucharistic Table—where we move from the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the strange, from memory to hope.
At the Table, we try as best we can to put Gospel truth into practice, bearing witness to a world where all welcome, no one is forgotten, and everyone is healed by love—everyone, no exceptions.
